“For The First Time, We’re Going To See These Machines And Systems As Part Of Our Everyday Life”

February 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The fear of automation causing widespread technological unemployment is probably only founded if the future arrives far faster now than it did in the past. That’s possible, given the current push on many fronts in AI. Driverless being perfected and instituted in rapid fashion means farewell to eight million or so jobs in trucking alone, not to mention taxis, limos, delivery, etc. Is it a disaster for Labor if it happens in two decades but not in four? The flip side is that it would probably be a body blow to the economy if such things happened too slowly or not at all. Innovation plus nimble policy is probably the only answer, but not an easy one in our jagged political landscape.

From Andrea Korte at the American Association for the Advancement for Science:

Artificial intelligence experts predict that intelligent and semi-intelligent autonomous systems — such as self-driving cars and autonomous drones — “will march into our society” in the next two to three years, with driving expected to be fully automated in 25 years, a panel of experts said at a 13 February news briefing at the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting.

“For the first time, we’re going to see these machines and systems as part of our everyday life,” said Bart Selman, professor of computer science at Cornell University, citing big changes in the AI field that have spurred a shift toward real-world applications in the last five years, including the ability of computers to see and hear as humans do and to synthesize data and fill in strategies for achieving their programmers’ high-level goals.

With more than a billion dollars spent last year on AI research — more than in the field’s entire history — the experts agreed that AI advances may threaten jobs and uncover a range of legal, regulatory, and ethical issues.

The widespread use of self-driving cars, for instance, is likely to bring about a reduction in car accidents; liability debates as courts determine whether a computer can be held at fault in an accident; and a serious effect on the labor market.

With 10% of U.S. jobs involving the operation of a vehicle, “we can expect the majority of these jobs will simply disappear,” said Moshe Vardi, professor of computer science and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University.

…

Vardi expects that the growing presence of intelligent machines in the workforce will contribute to a phenomenon called “job polarization.” With many high-skilled jobs requiring too much human intelligence and many low-skilled jobs too expensive to automate, those jobs in the middle will be easiest to automate. The disappearance of these jobs will spur “great inequality,” but even in a U.S. presidential election year, the issue is “nowhere on the radar screen,” Vardi said.•

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“He Portrays His Company And Other Companies In The Gig Economy As Increasingly Important To The United States’ Economic Future”

February 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Ridesharing is good in some ways, but it’s a bad deal for most workers, offering them no protections while destabilizing entrenched industries with guarantees, all in the name of “flexibility.” Anyone who thinks it’s a significant part of the solution for an American labor force that’s been laid low by a myriad of factors probably isn’t driving for Uber or Lyft.

In an Atlantic piece, Lawrence Mishel fires a statistics-supported salvo at the Gig Economy for drawing a great deal of attention while having relatively little impact on American employment, particularly of the positive kind. You could extrapolate forward its place in the U.S. economy as some Silicon Valley enthusiasts like to when trying to bend laws in their favor, but the writer will likely still be correct a decade or two down the line. If I’m wrong and the Gig Economy has truly become ascendant in that time, wow, major policy shifts are going to be necessary.

The opening:

The rise of Uber has convinced many pundits, economists, and policymakers that freelancing via digital platforms is becoming increasingly important to Americans’ livelihood. It has also promoted the idea that new technology—particularly the explosion of platforms enabling the gig economy—will fundamentally alter the future of work.

While Uber and other new companies in the gig economy receive a lot of attention, a look at Uber’s own data about its drivers’ schedules and pay reveals them to be much less consequential than most people assume. In fact, dwelling on these companies too much distracts from the central features of work in America that should be prominent in the public discussion: a disappointingly low minimum wage, lax overtime rules, weak collective-bargaining rights, and excessive unemployment, to name a few. When it comes to the future of work, these are the aspects of the labor market that deserve the most attention. 

Curiously, the best evidence of Uber’s relatively small impact on the American labor market comes from data released and publicized by the company itself. David Plouffe, an Uber strategist, began a recent speech by saying, “I want to talk today about the future of work—specifically, the fact that a growing number of people are engaging in flexible and freelance work because of the sharing economy or through on-demand platforms.” He highlighted the large number of people driving for Uber, saying, “Uber currently has 1.1 million active drivers on the platform globally. Here in the U.S., there are more than 400,000 active drivers taking at least four trips a month.” As he went on to list the number of drivers in the biggest American cities, he said, “The numbers show just how attractive this type of work is to people around the country.”

In other words, Plouffe is sending the message that Uber is very big and growing, and he portrays his company and other companies in the gig economy as increasingly important to the United States’ economic future. But these claims are undermined by the relatively minor contribution Uber makes to its drivers’ incomes.•

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“My Day Begins In A White Dome In The Middle Of A Red Lava Field”

February 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

What is it like waking up on Mars? None of us can say, precisely, of course, but it’s clear that within some sort of dome, it would be challenging, and on the outside of such an artificial habitat it would be deadly. 

To get a better idea of life on our neighboring planet, Sheyna Gifford, a medical doctor, is among a half-dozen faux-stronauts embedded for a year and a day in a dome on a Hawaiian island (and inside spacesuits when venturing outside of it). It’s a reasonable approximation for bubble life on Mars. though the spectre of death is not, absent a huge disaster, as ever-present as it would be were it not a simulation.

She’s written a wonderful Aeon essay about the first half of the adventure, which has been full of technical challenges, including an earthly one: a crush of media after the release of The Martian. Given her specialty, Gifford has insights into the improvised medical techniques required in “space.” One great line: “On sMars, where there is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness: of an object, a task, even a person.”

The opening:

I don’t quite remember what it’s like to wake up on Earth. Five months after ‘landing on Mars’, my day begins in a white dome in the middle of a red lava field, and I wonder: do we have enough power to turn on the heat? Will the weather let us suit up and check the greenhouses? Are my air fans going to work?

These thoughts circle in my brain as I pad downstairs for that first cup of something warm. The news that awaits me there will be in watts, percentage humidity and degrees Celsius, telling me what happened in and around our habitat overnight, and how much power we’re likely to have for the rest of today. I will hear water churning in the hydroponic systems, along with the hum of the lurid pink growing lights in the biology lab. I will see the same crewmates, kitchen and two-foot round porthole I’ve seen every morning for five months. That view of the jagged rocks beyond is a constant reminder that our world – this world we’re sharing for one year as a test run for life on Mars – is hostile and mysterious.

Let’s be clear: simulated Mars (or sMars) is technically your world.•

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“It’s A Problem That All The Candidates Appear To Be Technologically Illiterate”

February 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m not alone in thinking Mark Cuban a strange, unsavory guy who fell ass-backwards into wealth during Web 1.0 and somehow thinks that qualifies him as an expert on all things. Only in America.

That being said, he’s probably no more foolish or crass than most of the candidates running for President. In a recent blog post, the Mavericks’ owner said a lot of obvious things as if they were bolts of lightning from the heavens that only he has received, but then again, even basic wisdom is missing from Trump, Carson, etc. Cuban certainly is right that the average candidate has little knowledge of technology beyond 140 characters. A couple of excerpts::

2. SocioCapitalism is and has been Capitalism for Millennials. You haven’t been paying attention. Bernie has.

If you watch Shark Tank  you may have noticed a trend.  Entrepreneurs don’t just want to make a profit, they want to make a profit and share their success with those less fortunate.  I first saw this in the mid 90’s when Rob Glaser founded Progressive Networks and promised 5 pct of their profits to those less fortunate.

We saw this type of philanthropy gain interest with Tom’s Shoes and their One for One program.

Today, charitable give aways, or inclusive hiring  as part of a product or service purchase is more than just common place. We see it on Shark Tank in almost every pitch from a 20-something entrepreneur. Several of my recent Shark Tank deals reflect this trend, RRiveter, Combat Flip Flops, Living Christmas Trees to name just a few.

Not only are 20-something entrepreneurs starting companies with a social component , 20 – Something consumers are EXPECTING a social component from companies they do business with.

So how can it be a surprise that Millennials are excited about Bernie Sanders ? Millennials EXPECT capitalism to reflect a socialist element.  I don’t think Bernie knew this going in. Either way, any candidate that expects to get millennial votes needs to understand that your father’s capitalism is not what how they understand the world.  Soci0-Capitalism is who they are and what this country will be. Whether you like it or not.  

To each according to their ability, from each support for those in need.

____________________________

4. It’s a problem that all the candidates appear to be technologically illiterate.

Using or not using email, being on social media, neither reflect a knowledge of technology.  No one is saying they have to be hard core geeks, but the future of this country, our jobs, economy, security, culture, lifestyle and more are intertwined with advanced technology. How can you hope to strategize and create solutions to issues we face without having more than a basic understanding of technology?

Wars won’t be fought with bombs and bullets as much as bytes and advanced technologies. Homeland security will be much more about machine vision, learning and Artificial Intelligence than walls.  The future of healthcare and its cost will be much more about personalized medicine and CRISPR than trying to defund Obamacare. Do our candidates realize that when it comes to hacking, there are only 2 kinds of  companies and government agencies, those who have been hacked, and those who don’t know they have been hacked ? And what about our stock markets  ? Does anyone understand what is going on in the markets and how technology has completely upended companies ability to raise capital publicly and undermined the confidence our citizens have in our markets ? Financial terrorism is more than just a possibility.

This isn’t about the age of the candidates. It’s about their knowledge. None has given us any reason to believe they could make a decision on the technology used by a tiny business let alone the country.•

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Old Print Article: Horse-Meat Butcher Shop Opens In Manhattan, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1917)

February 14, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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I don’t eat meat, but I don’t understand why people who do tend to recoil at horse flesh. No different than dining on pig, is it? 

One immigrant in the early 1900s who had a dream of teaching America to love horse meat was John Sulser who opened what was reported to be the nation’s first all-equine butcher shop in Manhattan. For a little while at least, he enjoyed a thriving business. An extended report in the February 18, 1917 Brooklyn Daily Eagle tells his story. Read the opening below.

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“When It Comes To Providing The Essentials Of A Modern Society, It Has To Be Said That We’re A Backward Country”

February 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It certainly wouldn’t benefit the American Society of Civil Engineers to slap an “A” grade on every bridge in the U.S., but I don’t think many doubt the organization’s dismal grades for our infrastructure. In a NYRB piece, Elizabeth Drew reviews a raft of books on the topic, including Henry Petroski’s The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure.

Drew shares small, interesting details (there are still wooden pipes working beneath the White House) and big-picture fears (only calamity may force us to catch up to much of the rest of the world). On the latter topic, she surmises that “it may require even more widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and perhaps a revolt in parts of the country that have inadequate broadband.” Well, let’s hope not. She also surveys the current Presidential candidates’ plans for remaking our roads and airports, uncovering a lot of fuzzy math.

An excerpt:

The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the country. We admire Japan’s and France’s “bullet trains” that get people to their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. A friend of mine recently rode on the Turkish bullet train and noted that the coffee in his full cup didn’t spill. Last year, Japan demonstrated its new maglev train, which, using electromagnets, levitates above the tracks, and can go about an amazing 375 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the world. The fastest commercially used maglev, in Shanghai, goes up to 288 miles per hour. But the United States hasn’t a single system that meets all the criteria of high-speed rail. President Obama has proposed a system of high-speed railroads, which has gone nowhere in Congress.

When it comes to providing the essentials of a modern society, it has to be said that we’re a backward country. California Governor Jerry Brown, a longtime visionary, has initiated the building of a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco; one high-speed rail system scheduled to come into service soon to carry people between the wealthy cities of Dallas and Houston will be privately financed. (Shopping and business made easier.) But not many communities have the means to build their own train.

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) conducts a study of where the United States stands in providing needed infrastructure in various sectors. Though the organization obviously has an interest in the creation of more construction jobs, its analyses, based as they are on information from other studies, are taken seriously by nonpartisan experts in the field. In the ASCE’s most recent report card, issued in 2013, the combined sectors received an overall grade of D+. In the various sectors, the grades were: aviation, D; bridges, C+; inland waterways, D–; ports, C; rail, C+; roads, D; mass transit, D; schools, D; hazardous waste, D; drinking water, D. No sector received an A. That none of the infrastructure categories received an F is hardly grounds for celebration.•

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“American Egalitarianism Is On Its Last Legs”

February 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Among U.S. scholars, none seem to casually elide more inconvenient truths than Charles Murray, who somehow claims to love both meritocracy and Sarah Palin. He can make solid sociological points, but he’s also a believer in American myths that were never quite true, especially if you weren’t a white male. 

Murray argues in a WSJ essay that Donald Trump is benefiting from those who feel America is losing its national identity, which he says is rooted in three qualities: egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. Well, cross off the first two for large swaths of the population and even the third during long periods of our history when conformity was the norm. It’s big of Murray to acknowledge that “there are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism”–you don’t say, Chuck?–but he sees it as subplot rather than driving narrative.

His description of wealthy Americans “seceding from the mainstream” is limited by his blinders, but there is value in the passage. Citizens without money being thought of as “losers” is often a sad reality. Oddly enough, it’s very Trumpian.

An excerpt:

America also retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities. Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960 census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.

In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees. They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000 and $203,000, respectively.

And the conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.

Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.

For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.

While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

February 14, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. neil degrasse tyson delusions of space enthusiasts
  2. the word “computer” will be a relic of the past
  3. an argument for letting athletes dope
  4. hollywood producer don simpson
  5. stanley kubrick playboy interview
  6. hanna reitsch nazi test pilot
  7. grandpa friedrich trump was a “whoremaster”
  8. friedrich nietzsche’s death
  9. harvey pekar article about herbert huncke
  10. margaret atwood predicts the future

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

February 14, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Donald Trump

This week, Donald Trump said he hoped to get to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, which is troubling since he’s only familiar with one judge.

I presided over the case of the missing pancake.

 

  • So many influential geniuses were nurtured in ancient Athens. Why?
  • Cory Doctorow asks if Wikipedia’s anti-hierarchy works in the non-virtual world.
  • A brief note from 1897 about a fat baby.

“It’s Not An Arbitrary Morass Of Complexity That We’re Not Going To Ever Make Sense Of”

February 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I think there’s no doubt that if our species soldiers on long enough that we’ll eventually solve consciousness, we’ll understand how the brain–that mysterious organ–works. It’s a monumental, unsolvable problem until it isn’t anymore.

The question is how we’ll arrive at that knowledge, whether it will be by figuring out the process theoretically or by collecting data and putting together the granular pieces. In “How the Brain Is Computing the Mind,” an Edge piece, Ed Boyden, MIT neuroengineer, opts for the latter strategy.

An excerpt:

The approach I would like to take is to go get the data. Let’s see how the cells in the brain can communicate with each other. Let’s see how these networks take sensation and combine that information with feelings and memories and so forth to generate the outputs, decisions and thoughts and movements. And then, one of two possibilities will emerge.

One will be that patterns can be found, motifs can be mined, you can start to see sense in this morass of data. The second might be that it’s incomprehensible, that the brain is this enormous bag of tricks and while you can simulate it brute force in a computer, it’s very hard to extract simpler representations from those datasets.                 

In some ways, it has to be the former because it’s strange that we can predict our behaviors. People walk through a city, they communicate, they see things, there are commonalities in the human experience. So that’s a clue; that’s a clue that it’s not an arbitrary morass of complexity that we’re not going to ever make sense of. Of course, being a pessimist, we should still always hold open the possibility that it will be incomprehensible. But the fact that we can talk in language, that we see and design shapes and that people can experience pleasure in common, that suggests that there is some convergence that it’s not going to be infinitely complex and that we will be able to make sense of it.•

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“Donald Trump Does Not Do Nuance”

February 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump is measuring the White House windows for curtains, when he’s not busy measuring his penis. 

There’s long been an argument that exorbitant wealth inequality doesn’t matter if the poorest among us (a widening group) see their standard of living improve somewhat while a few have theirs increase exponentially. Everyone is getting better, so who cares?

First, that balance seems a rare thing, and even if it can be achieved, a small number will be able to tilt power in their favor at will. Second, when things go bust, and they always do eventually, those at the lower end are hurt inordinately. Things then can get ugly, when reality gets ragged, and not only are scapegoats sought but so are those who can point them out. 

A nativist seems appealing in that unhappy situation. A fascist, even. Where have you gone, Benito Mussolini? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

From Edward McClelland at Salon:

Donald Trump stepped into the gymnasium at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University to the opening riff of The Beatles’ “Revolution.” Never mind that it’s a song mocking the pretensions of self-styled revolutionaries. Donald Trump does not do nuance. Donald Trump does bold, garish strokes. The song is loud and it’s got the word “revolution” in it. That’s what Donald Trump wants.
 
It was the day after the last debate before the New Hampshire primary, but Trump didn’t want to brag about his performance. He wanted to talk about how “rich donors and special interests” had hogged all the tickets, leaving college students outside in the snow. The crowd, waving signs that read “The Silent Majority Stands With Trump,” booed loudly.

“I look at these people who have tremendous money,” Trump said. “They’re wasting their money. They should give it to the vets. It’s the special interests: people who represent insurance companies, oil companies, drug companies. I’m their worst nightmare, because I’m not taking their money. I’m richer than they are. I don’t need your money. I need your vote.”

Live and in person, Trump is reminiscent of Regis Philbin: an overexcited New Yorker riffing off the top of his head and emphasizing his points with broad hand gestures: the OK sign, the “whaddya-whaddya” open-palmed shrug. Like a lot of people in the crowd, I was there for the Trumpertainment, hoping the most uninhibited performer in American politics would threaten to shoot someone, or make a pussy joke about one of his enemies in the media or the Republican primary. Seeing Trump is like seeing Marilyn Manson, circa 1995: you’re not there for the music.•

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“Drivers Do Jump Around”

February 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Every decade or so when the wounds heal and painful lessons are forgotten, venture capital will pour into food-delivery startups trying to execute the Web 1.0 business model of Urbanfetch and Kozmo.com, may they rest in peace.

It seems so simple since pizzerias have done it forever. But pizza shops are largely deeply rooted local businesses that know of a few good men (and women) to deliver their pies. Doing something on a far grander scale requires an abundance of drivers willing to make $5 a pop (plus tips) to deliver meals. And that’s just one problem with the system. Perhaps someday when they’re are plentiful driverless cars or delivery drones, the dream will be realized.

From Mike Isaac in the New York Times:

DoorDash, one of a multitude of start-ups with a mobile app that lets people order and get food sent to their doorsteps, relies on contract drivers like Brian Navarro to make the deliveries. The problem is that workers like Mr. Navarro don’t always stick around.

Mr. Navarro began driving for DoorDash and another delivery start-up, Postmates, in Los Angeles about four months ago. Mr. Navarro, 40, who previously drove for the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, said he had seen plenty of contractors quit DoorDash and other delivery companies during the time he has worked with them.

“Drivers do jump around,” Mr. Navarro said. “The general consensus is that drivers really only stick around for three to six months.”

That churn has become expensive for DoorDash. A large number of drivers left the start-up less than a year after they joined, according to two people who have seen the company’s driver data. DoorDash spends upward of $200 in recruitment and referral bonuses for some drivers, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. Other delivery companies, like Postmates and Instacart, face similar retention challenges, these people said.•

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“Why Is The Valley Suddenly So Tone Deaf?”

February 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Silicon Valley oligarchs don’t get much jerkier than Marc Andreessen, a real toolbox who has to bury beneath his arrogance perfectly reasonable people who disagree with him. You’re not simply wrong if you worry that machine learning may lead to technological unemployment–you’re a dope worthy of scorn. 

Andreessen stepped into it in a big way a few days ago with a tone-deaf tweet about India, after the country embraced net neutrality and blocked a Facebook app. Instead of arguing the move would harm the developing nation and explain why, the venture capitalist sent out 140 callous characters of pro-colonialism. As if billionaires didn’t have a bad enough name already.

It’s great that the shitstorm that followed made Andreesen withdraw his comments and apologize profusely, but where there’s no sense of humility, there are likely no lasting lessons learned. 

From Nellie Bowles in the Guardian:

When the news came that India had rejected Facebook, board member and investor Andreessen tweeted the missive that echoed around the world: “Anti-Colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades. Why stop now?”

One sunny San Francisco day later – after Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to publicly disavow the tweet – Sharma was calling in on Arvind Gupta, who invests in and guides a group of early stage startups at his accelerator IndieBio. Their conversation quickly shifted to Free Basics and Andreessen’s message.

Gupta said he felt Facebook’s stumble was partly due to distance and being out of touch with Indian people.

“It’s easy to think this is a good idea 5,000 miles away in your nice apartment,” Gupta said.

Sharma saw it as part of a broader issue of homogeneity in Silicon Valley, a region run by a narrow set of oligarchs who famously eschew hiring women or people of color.

“Why is the Valley suddenly so tone deaf? Well, look how badly the Valley does on inclusion in hiring. Bias is the norm here,” Sharma said. “Why is the Indian user any less capable than anyone else? Why do they have different needs than you do? They don’t. But that thinking is all part of the same problem.”•

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“This Echo Chamber Deluded Its Believers To The Point That It Sometimes Apparently Killed Them”

February 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Milosevic with a trophy wife, hopes to add a stripper pole to the Lincoln Bedroom.

In his latest op-ed, Nicholas Kristof credits Trump as “smarter than critics believe,” asserting that the hideous hotelier “understood the political mood better than we pundits did.” I think it more likely that Trump is a blowhole who merely threw shit at the wall and was as surprised as anyone that it stuck. If you could go back in time to moments after his candidacy announcement and ask him what line would get the most attention, I doubt he would identify the “they’re rapists” slur about Mexicans.

Kristof goes on to belatedly state what many people (myself included) have been saying for months: The GOP created this Frankenstein monster of a political season it can’t control, though he illustrates it with an interesting fact about echo-chamber misinformation manifesting itself in the real world. An excerpt:

Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites — and, yes, there are left-wing versions as well, but they are much less influential. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant.

A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than that Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly a three-to-one ratio that Obama was born overseas.

The Republican establishment profited from the insinuations that Obama is a Muslim, that he’s anti-American, that his health care plan would lead to “death panels.” Rick Perry has described Trump as a “cancer on conservatism” and said his movement is “a toxic mix of demagoguery and meanspiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” — indeed, but it was a mix that too many Republican leaders accepted as long as it worked for them.

This echo chamber deluded its believers to the point that it sometimes apparently killed them. During the 2009-10 flu pandemic, right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck denounced the call for flu shots, apparently seeing it as a nefarious Obama plot.

The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots, according to a peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. So when the pandemic killed up to 18,000 Americans, they presumably were disproportionately conservatives.•

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A Brief Note From 1897 About A Fat Baby

February 11, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the May 9, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Many Aspects Of Athenian Life…Were Conducive To Creative Thinking”

February 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Whenever people deride philosophy in the name of analytics, I like to remind them that democracy wasn’t created by an algorithm. Like many human creations that shape our world (including philosophy itself), the rule by many was dreamed up in ancient Athens, a “small, dirty, crowded city,” as Eric Weiner identifies it in an Atlantic piece which wonders how so many influential geniuses were nurtured in that place and time. The emergence of the world’s first global city seems more than merely a happy accident. Culture was likely a much more important force than genetics. An acceptance of immigration was one piece of the puzzle, but there were many other factors. An excerpt:

How did a small, dirty, crowded city, surrounded by enemies and swathed in olive oil, manage to change the world? Was Athenian genius simply the convergence of “a happy set of circumstances,” as the historian Peter Watson has put it, or did the Athenians make their luck? This question has stumped historians and archaeologists for centuries, but the answer may lie in what we already know about life in Athens back in the day.

The ancient Athenians enjoyed a deeply intimate relationship with their city. Civic life was not optional, and the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. There was no such thing as an aloof, apathetic Athenian. “The man who took no interest in the affairs of state was not a man who minded his own business,” wrote the ancient historian Thucydides, “but a man who had no business being in Athens at all.” When it came to public projects, the Athenians spent lavishly. (And, if they could help it, with other people’s money—they paid for the construction of the Parthenon, among other things, with funds from the Delian League, an alliance of several Greek city-states formed to fend off the Persians.)

All of ancient Athens displayed a combination of the linear and the bent, the orderly and the chaotic. The Parthenon, perhaps the most famous structure of the ancient world, looks like the epitome of linear thinking, rational thought frozen in stone, but this is an illusion: The building has not a single straight line. Each column bends slightly this way or that. Within the city walls, you’d find both a clear-cut legal code and a frenzied marketplace, ruler-straight statues and streets that follow no discernible order.

In retrospect, many aspects of Athenian life—including the layout and character of the city itself—were conducive to creative thinking.•

“Medical Robots Do Not Need To Be Perfect, They Just Have To Be Better Than Humans”

February 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I’m not anticipating “doctor-less hospitals” in my lifetime nor do I expect them for a very long while after that. Medical centers are discomfiting enough as is without being automated. I do think, however, that software guiding surgical robots will be put to good use sooner than later, and in the longer run, any task–even a life-saving one–that humans and machines can do equally well will largely be ceded to silicon. 

From a Singularity Hub article about the hospital of tomorrow by Ross Crawford, Anjali Jaiprakash and Jonathan Roberts:

Imagine your child requires a life-saving operation. You enter the hospital and are confronted with a stark choice.

Do you take the traditional path with human medical staff, including doctors and nurses, where long-term trials have shown a 90% chance that they will save your child’s life?

Or do you choose the robotic track, in the factory-like wing of the hospital, tended to by technical specialists and an array of robots, but where similar long-term trials have shown that your child has a 95% chance of survival?

Most rational people would opt for the course of action that is more likely to save their child. But are we really ready to let machines take over from a human in delivering patient care?

Of course, machines will not always get it right. But like autopilots in aircraft, and the driverless cars that are just around the corner, medical robots do not need to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans.

So how long before robots are shown to perform better than humans at surgery and other patient care? It may be sooner, or it may be later, but it will happen one day.•

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“Anything Could Happen”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Pinochet with a line of men’s fragrances, would seem to have a proper path forward in the GOP race. With the next month of Republican primaries favoring far-right pols, and the trio of Kasich, Rubio and Bush subtracting from one another, the Reality TV realtor need only outpace Ted Cruz, a rat trap of a man and the only person in America more unlikable than him. Trump isn’t a true conservative, but he’s clearly communicated his intention to “Make America Great White Again.” At this point, his campaign can’t be disqualified by anything he says, no matter how repugnant, but will instead rise or fall based on how many caucasians in the U.S. deeply resent no longer being able to use the N-word without consequence. 

It’s not as easy to see a similar road to success for the other upstart, Bernie Sanders, despite his rousing N.H. win and Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities. Until the race moves past Super Tuesday, the Vermont Senator will walk headlong into an unforgiving slate of mostly Southern states where he’ll have to pick up non-white voters, something he’s thus far shown little flair for. Sanders could be trailing badly by the time we move deeper into March, so he needs to change that reality before the South Carolina primary.

From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

Nobody knows better than the Clintons the power of early state momentum.

In his victory speech, Mr Sanders said he was travelling to New York on Wednesday — “but not to raise money from Wall Street.” In fact, he will be breakfasting with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the radical black pastor, who seems likely to endorse him. Other black celebrities have been lined up.

Mr Sanders has two weeks, and the media wind at his back, to turn South Carolina into another victory. If he pulls that off, he will join Mr Trump as odds-on favourite to win his party’s nomination. The polls say Mrs Clinton will halt Mr Sanders’ progress south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But pre-New Hampshire polls are now virtually worthless. Anything could happen.

Both parties may be on course to endorse candidates who repudiate much of what they stand for.

If there was ever a moment Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was tempted to run for the White House, it may be fast approaching.•

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“Its Self-Driving Car Will Not Have A ‘Driver’ In The Traditional Sense”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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When it appeared that the driverless-car business might become a going concern, my take on the industry was that the final five percent of bugs to be worked out might be more challenging than the first 95% of the enterprise had been. I don’t think that was a controversial opinion. The smallest problems are the knottiest in this case.

For a few years, it seemed equal to those technological challenges might be snafus caused by a lack of legal framework, but 2016 has been an inflection point. Last month, the Obama Administration proposed $4 billion over the next decade to ameliorate the industry’s realization, the government firmly behind the U.S. winning this nouveau “Space Race.” That measure will encourage Europe and Asia forward, untangling its own limits and liabilities.

Two more important pieces of autonomous-car legalese have come to light, one in regards to the definition of a “driver” in America and the other a patent filed by Google. Excerpts follow.

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From Paul Lienert and David Shepardson of Reuters:

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step towards ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc , of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week.

Google’s self-driving car unit on Nov. 12 submitted a proposed design for a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver,” the letter to Google from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh said.

“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” NHTSA’s letter said.

“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”•

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From Future Tech Hub:

Google wants to deliver your package through self-driving trucks. The tech giant has been awarded a  patent described as an “autonomous delivery platform” for delivery trucks. The self-driving trucks will be equipped with lockers which can be opened only with the access codes assigned to the customer. Credit cards can also be used by users to open. The trucks will drive away to other location to deliver once the packages are dispatched. The automated vehicle will drive to the customers address. Once after arriving, it will send an SMS alert with the access codes to the lockers.•

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“From Each Of These District Shops Innumerable Electric Wires Branched Off In All Directions”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The good folks at The Public Domain Review, that excellent thing, unearthed an 1857 piece of writing from the illustrated magazine The Leisure Hour which predicted what London would be like a hundred years in the future. It’s a drunken, utopic vision of a fogless, crimeless metropolis, but the best of the article is a prediction of things akin to Internet shopping and social networking. Technology was to deliver a global village. An excerpt: 

Some of these shops were vast magazines of wealth, covering wide areas, and perfectly dazzling with the splendour of their contents. The purchaser walked through long galleries, where, ranged in orderly array, glittered and gleamed the gold, the gems, the jewels of every clime. Some were as rich in works of pictorial or fictile art; and some, again, had inexhaustible stores of intellectual wealth. Books on all subjects, and which seemed, from the abundance of their illustrations, to speak as much to the eye as to the mind, abounded in inconceivable stores in these repositories; and every household, however humble, had its family library, and, what was better still, its family of readers. I observed that from each of these district shops innumerable electric wires branched off in all directions, communicating with several houses in the district to which it belonged. Thus, no sooner did a house-keeper stand in need of any article than she could despatch the order instantaneously along the wire, and receive the goods by the very first railway carriage that happened to pass the store. Thus, she saved her time, and she lost no money, because all chaffering and cheapening, and that fencing between buyer and seller, which was once deemed a pleasure, had been long voted a disgraceful, demoralizing nuisance, and was done away with. The electric wires ran along the fronts of the houses near the upper stories, crossing the streets at an elevation at which they were scarcely visible from below; and I noticed that the dwellings of friends, kindred, and intimates were thus banded together, not only throughout the whole vast city, but even far out into the provinces, and, in cases where the parties were wealthy, to the uttermost limits of the realm.

One result of this extended social intimacy and sympathy was pleasingly apparent. The old walls of separation which had formerly shut out rich from poor and poor from rich, had crumbled beneath it, and were fast falling to decay.•

Old Print Article: Pneumatic Railroads, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1867)

February 9, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It wasn’t quite the Hyperloop, but some in the Victorian Era has an interest in utilizing pneumatic tubes to transport people. Such systems had successfully moved mail, with some foreseeing a day when there would be tubes conveying messages to every home. (The Internet, of course, ultimately did that idea considerably better.) But travel for humans was another order of difficulty. An article from the March 23, 1867 Brooklyn Daily Eagle hopefully addressed the topic.

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“The Hyperloop Is Real”

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

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For most people, creating a new mode of travel to massively improve speed and environmental impact would be worthy of a life’s work. But not so for Elon Musk, too busy to develop his idea for the Hyperloop because he’s trying to colonize Mars and transform Earth into a solar-and-electric planet.

Others, however, are interested, very interested. In a Vice “Motherboard” article, Jason Koebler travels to College Station, Texas, to take the temperature of engineers who have pipe dreams, at a competition among those driven to complete Musk’s mandate by an idealism they may not even be able to express. An excerpt:

After briefly talking about it in public, Musk published a white paper that went into specifics of how it would work: Use vacuum pumps to take the air out of an enclosed tube to reduce air pressure, remove the wheels from a “pod” to reduce friction, and use some induction motors to shoot the pod down the tube very quickly.

Two and a half years later, actually traveling on a hyperloop is still theoretical, but its effect on business is not. There is a very real, bonafide industry of people trying very hard to make the hyperloop. The way Smith and everyone else in the industry talks about it, the hyperloop is is not some futuristic thing—it’s an engineering problem that’s being actively solved by real companies and real engineers.

“The hyperloop is real,” Brogan BamBrogan, a former SpaceX employee and cofounder of Hyperloop Technologies told me.

If the hyperloop is real, then the pod design weekend was its coming out party. Hosted by SpaceX at Texas A&M University, the weekend featured more than 1,000 students split between 180 university teams, each of them armed with design schematics, computer models, and physics proofs that suggest it’ll be possible to build hyperloop pods that can successfully navigate a one-mile test track being built by SpaceX on its Hawthorne, California campus. More strikingly were the number of companies and professional engineers there whose main business and job description is, broadly speaking: Make the hyperloop into a tangible thing.•

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“Reagan Would Be A Moderate In Today’s GOP”

February 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump mostly wants to be President so that he can giver Fireside Chats about his erections.

There are plenty of reasons why a vulgar clown like Trump is a viable candidate in the current race, but I do believe the decline of the GOP as a serious party began with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, their coded language of divisiveness (“welfare queens”), assault on the middle class and utter disdain for environmentalism. In many ways, Reagan was ultimately a reasonable man, but he pushed the right into a nostalgia for a past that had never quite existed except in Peggy Noonan’s greeting-card grade prose. The repeated inability of conservatives to deliver the impossible has driven the true believers over the edge.

Jacob Weisberg, who’s written a biography of Reagan, just did an AMA at Reddit, answering questions about 40. The writer’s contention that Reagan wasn’t a womanizer is naive, but it’s a lively give-and-take. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Which of the Republican candidates do you think has views that are closest to Ronald Reagan’s?

Jacob Weisberg:

Reagan would be a moderate in today’s GOP — he signed the biggest-ever immigration “amnesty” (his phrase) into law, supported handgun regulation, and played a huge in making abortion legal — and keeping it legal, by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. There’s no one running who supports those positions. In policy terms, I’d say the closest is John Kasich, because he’s more moderate than the others. Temperamentally, Marco Rubio seems the most Reagan-like to me. Rubio is optimistic and future-focused, where most of the others are pessimistic and negative about America’s future.

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Question:

There has been much discussion of the unusual age of the 2016 presidential election frontrunners vis a vis Reagan, with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders all being at least as old upon potential inauguration as Reagan was. Is there such a thing as “too old” in your opinion, and if so how old is it?

Jacob Weisberg:

Life expectancy keeps increasing, and being 70 now doesn’t mean what it meant in 1980 – let alone what it meant in 1880. On the other hand, the presidency is physically very taxing — I’ve heard it said that a year in the White House takes the physical toll of two years outside of it. Reagan was a vigorous, healthy man when he took office, but he suffered from a number of health problems tied to age. I don’t know that there’s an age when you’re too old per se. Sanders definitely pushes the limit. It’s hard to imagine someone over 80, which he would be in a second term, being up to the demands of the job. But there are better reasons to not vote for Sanders, IMO.

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Question:

Who was Reagan’s favorite President? And how did he feel about Lincoln in particular?

Jacob Weisberg:

The President he admired the most in his own lifetime was FDR. He consciously modeled himself on FDR in many ways – including his Saturday Radio addresses, which were a reinvention of Roosevelt’s fireside chat. He borrowed some key phrases from Lincoln, like the America as the “last, best hope” of man on earth. But like all great political speechmakers, he borrowed liberally from his predecessors.

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Question:

What was your conclusion about his role in the end of the Cold War?

Jacob Weisberg:

I give him a lot of credit. Reagan was unusual on the right in thinking — as far back as 1962 — that communism might just collapse, because it was a ridiculous system. And he improvised to help it do so, moving from nuclear hawk in his first term to disarmament radical in his second. Both the push he gave the Soviets, and the support he gave Gorbachev, were crucial to the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.

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Question:

It’s commonly stated in leftist circles that Reagan was barely functioning in his second term due to advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s. In your opinion, how much truth is there to that assertion?

Jacob Weisberg:

Not just in leftist circles. His son, Ron Jr, thinks Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was affecting him pretty significantly by 1986 – the middle of his second term. There’s a lot of evidence to support that, including a study by some Alzheimer’s researchers I cite in my book that looks at his use of language in press conferences. That doesn’t mean he was barely functioning. Like a lot of people in the early stages of that disease, he had better days and worse days.

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Question:

Was he the womanizer that I have heard? Never met a female co-star he didn’t really, really like.

Jacob Weisberg: 

I wouldn’t call Reagan a womanizer. He does write about the tendency to always fall in love with the leading lady when he was younger. But I’ve never heard it argued that Reagan was anything other than faithful in his two marriages. During the period in between, after he divorced Jane Wyman, he definitely played the field and slept around in Hollywood. But I don’t think he enjoyed that very much — he was eager to settle down with someone, and Nancy ended up being his true soulmate.•

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“Imagine A State Run Like That. That’s A Futuristic Thing, Right?”

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

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Here’s an interesting thought experiment put forth by Cory Doctorow in a Jacobin interview conducted by Simon Willmetts: What if the anti-hierarchal modus operandi of Wikipedia was applied to projects like building developments, space programs or even state governance? Crowdsourcing would be employed on an epic scale in the non-virtual realm.

Well, I would say Wikipedia hasn’t been absolutely free of hierarchy for a long time, but what was put in place was organic and certainly less heavy-handed. I do doubt a state run that way would be more democratic since the online encyclopedia itself has drawn avid contributors but not anything near truly representative. Such a system might need be limited to project-specific problems.

An excerpt:

Question:

So you wouldn’t describe yourself as a “libertarian” — you don’t think state intervention is always necessarily a bad thing?

Cory Doctorow:

No. I believe in civil liberties, and I think that states are the least-worst option right now for solving some difficult collective action problems. But I also think that we’re learning every day how much hierarchy we can remove from complex endeavors.

Imagine something futuristic, like something on the scale of an operating system or an encyclopedia, with the same degree of complexity, the number of human hours and the amount of knowledge that goes into it, and something else on that scale, like a Canary Wharf tower, and imagine it being built the way that we built Wikipedia.

I have a plot of dirt, and I’m going to invite any stranger who has structural steel, trunking, rebar, cement, gravel, diggers, architectural drawings, or ideas to come and just muck around for a while. We’ll shout at each other a lot, and we’ll have some false starts. Some bits will come down, some bits will go up, and at the end, we will have not just an office tower, but the greatest office tower ever built, and it will be infinitely reproducible at zero cost.

Imagine a space program run like that. Imagine an aviation system run like that. Imagine a state run like that. That’s a futuristic thing, right? That’s a futuristic parable that uses Wikipedia and any Linux project to think about the scale at which we can operate in the absence of hierarchy. It challenges our imaginations to think about the coordination of that much labor without hierarchy.•

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“I Will Stand By Much Of The Document As Written”

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

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On the 20th anniversary of John Perry Barlow’s idealistic Davos edict, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” the Economist asked him to revisit those words and consider what he hit and missed. The Internet is no longer an utter Wild West but now an odd mix of anarchy and surveillance, a conflict unlikely to ever be fully settled, and one that will continue to produce positive and negative developments. Barlow’s idea that state governments were remnants of the Industrial Age now seems naive, though his argument that a global world demands a digital openness is a good one.

An excerpt:

The Economist:

What do you think you got especially right—or wrong?

John Perry Barlow:

I will stand by much of the document as written. I believe that it is still true that the governments of the physical world have found it very difficult to impose their will on cyberspace. Of course, they are as good as they ever were at imposing their will on people whose bodies they can lay a hand on, though it is increasingly easy, as it was then, to use technical means to make the physical location of those bodies difficult to determine.

Even when they do get someone cornered, like Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange, or [Edward] Snowden, they’re not much good at shutting them up. Ed regularly does $50,000 speeches to big corporate audiences and is obviously able to speak very freely. Ditto Julian. And even ditto Chelsea Manning, who despite the fact that she’s serving a 35-year sentence, is still able to speak her mind to all who will listen.

People will sputter, but what about China, what about Silk Road [an online marketplace that sold drugs before being shut down in 2013], what about Kim Dotcom? Well, I believe that a close examination of Chinese censorship is a little more nuanced than the media here would have us believe and is mostly focused on preventing something like the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese know that they can’t compete in a global marketplace if they don’t allow their best minds full contact with our best minds. Silk Road is already reassembling itself in the gloomier recesses of the dark web, and the arrest and persecution of Kim Dotcom was simply an illegal over-reach by the U.S. government. Yeah, they can enforce the rule of law online provided their ability to break it.•

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