“There Are Deep Worries, As Well As Awe, At What Technology Can Do”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In Ben Hirschler’s Reuters Davos report, he identifies several game-changing technologies that World Economic Forum attendees believe will be possible by 2025: implantable mobile phones, 3D-printed organs for transplant, clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet. Apart from the bioprinting of organs, the rest seem to be not very risky bets. If human kidneys can be printed by that year (or any near it), we’ll have moved into a very remarkable new age. Of course, all new eras have their challenges as well. 

An excerpt:

One of the most in-demand participants in Davos this year is not a central banker, CEO or politician but a prize-winning South Korean robot called HUBO, which is strutting its stuff amid a crowd of smartphone-clicking delegates.

But there are deep worries, as well as awe, at what technology can do.

A new report from UBS released in Davos predicts that extreme levels of automation and connectivity will worsen already deepening inequalities by widening the wealth gap between developed and developing economies.

“The fourth industrial revolution has potentially inverted the competitive advantage that emerging markets have had in the form of low-cost labor,” said Lutfey Siddiqi, global head of emerging markets for FX, rates and credit at UBS.

“It is likely, I would think, that it will exacerbate inequality if policy measures are not taken.”

An analysis of major economies by the Swiss bank concludes that Switzerland is the country best-placed to adapt to the new robot world, while Argentina ranks bottom.•

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“In Other Words You Could Simply Upload To A New, Perhaps Synthetic, Body”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Head of "Mind Control" Jack Gariss conducting group who are hooked-up to bioscope machines. Location: Los Angeles, CA, US Date taken: March 1972

In the same way that you either bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water, Singularitarians want to bring the computer inside of humans or put humans inside computers. They’d ideally prefer both options. 

The idea of digitizing brain function seems impossibly far off in the future to me, but one idea if it does someday become reality is that we could capture the wetware in our heads, make copies of it, and upload it into a video-game-ish scenario or a synthetic bodysuit of sorts.

Yes, far-flung stuff, and none of us will live to see it, though Nell Watson of Singularity U believes it could be possible this century. From Marie Boran at the Irish Times:

Nell Watson’s job is to think about the future and she says: “I often wonder if, since we could be digitized from the inside out – not in the next 10 years but sometime in this century – we could create a kind of digital heaven or playground where our minds will be uploaded and we could live with our friends and family away from the perils of the physical world.

“It wouldn’t really matter if our bodies suddenly stopped functioning, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What really matters is that we could still live on.”

In other words you could simply upload to a new, perhaps synthetic, body.

As a futurist with Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley-based corporation that is part university, part business incubator, Watson, in her own words, is “someone who looks at the world today and projects into the future; who tries to figure out what current trends mean in terms of the future of technology, society and how these two things intermingle”.

She talks about existing technologies that are already changing our bodies and our minds: “There are experiments using DNA origami. It’s a new technique that came out a few years ago and uses the natural folding abilities of DNA to create little Lego blocks out of DNA on a tiny, tiny scale. You can create logic gates – the basic components of computers – out of these things.

“These are being used experimentally today to create nanobots that can go inside the bloodstream and destroy leukaemia cells, and in trials they have already cured two people of leukaemia. It is not science fiction: it is fact.”•

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“Biometric Data Is Perhaps The Last ‘Missing Link’”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Five years ago when I looked back at the 1978 Michael Crichton film, Coma, through the lens of the new millennium, I wrote this: 

The nouveau tech corporations are aimed at locating and marking our personal preferences, tracking our interests and even our footsteps, knowing enough about what’s going on inside our heads to predict our next move. In a time of want and desperation and disparity of wealth, how much information will we surrender?•

It seems truer now than in 2011, as wearables multiply and the Internet of Things comes closer to fruition. Whenever data is collected, it will be sold, whether that was the original intent or not. And the collection process will grow so seamless and unobtrusive we’ll hardly notice it.

From “What Happens to the Data Collected On Us While We Sleep,” by Meghan Neal at Wired Motherboard:

We already know that the major data brokers like Acxiom and Experian collect thousands of pieces of information on nearly every US consumer to paint a detailed personality picture, by tracking the websites we visit and the things we search for and buy. These companies often know sensitive things like our sexual preference or what illnesses we have.

Now with wearables proliferating (it’s estimated there will be 240 million devices sold by 2019) that profile’s just going to get more detailed: Get ready to add how much body fat you have, when you have sex, how much sleep you get, and all sorts of physiological data into the mix.

“Whenever there’s information that you’re collecting about yourself and you’re quantifying, there’s a very good chance that it will end up in a profile of you,” Michelle De Mooy, a health privacy expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told me.

This has many privacy and security experts, politicians, and the government wringing their hands, worried that if and when all that granular personal information gathered gets in the hands of advertisers and data brokers, it could be used in ways we never intended or even suspected.

“Biometric data is perhaps the last ‘missing link’ of personal information collected today,” said Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

“The next great financial windfall for the digital data industry will be our health information, gathered thru wearables, swallowable pills and an ever-present Internet of Things,” Chester told me. “Pharma companies, hospitals and advertisers see huge profits in our health information.”•

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A Brief Note From 1909 About Flying Bicycles

January 19, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 26, 1909 New York Times:

Paris–Jules Bois believes that motor cars will in a hundred years be things of the past, and that a kind of flying bicycle will have been invented which will enable everybody to traverse the air at will, far above the earth. Hardly any one will remain in the cities at night. They will be places of business only. People of every class will reside in the country or in garden towns at considerable distances from the populous centres. Pneumatic railways and flying cars and many other means of quick transit will be so developed that the question of time will enter but little into one’s choice of a home. Transportation will be immensely cheaper than it is at present. As there will be less crowding, realty values and rentals will less exorbitant.•

“As AI Accelerates, He Predicts That So, Too, Will The Ability To Augment Our Genetic Code”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Echoing what physicist Stephen Hsu wrote in Nautilus in 2015 (a piece that made the “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list), Reed Hastings of Netflix believes the future will see a race between engineered humans and Intelligent AI. To me, that seems the most likely outcome. In the very long run, we will probably increasingly drive our own evolution. We’ll be the “existential risk” to what Homo sapiens currently is.

From Chris O’Brien at Venturebeat:

During a conversation on stage today at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, Hastings said he was far less worried about looming threats of an AI-triggered apocalypse than are many other observers, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

“Some people worry about what happens when machine intelligence is too strong,” Hastings said. “That’s like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later.”

He emphasized, rather, that machine intelligence is just beginning to be felt, through applications like Netflix’s recommendation engine. But he expects that impact to accelerate and predicted that the world is only five to 15 years away from a time when we can hold a three-person conversation and not be sure which of the three is a machine.

Even then, Hastings believes all will not be lost for the puny human race. As AI accelerates, he predicts that so, too, will the ability to augment our genetic code.•

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“Perhaps The Space Age Really Is Here”

January 18, 2016 in Books, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Audio only of Ray Bradbury lecturing in 1964 at UCLA during the “most exciting age in the history of mankind,” labeling the Space Age as greater than the Renaissance. He was right that we would soon be on the moon, but he didn’t foresee the forestalling of space exploration post-Apollo and the geographical barriers to global unity. Bradbury also speaks adoringly of Mad magazine and discusses a Life short story to be published at the beginning of 1965.

“To Me, Sleeping Is A Disease”

January 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Here’s something I feel very good about guaranteeing: Sleep will not be “cured” in 25 years. 

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan sees things very differently, believing the REM state a “disease,” a dress rehearsal for death, that robs us of waking life. He thinks within a quarter century we might not even need to sleep. I, on the other hand, think much of my self-awareness comes from analyzing my dreams. Beyond that, what Istvan proposes seems not even a remote biological possibility by 2040.

From his article on the topic at Vice Motherboard:

To me, sleeping is a disease. Luckily, in the next 25 years, scientists may cure it. For millions, that cure can’t come soon enough. I hate sleeping and always have. I see sleeping as an early form of dipping in and out of death. Sleeping is probably the most wasteful thing all humans do—we spend a third of our lives in basically a lobotomized state. I wish I could I will myself from doing it, but like everyone else, I’m a slave to my body and mind, and I require sleep to function normally.

…

While much has been made about how beneficial a good night of sleep is, few discuss that sleeping is stealing away conscious time with loved ones, hampering economies around the world, and even indirectly hurting our bodies. We should never forget we age whether we’re awake or sleeping. And while the studies say the better we sleep the longer we live, this information may be misleading. I believe we age much more in our sleep than our lifespans gain from sleeping well. Sleeping—like being awake—is slowly killing us.

Scientifically speaking, sleep is a process where internal restoration and recuperation of the body and mind takes place. Sleep is comprised of various cycles, which are often separated by two classifications: non-REM and REM sleep.

There are numerous researchers in the world working on ways to try to remain alert despite sleep deprivation.•

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“Google Also Believes That Cars Should Be Able To Move Around Even With No Humans In Them”

January 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In a Backchannel piece, Steven Levy shares everything most things he learned during an inside look at Google’s autonomous-car mission command at the decommissioned Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, California. Most of the (non-)drivers hired to put miles on the vehicles are recent Liberal Arts grads who test the prototypes on streets in Mountain View and Austin. Some are even employed as human props, known as “professional pedestrians.” “We just have to learn to trust,” one tells Levy. It seems the tight-lipped company’s testing of the cars may have gone beyond what people realize.

An excerpt:

Google’s ultimate goal, of course, is to make a transition from testing to systems where no safety drivers are needed — just passengers. For some time, Google has been convinced that the semiautonomous systems that others champion (which include various features like collision prevention, self-parking, and lane control on highways) are actually more dangerous than to the so-called Level Four degree of control, where the car needs no human intervention. (Each of the other levels reflects a degree of driver involvement.) The company is convinced that with cars that almost but don’t drive themselves, humans will be lulled into devoting attention elsewhere and unable to take quick control in an emergency. (Google came to that conclusion when it allowed some employees to commute with the cars, using autodrive only on premapped freeways. One Googler, perhaps forgetting that the company was capturing the whole ride on video, pretty much crawled into the backseat for a phone charger while the car sped along at 65 miles per hour.)

Google also believes that cars should be able to move around even with no humans in them, and it has been hoping for an official go-ahead to begin a shuttle service between the dozens of buildings it occupies in Mountain View, where slow-moving, no-steering-wheel prototypes would putter along by themselves to pick up Googlers. It was bitterly disappointed when the California DMV ruled it was not yet time for driverless cars to travel the streets, even in those limited conditions. The DMV didn’t even propose a set of requirements that Google could satisfy to make this happen. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is barreling ahead, introducing a driverless feature in his Tesla cars called Summon. He predicts that by 2018, Tesla owners will be able to summon their cars from the opposite coast, though it’s a mystery how the cars would recharge themselves every 200 or so miles.

But maybe Musk is not the first. When I discussed this with [program director Chris] Urmson, he postulated that in most states — California not among them — it was not illegal to operate driverless cars on public streets. I asked him whether Google had sent out cars with no one in them to pick up people in Austin. He would not answer.•

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“We Can Put Unlimited Numbers Of People In Such Engineered Environments”

January 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a Phys.org piece, astronomer Seth Shostak identifies the twenty-first century as the last one that may be ruled by Homo sapiens, with speciation being driven by three huge changes. Perhaps it’s surprising the writer believes humans living on other planets won’t be altered as radically as those on Earth engineered by General Artificial Intelligence. My bearish mind thinks 85 years is a very aggressive timeframe for what he proposes, but nothing about it seems theoretically impossible in the long run. 

An excerpt:

To begin with, we’re finally going to understand biology at a molecular level. DNA’s double helix was discovered a mere six decades ago, and now – for hardly more than a kilobuck – you can sequence the genome of your yorkie or yourself.

The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it’s obviously desirable. But our efforts won’t be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we’ll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.

Number two on my list of major developments is expanding into nearby space. We need more resources – both acreage and raw materials – unless we’re happy to condemn our descendants to a limited lifestyle and unlimited war. You may worry about running out of oil, but that’s not the resource that should really make you antsy. We’re going to eat through the easily recoverable reserves of stuff like copper, zinc, and the platinum group metals in a matter of decades.

We can find more of these elements in asteroids, and already several companies are planning to do so. But nearby space could also provide unlimited real estate for siting the condos of the future. Everyone expects our progeny to establish colonies on the moon or Mars, but the better deal is to build huge, orbiting habitats in which you can live without a spacesuit. Think of scaling up the International Space Station a few thousand times. We can put unlimited numbers of people in such engineered environments, and sometime in this century we’ll start doing that. The days of being confined to the bassinette of our birth are coming to an end.

The third thing you can expect before the year 2100 is the development of generalized artificial intelligence (GAI). In other words, machines that don’t just play games like chess or Jeopardy, but can do the thinking required for any white-collar job, including all the ones at the top. And such machines won’t necessarily be large. A synapse in your brain is a few thousand nanometers in size. A transistor on a chip is hundreds of times smaller. The hardware necessary for human-level smarts – even today – could fit in an iPad.•

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Old Print Article: Film Star Mabel Normand Dead At 37, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1930)

January 18, 2016 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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Mabel Normand was a Silent Era triple threat (writer-director-actor) who collaborated with Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Boris Karloff and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, so it would have taken a lot for personal life to overwhelm her career. Somehow, she managed.

Despite starring across Chaplin the first time he performed as the Little Tramp and becoming a big box-office draw, Normand’s star was dimmed by a cocaine addiction and scandal, most notably by being named the other woman in a divorce trial and by her close proximity to two mysterious shootings, one of which resulted in the death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor. Her career had slowed considerably before tuberculosis killed her at age 37 in 1930. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced the end of her tumultuous life in the February 24, 1930 edition.

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From 1914’s “Mabel’s Strange Predicament,” which introduced the Little Tramp.

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“My Gut Tells Me Things Are Changing For The Worse”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the Kim Jong-un of casino bankruptcy, had largely played footsie with Ted Cruz even while excoriating all other GOP hopefuls. That changed recently, however, when the two most detestable of all the candidates began throwing haymakers at one another. Amusing to hear Trump play the likability card with Cruz, since the former Apprentice host has tried to not only connect with members of the 4-H club but also those in the 3-K club.

The most telling line of the entire GOP race was spoken before Trump and Cruz were torn asunder, when they still resisted attacking one another. The aspiring potentate said this of his Texan-Canadian competitor: “Everything I say, he agrees with me. No matter what I say.” It was a tacit acknowledgement by Trump that he knew he was spouting crazy shit because he thought it would resonate with nativist voters he needed to float his cockamamie campaign.

Largely it has, at least with a sizable-enough swath of a frayed and divided party. It’s been the Reality TV version of the political season, full of disgraceful taunts and pathetic posturing, and the question is if the show gets cancelled in Iowa and New Hampshire or if the season is sadly extended.

From Edward Luce’s Financial Times column about the approaching American hour of reckoning:

Returning to America after a trip, I encountered a chatty immigration officer. “You guys should have finished off the crusades when you had the chance,” he said as he handed back my British passport. In themselves such encounters mean little. But I have had many similar ones recently — and the plural of anecdote is data, as they say.

Within the next three weeks, we shall find out if the rise of Donald Trump is silly season froth that comes before voting, or whether we are in the midst of a dramatic upheaval in US politics. My head is agnostic. But my gut tells me things are changing for the worse. Either way, the time for speculation is nearly over.

The rest of the world is almost as obsessed about America’s political health as the US. Every time I have been abroad in the past few months, people ask the same question: “Could Donald Trump be president?” The answer is probably not. But it comes with a strict health warning. More seasoned observers have been wrong about US politics in the past year and show few signs of lifting their batting average.

In spite of that, the consensus holds that Mr Trump will not be the Republican nominee. Should he become so, he would lose the presidential election. If, by some miracle, he won it, he would make a disastrous president. The next question is: “What is fuelling Mr Trump’s popularity?” (And for better informed foreigners, that of Ted Cruz too.) This is the issue that matters most.•

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“Going To The Stars Is Often Regarded As Humanity’s Destiny”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Has there ever been an era when enthusiasts have gotten so far ahead of themselves in terms of scientific and technological possibilities? I was reading an article the other day, clearly written by an intelligent person, who proclaimed that by 2050 we would see the “end of death,” that we will have left mere biological life behind. I’m not saying that such a transition is impossible, but it won’t be happening during our lifetimes. We are, ultimately, toast.

Likewise, I have no doubt we can eventually colonize space if we don’t do ourselves in first. We should certainly be sending human-less probes and 3D printers to Mars and elsewhere, but it’s probably a good idea to stay realistic about what we can accomplish in each era. In a rush to save ourselves, we may lose sight of the proper path.

In “What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?” a Scientific American article, Kim Stanley Robinson stresses the difficulty of near-term colonization of other star systems. The opening:

The idea that humans will eventually travel to and inhabit other parts of our galaxy was well expressed by the early Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote, “Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not meant to stay in your cradle forever.” Since then the idea has been a staple of science fiction, and thus become part of a consensus image of humanity’s future. Going to the stars is often regarded as humanity’s destiny, even a measure of its success as a species. But in the century since this vision was proposed, things we have learned about the universe and ourselves combine to suggest that moving out into the galaxy may not be humanity’s destiny after all.

The problem that tends to underlie all the other problems with the idea is the sheer size of the universe, which was not known when people first imagined we would go to the stars. Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars to us at around 12 light-years away, is 100 billion times farther from Earth than our moon. A quantitative difference that large turns into a qualitative difference; we can’t simply send people over such immense distances in a spaceship, because a spaceship is too impoverished an environment to support humans for the time it would take, which is on the order of centuries. Instead of a spaceship, we would have to create some kind of space-traveling ark, big enough to support a community of humans and other plants and animals in a fully recycling ecological system.•

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“Probably His Most Enduring Interest Is A Fellow Polymath, An 18th-Century German Named Matthias Buchinger”

January 17, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If I could have dinner with any three living Americans, Ricky Jay would definitely be one, even though I can’t say I care much for magic. Jay, of course, practices magic in the same sense that Benjamin Franklin flew kites. It’s the invisible stuff being conducted that makes all the difference.

It’s always amazed me that Jay’s enjoyed so much success despite having a brilliance driven so far from the mainstream by manias about marginalia, things barely perceptible to most. In that vein, he’s written a book about Matthias Buchinger, an eighteenth-century German magician whose unlikely success even outdoes Jay’s. 

Buchinger was a 29-inch tall phocomelic who lacked properly formed limbs yet managed to gain acclaim in a variety of fields: marksmanship, bowling, illustration, music, dance and micrography. The latter gift–the ability to write in incredibly small letters–is the basis of the book and a part of an exhibit at the Met.

From Charles McGrath at the New York Times:

The magician Ricky Jay, considered by many the greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, is also a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities. Master of a prose style that qualifies him as perhaps the last of the great 19th-century authors, he has written about oddities like cannonball catchers, poker-playing pigs, performing fleas and people who tame bees. But probably his most enduring interest is a fellow polymath, an 18th-century German named Matthias Buchinger.

Buchinger (1674-1739) was a magician and musician, a dancer, champion bowler and trick-shot artist and, most famously, a calligrapher specializing in micrography — handwriting so small it’s barely legible to the naked eye. His signature effect was to render locks of hair that, when examined closely, spelled out entire Psalms or books from the Bible. What made his feats even more remarkable is that Buchinger was born without hands or feet and was only 29 inches tall. Portraits show him standing on a cushion and wearing a sort of lampshade-like robe. Yet he married four times and had 14 children. Some people have suggested that he also had up to 70 mistresses, but Mr. Jay says that’s nonsense.

Mr. Jay, 67, has been studying Buchinger and collecting his work since he was in his 20s and has now written a book about him, just out from Siglio, with the mouthful of a title Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living,” by Ricky Jay, Whose Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg’ are Herein Revealed.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 17, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. who was stanley siegel?
  2. david bowie friends with henry winkler
  3. why does donald trump stink?
  4. hunter s thompson on henry miller in big sur
  5. erik sandberg diment technology journalist
  6. child chess prodigy
  7. man who sold his mustache
  8. plato’s retreat tv commercial
  9. dorothy stratten village voice article
  10. mussolini’s human cannonballs

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 16, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Iran released imprisoned Washington Post reporter Jason Resalan when American agreed to send another journlaist in his place.

This week, Iran released imprisoned Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian when America offered to send another journalist in his place.

Sean Penn: actor and international diplomat

 

  • Ford Motor Co. may be trying to radically reinvent itself in the Digital Age.
  • Colonizing space will require mining for water and materials out there.
  • Oregon was originally founded as a racist, whites-only state.

A Note From 1929 About A Champion Bigamist

January 15, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the September 1, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Repopulating The Earth With Humans Is Quite Another Matter”

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

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If the population of humans on Earth dwindled to just one man and one woman, I’m willing to wager that Homo sapiens would soon be extinct. That’s because whatever catastrophic event(s) led to the extreme thinning of the ranks would soon claim the last of us. 

Ignoring that likely outcome, Zoria Gorvett at BBC Future presents a thought experiment: If you place a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve on Earth with just one another, would they be able to repopulate the planet? Well, they’d have to fuck like bunnies, and think of the incest! It’s actually best not to think about it. Hundreds of years of inbreeding would not be pretty, in any sense. Even if people somehow survived, the lack of diversity would probably cause us to transition into a different species. The most positive way to look at it? Anything’s possible.

The opening:

The alien predators arrived by boat. Within two years, everyone was dead. Almost.

The tiny islet of Ball’s Pyramid lies 600km east of Australia in the South Pacific, rising out of the sea like a shard of glass. And there they were – halfway up its sheer cliff edge, sheltering under a spindly bush – the last of the species. Two escaped and just nine years later there were 9,000, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Adam and Eve.

No, this isn’t a bizarre take on the story of creation. The lucky couple were tree lobsters Dryococelus australis, stick insects the size of a human hand. They were thought to be extinct soon after black rats invaded their native Lord Howe Island in 1918, but were found clinging on in Ball’s Pyramid 83 years later. The species owes its miraculous recovery to a team of scientists who scaled 500ft of vertical rock to reach their hiding place in 2003. The lobsters were named “Adam” and “Eve” and sent to start a breeding programme at Melbourne Zoo.

Bouncing back after insect Armageddon is one thing. Female tree lobsters lay 10 eggs every 10 days and are capable of parthenogenesis; they don’t need a man to reproduce. Repopulating the earth with humans is quite another matter. Could we do it? And how long would it take?•

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“Decisions About Space Policy Have Enormous Consequences For The Future Of Human Welfare”

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

spacecolony8“Greed is good,” proclaimed fictional robber baron Gordon Gekko in 1987, echoing a speech from a year earlier by the very real Ivan Boesky, who by the time Wall Street opened had traded the Four Seasons for the Graybar Hotel, his desires having pried him from the penthouse. The point is well-taken, however, when applied correctly: Unhealthy desires can be useful. You don’t get people to risk life and limb–emigrating to the “New” World or participating in the dangerous Manifest Destiny–unless there’s a potential for a better life, and, often, a bigger bank account. 

I’ve posted previously about my queasiness over recent U.S. regulation which unilaterally allows its corporations to lay claim to bodies in space, but perhaps the quest to go for the gold in out there has a silver lining. While it’s gross for those already fabulously wealthy to be wondering who will use asteroid mining to become the first trillionaire, Grayson Cary considers in a smart Aeon essay that perhaps avarice is a necessary evil if we are to colonize space and safeguard our species against single-planet calamity. As the writer states, past multinational treaties may inhibit unfettered speculation, but probably not. Private, public, U.S., China, etc.–it’s going to be a land rush that sorts itself out as we go, and go we will. As Cary writes, “There comes a point at which Earthbound opinions hardly matter.”

An excerpt:

Over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday – which, in the spirit of appropriation, seems appropriate – President Barack Obama signed into law the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act. It had emerged from House and Senate negotiations with surprisingly robust protections for US asteroid miners. In May, the House had gone only so far as to say that ‘[a]ny asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained them’. In the Senate, commercial space legislation had moved forward without an answer to the question of property. In the strange crucible of the committee process, the bill ended up broader, bolder and more patriotic than either parent.

‘A United States citizen,’ Congress resolved, ‘engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained.’ It’s a turning point, maybe a decisive one, in a remarkable debate over the administration of celestial bodies. It’s an approach with fierce critics – writing for Jacobin magazine in 2015, Nick Levine called it a vision for ‘trickle-down astronomics’ – and the stakes, if you squint, are awfully high. A small step for 535 lawmakers could amount to one giant leap for humankind.

If you hew to the right frame of mind, decisions about space policy have enormous consequences for the future of human welfare. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, offered a stark version of that view in a paper called ‘Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development’ (2003). By one estimate, he wrote, ‘the potential for approximately 1038 human lives is lost every century that colonisation of our local supercluster is delayed; or, equivalently, about 1029 potential human lives per second’. Suppose you accept that perspective, or for any other reason feel an urgent need to get humanity exploring space. How might a species hurry things up?

For a vocal chorus of pro-space, pro-market experts, the answer starts with property: to boldly go and buy and sell. ‘The only way to interest investors in building space settlements,’ writes the non-profit Space Settlement Institute on its website, ‘is to make doing so very profitable.’ In other words: show me the money.•

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“Bowie Himself Is Unlikely To Last Long As A Cult”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts | Permalink

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You had to have had a particularly fetid heart if you were a young adult in 1973 and despised David Bowie, but New Statesman found such a grinch in Martin Amis, who dragged his rotting teeth to what would be the penultimate Ziggy Stardust performance and had a miserable time. Amis has since written some excellent novels, but I want to say this to his 23-year-old self: Fuck you, you privileged snot.

An excerpt:

For all his preening and swanking Bowie often seemed a frail, almost waiflike figure, curiously dwarfed by the electric aura of knowing sexiness and modish violence on which his act depends – panicky strobes, dizzying light effects, a Clockwork Orange-theme ritornello, and SS lightning-flashes.

This incongruity may be responsible for Bowie’s appeal and for what (if anything) is sinister about it. Among certain more affluent hippies Bowie is apparently the symbol of a kind of thrilling extremism, a life-style (the word is for once permissible) characterised by sexual omnivorousness, lavish use of stimulants – particularly cocaine, very much an élitist drug, being both expensive and galvanising – self-parodied narcissism, and a glamorously early death. To dignify this unhappy outlook with such a term as “nihilist” would, of course, be absurd; but Bowie does appear to be a new focus for the vague, predatory, escapist reveries of the alienated young. Although Bowie himself is unlikely to last long as a cult, it is hard to believe that the feelings he has aroused or aggravated will vanish along with the fashion built round him.•

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“That’s The Data”

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

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Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing, so the Harvard economist Roland Fryer likes to stick to data, which can, of course, lead to some inconvenient truths. How about being an African-American scholar in the time of Ferguson who’s convinced that police in the U.S. are no more likely to shoot a black person than a white one?

Fryer’s argument, which he relates to John McDermott of the Financial Times, is that the numbers say officers harass and manhandle African-Americans in a disproportionate way, but actual lethal violence is proportionate among different race groups. The more minor and incessant acts of persecution persuade black folks that they are being shot far more often. 

Well, I haven’t studied the numbers, but if this is true it should make us incredibly vigilant of the type racial profiling and serial intimidation that divides us. The so-called quality-of-life approach to policing has provided too much wiggle room for some to be targeted. Even Fryer himself acknowledges that he had guns pulled on him by police six or seven times during his youth.

An excerpt:

At a quiet table in the cavernous Hawksmoor Seven Dials, a branch of the high-end restaurant chain in central London, where the decor is brown and the meat is red, Fryer tells me how he spent two days last year on the beat shadowing cops in Camden, New Jersey. (On his first day on patrol a woman overdosed in front of him and died.) What Fryer wanted to figure out was whether the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — two African-Americans whose deaths led to widespread protests — were part of an observable pattern of discrimination, as activist groups such as Black Lives Matter have suggested. After his week on patrol, he collected more than 6m pieces of data from forces such as New York City’s on cases of blacks, whites and Latinos being victims of police violence.

The graph he passes between the salt and pepper displays his provisional findings. The horizontal axis is a scale of the severity of the violence, from shoving on the left all the way to shootings on the right. The curve starts high, suggesting strong differences in minor incidents, but descends to zero as the cases become more violent. In other words, once contextual factors were taken into account, blacks were no more likely to be shot by police. All of which raises the question: why the outcry in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was shot?

“That’s the data,” Fryer says. “Now one hypothesis for why Ferguson happened — not the shooting but the outcry — was not because people were making statistical inference, not from whether Michael Brown was guilty or innocent but because they fucking hate the police.” He continues: “The reason they hate the police is because if you spent years having hands put on you and [being] pushed to the ground and handcuffed without proper cause, and then you hear about a [police] shooting in your town, how could you believe it was anything but discrimination?”•

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“I Stared At Her Notes For A Few Minutes Before It Hit Me: She Was A Bot”

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

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Almost all the entries in my Gmail spam folder are boner-juice ads written by bots in barely comprehensible English. They suck. But according to Nellie Bowles’ new Guardian piece, the performance of high-end virtual email assistants has recently risen to an impressive, and perhaps unsettling, level. These tools can show empathy just as surely as they arrange business meetings, and the humans who interact with them often treat them like people even when they know they’re not. The opening:

It started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange.

Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All formatted the same. All sent at socially convincing times. And all at believable intervals from my own messages. But they were off just a little.

Hi Nellie,

No worries! Unfortunately, Swift is unavailable tomorrow morning. Can you talk at one of the following times?

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 3pm EST

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 4:30pm EST

Let me know!

Best,

Clara

I stared at her notes for a few minutes before it hit me: she was a bot.

Leaving aside the issues around giving the admin bot a female name, as all these services seem to do, this feels like one of those moments the future promised us. So now it’s here, I thought to myself, staring at her emails. It has arrived. She is among us. And she’s excellent.

“You asked me how I conceived of ‘her,’ not ‘it’. When you talk about ‘her,’ we’re 90% there already,” said Dennis Mortensen, whose company, X.ai, has pioneered email bot personal assistants. “You already conceive of her as a human being even though you know she’s a machine. Now we have something to work with.”•

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Old Print Article: “Warns Machines May Some Day Take Over The World,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1948)

January 14, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

wsm (2)Even by the oft-eccentric standards of mid-century cyberneticists, Warren Sturgis McCulloch was something of an outlier. Known for his diet of cigarettes, whiskey and ice cream, the MIT genius was the proud father of 17 adopted children. More than six decades ago he was extrapolating the power of then-rudimentary machines, concerned that eventually AI might rule humankind, a topic of much concern in these increasingly automated times. The below article from the September 22, 1948 Brooklyn Daily Eagle records his clarion call about the future.

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In 1969, the year before McCulloch died, his opinions on the Singularity had modified.

“His Diet Was Red Peppers, Cocaine And Milk”

January 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

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The growling, hirsute deejay Wolfman Jack used to tell bawdy tales of David Bowie’s Los Angeles years, a period of extreme decadence that belied the rock star’s cyborg persona. In a really well-considered Economist obituary, the protean performer’s coked-up California days are recalled. An excerpt:

Some called him a chameleon, but he was the reverse. Chameleons change hue to blend in with their background; he changed to stand out, and dared others to mimic him. He was never afraid to murder his darlings. Ziggy was killed off in 1973 as he finished an exhausting worldwide tour at London’s Hammersmith Odeon; he was being too much imitated, and Mr Bowie always had to be one step ahead. One successor was Aladdin Sane, a zigzag of painted lightning across his face; another, the most troubled, was the Thin White Duke, an aristocratic cabaret singer in black trousers, waistcoat and white shirt, needing only a skull to play Hamlet.

The tragic garb was well judged. As he dashed from persona to persona, station to station, so the worlds he pushed into became darker. Shaped by the threat of nuclear war, the cultural imagination took a catastrophic turn in the 1970s—one ever-present future was no future at all. Mr Bowie was there at the turning point; his song “Five Years” says more about impending annihilation than a shelf full of reports from the RAND Corporation. Spectacular levels of cocaine abuse also shaped this nihilistic trajectory. Settled in Los Angeles from 1975, he stayed up for days on end, sitting cross-legged behind black curtains, surrounding himself with black candles and painted pentagrams.

His diet was “red peppers, cocaine and milk”; always slender, he became skeletal. He would work madly on a song for a week, only to realise that he had got no further than four bars. Nicolas Roeg had originally been set on Peter O’Toole to play the titular alien in his film The Man Who Fell To Earth. But on seeing television footage of Mr Bowie sitting utterly isolated in the back of a limousine he knew he had his not-quite-man. Mr Bowie, true to form, remembered almost nothing of the filming. There is no alienation like drugged alienation, and perhaps no worse place to experience that than “the most repulsive wart on the backside of humanity”, as he described the City of Angels.•

In 1975, Bowie visits with Dinah Shore, Henry Winkler and Nancy Walker, performs “Stay,” acknowledges he’s a “great fan of Fonzie” and takes a karate lesson.

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“We Are At The Cusp Of The Industrial-Robot Revolution”

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

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In a Techcrunch piece, Vivek Wadhwa identifies 2016 as a technological inflection point, naming six fields which he believes will see significant progress, promising the next 12 months “will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future.”

I don’t know for most of the areas he mentions that this year will be any more important than 2015 or 2017. Consider the example of space exploration. Perhaps in 2016 private companies or government will accomplish something more impressive than the Falcon 9 landing or maybe not. Even if they do, it will be part of an incremental process rather than a radical breakthrough. Life on Mars will get nearer every year.

Wadhwa’s best bet, I think, is in the area of driverless cars, which will likely move much closer to fruition based on tests done this year. The writer is more measured with robotics, believing the industrial kind is on the cusp of major advances, but personal assistants still have a ways to go. An excerpt:

The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge required robots to navigate over an eight-task course simulating a disaster zone. It was almost comical to see them moving at the speed of molasses, freezing up, and falling over. Forget folding laundry and serving humans; these robots could hardly walk. As well, although we heard some three years ago that Foxconn would replace a million workers with robots in its Chinese factories, it never did so.

The breakthroughs may, however, be at hand. To begin with, a new generation of robots is being introduced by companies such as Switzerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics—robots dextrous enough to thread a needle and sensitive enough to work alongside humans. They can assemble circuits and pack boxes. We are at the cusp of the industrial-robot revolution.

Household robots are another matter. Household tasks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly difficult for machines to perform. Cleaning a room and folding laundry necessitate software algorithms that are more complex than those to land a man on the moon. But there have been many breakthroughs of late, largely driven by A.I., enabling robots to learn certain tasks by themselves and teach each other what they have learnt. And with the open source robotic operating system, ROS, thousands of developers worldwide are getting close to perfecting the algorithms.

Don’t be surprised when robots start showing up in supermarkets and malls—and in our homes.  Remember Rosie, the robotic housekeeper from the TV series The Jetsons?  I am expecting version 1 to begin shipping in the early 2020s.•

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“The Net Result Of The General Howl And Publicity Has Been To Obscure And Avoid The Real Issues”

January 14, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Nothing’s so useful in politics as boogeymen. Fixing an actual large-scale problem is hard, sometimes impossible, so attention is often diverted to a relatively miniscule one. There’s an added bonus: Frightened people are paralyzed, easy to manipulate. 

During the second half of the 1960s, when the American social fabric began to fray in a cultural revolution that no one could contain, motorcycle gangs became useful stooges as symbols of barbarians at the gates. In 1966, when a shocking report of a California crime made the Hell’s Angels Public Enemy No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson elucidated the disproportionate attention the unholy rollers were receiving in an article in the Nation. Of course, the following year he fed the myth himself with a book about his travels–and travails–with the club. An excerpt:

The California climate is perfect for motorcycles, as well as surfboards, swimming pools and convertibles. Most of the cyclists are harmless weekend types, members of the American Motorcycle Association, and no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers. But a few belong to what the others call “outlaw clubs,” and these are the ones who–especially on weekends and holidays–are likely to turn up almost anywhere in the state, looking for action. Despite everything the psychiatrists and Freudian casuists have to say about them, they are tough, mean and potentially as dangerous as a pack of wild boar. When push comes to shove, any leather fetishes or inadequacy feelings that may be involved are entirely beside the point, as anyone who has ever tangled with these boys will sadly testify. When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, you can generally count your chances of emerging unmaimed by the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools. “I smashed his face,” one of them said to me of a man he’d never seen until the swinging started. “He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid.”

The most notorious of these outlaw groups is the Hell’s Angels, supposedly headquartered in San Bernardino, just east of Los Angeles, and with branches all over the state. As a result of the infamous “Labor Day gang rape,” the Attorney General of California has recently issued an official report on the Hell’s Angels. According to the report, they are easily identified:

The emblem of the Hell’s Angels, termed “colors,” consists of an embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet. Just below the wing of the emblem are the letters “MC.” Over this is a band bearing the words “Hell’s Angels.” Below the emblem is another patch bearing the local chapter name, which is usually an abbreviation for the city or locality. These patches are sewn on the back of a usually sleeveless denim jacket. In addition, members have been observed wearing various types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of German iron crosses.* (*Purely for decorative and shock effect. The Hell’s Angels are apolitical and no more racist than other ignorant young thugs.) Many affect beards and their hair is usually long and unkempt. Some wear a single earring in a pierced ear lobe. Frequently they have been observed to wear metal belts made of a length of polished motorcycle drive chain which can be unhooked and used as a flexible bludgeon… Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell’s Angels is generally their filthy condition. Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and their female associates, seem badly in need of a bath. Fingerprints are a very effective means of identification because a high percentage of Hell’s Angels have criminal records.

In addition to the patches on the back of Hell’s Angel’s jackets, the “One Percenters” wear a patch reading “1%-er.” Another badge worn by some members bears the number “13.” It is reported to represent the 13th letter of the alphabet, “M,” which in turn stands for marijuana and indicates the wearer thereof is a user of the drug.

The Attorney General’s report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming–just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels. Newsweek led with a left hook titled “The Wild Ones,” Time crossed right, inevitably titled “The Wilder Ones.” The Hell’s Angels, cursing the implications of this new attack, retreated to the bar of the DePau Hotel near the San Francisco waterfront and planned a weekend beach party. I showed them the articles. Hell’s Angels do not normally read the news magazines. “I’d go nuts if I read that stuff all the time,” said one. “It’s all bullshit.”

Newsweek was relatively circumspect. It offered local color, flashy quotes and “evidence” carefully attributed to the official report but unaccountably said the report accused the Hell’s Angels of homosexuality, whereas the report said just the opposite. Time leaped into the fray with a flurry of blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a classic of supercharged hokum: “Drug-induced stupors… no act is too degrading… swap girls, drugs and motorcycles with equal abandon… stealing forays… then ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior…”

Where does all this leave the Hell’s Angels and the thousands of shuddering Californians (according to Time) who are worried sick about them? Are these outlaws really going to be busted, routed and cooled, as the news magazines implied? Are California highways any safer as a result of this published uproar? Can honest merchants once again walk the streets in peace? The answer is that nothing has changed except that a few people calling themselves the Hell’s Angels have a new sense of identity and importance.

After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell’s Angels phenomenon, both in print and in person, I’m convinced the net result of the general howl and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will be “business as usual” once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.•

 

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