In Cold War America, the inveterate jailbird reinvented himself as the messiah Krishna Venta, founder and leader of the postwar Los Angeles cult known as the WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Love) Fountain of the World. The Simi Valley group had an apocalyptic edge and seemed to be an antecedent to the Manson Family, from the gaggle of young, female followers with scarily intense eyes to the belief that a violent race war would ultimately explode and engulf the country. Pencovic was murdered in 1958 in a suicide bombing perpetrated by former members of the sect. From theInternational Cultic Studies Association:
His name was Krishna Venta, and Monday, December 10, 2008, marked the 50th anniversary of his violent assassination, which all told ended ten lives.
Born Francis Pencovic in the San Francisco of 1911, Venta was an interesting candidate for messiah, having previously lived as burglar, thief, con artist, and shipyard timekeeper. This changed in 1946 when, following a stretch on a chain gang and a stint in the Army, Pencovic’s body (or so he claimed) became the host vessel for the ‘Christ Everlasting,’ an eternal spirit being who had not only died on the cross at Calvary 2,000 years earlier, but had commandeered to Earth from the planet Neophrates a convoy of rocket ships whose passengers included Adam and Eve.
But in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insisted Venta, such ancient history was irrelevant. This time around, his Earthly mission was to gather the 144,000 Elect foretold in Revelation and deliver them from an apocalypse heretofore unseen by mankind.
To draw attention to this cause, Venta donned a monk’s robe, permanently discarded footwear, and thereafter forewent cutting both hair and beard. In the Truman and Eisenhower eras, Venta, who frequently made headlines for both his luck at the dog track and his repeated arrests for failure to pay child support, cut a unique figure. His message, however, could not have been more tailor-made for Cold War America.
Armageddon, prophesied Venta, would begin as an armed race war in the streets of America.•
Tambora’s monumental eruption was bad for crops and good for art, contributing to the creation of Frankenstein and the modern conception of the vampire, a mirror to how undead the whole world had become. There was nowhere to go, no higher ground, with hunger ubiquitous and crime spiked by desperation, making clear how fragile we are, something we may relearn should another monster we’re creating, climate change, be enabled even further.
For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.
One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel Frankenstein bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie—which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—serve as tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18.
Considered on a geological timescale, Tambora stands almost insistently near to us. The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in temperatures and rainfall, and a flow-on tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.•
IBM’s Watson may be the biggest thing ever or a huge disappointment, but it’s probably somewhere in between. The former Trebek foil didn’t “end cancer” as the company’s breathless press release suggested when it announced the AI would transition from game-show contestant to all-around problem solver. The in-flux firm has pretty much everything staked on successfully applying the machine’s analytical skills in myriad directions. In a Financial Times piece, Richard Waters reviews the process, which has numerous champions and just as many naysayers. An excerpt:
IBM’s initial plan was to apply Watson to extremely hard problems, announcing in early press releases “moonshot” projects to “end cancer” and accelerate the development of Africa. Some of the promises evaporated almost as soon as the ink on the press releases had dried. For instance, a far-reaching partnership with Citibank to explore using Watson across a wide range of the bank’s activities, quickly came to nothing.
Since adapting in 2014, IBM now sells some services under the Watson brand. Available through APIs, or programming “hooks” that make them available as individual computing components, they include sentiment analysis — trawling information like a collection of tweets to assess mood — and personality tracking, which measures a person’s online output using 52 different characteristics to come up with a verdict.
At the back of their minds, most customers still have some ambitious “moonshot” project they hope that the full power of Watson will one day be able to solve, says [IBM Head of Research John] Kelly; but they are motivated in the short term by making improvements to their business, which he says can still be significant.
This more pragmatic formula, which puts off solving the really big problems to another day, is starting to pay dividends for IBM. Companies like Australian energy group Woodside are using Watson’s language capabilities as a form of advanced search engine to trawl their internal “knowledge bases”. After feeding more than 20,000 documents from 30 years of projects into the system, the company’s engineers can now use it to draw on past expertise, like calculating the maximum pressure that can be used in a particular pipeline.
To critics in the AI world, the new, componentised Watson has little to do with the original breakthrough and waters down the technology. “It feels like they’re putting a lot of things under the Watson brand name — but it isn’t Watson,” says [Northwestern computer science professor Kris] Hammond.
[Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence head Oren] Etzioni goes further, claiming that IBM has done nothing to show that its original Jeopardy!-playing breakthrough can yield results in the real world. “We have no evidence that IBM is able to take that narrow success and replicate it in broader settings,” he says. Of the box of tricks that is now sold under the Watson name, he adds: “I’m not aware of a single, super-exciting app.”•
To many Americans, the sons of Bundy and their militia mates evoke one question: why? Why would a group of well-fed, so-called patriots think their own government, for whatever flaws it possesses, is the devil? It seems madness, alien to any rational interpretation. That could be because the terroristic behavior isn’t driven by facts but by faith, and one given to particularly violent tendencies. You don’t need religion to do something rash and scary, of course, but it can be a very potent ingredient in a toxic mix.
There has always been faith-fuelled madness in the country, as best demonstrated in Gilbert Seldes’ book The Stammering Century, and Jon Krakauer believes the Oregon occupation is powered by the same spiritual madness that abetted the murders committed by Dan and Ron Lafferty, which he investigated in Under the Banner of Heaven.
In a Medium article, the author excerpts two pieces of his 2004 book particularly pertinent to current events. An excerpt:
After Dan Lafferty read The Peace Maker in the early 1980s and resolved to start living the principle of plural marriage, he announced to his wife, Matilda, that he intended to wed her oldest daughter — his stepdaughter. At the last minute, however, he abandoned that plan and instead married a Romanian immigrant named Ann Randak, who took care of the horses on one of Robert Redford’s ranches up Spanish Fork Canyon, in the mountains east of the Dream Mine. Ann and Dan met when he borrowed a horse from her to ride in a local parade. She wasn’t LDS, says Dan, “but she was open to new experiences. Becoming my plural wife was her idea.” Ann, he adds, “was a lovely girl. I called her my gypsy bride.”
Living according to the strictures laid down in The Peace Maker felt good to Dan — it felt right, as though this really were the way God intended men and women to live. Inspired, Dan sought out other texts published by a well-known fundamentalist and Dream Mine backer, Ogden Kraut, about Mormonism as it was practiced in the early years of the church.
It didn’t take him long to discover that polygamy wasn’t the only divine principle the modern LDS Church had abandoned in its eagerness to be accepted by American society. Dan learned that in the 19th century, both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had preached about the righteousness of a sacred doctrine known as “blood atonement:” Certain grievous acts committed against Mormons, as Brigham explained it, could only be rectified if the “sinners have their blood spilt upon the ground.” And Dan learned that Joseph had taught that the laws of God take precedence over the laws of men.
Legal theory was a subject of particular interest to Dan. His curiosity had first been aroused when he was training to be a chiropractor in California, following a run-in he had with state and county authorities. At the time, he supported his family primarily by running a small sandwich business out of their home. Dan, Matilda, and the oldest kids would get out of bed before dawn every morning in order to make and wrap stacks of “all natural” vegetarian sandwiches, which Dan would then sell to other chiropractic students during the lunch hour.
“It was a very profitable little hustle,” Dan says proudly. “Or it was until the Board of Health closed me down for not following regulations. They claimed I needed a license, and that I wasn’t paying the required taxes.” Just before he was put out of business, Matilda had given birth to a baby boy. Money was tight. Losing their main source of income was problematic. It also proved to be a pivotal event in Dan’s passage to fundamentalism.
“After they shut me down,” Dan recalls, “I didn’t know quite what to do. It didn’t seem right to me, that the government would penalize me just for being ambitious and trying to support my family — that they would actually force me to go on welfare instead of simply letting me run my little business. It seemed so stupid — the worst kind of government intrusion. In The Book of Mormon, Moroni talks about how all of us have an obligation to make sure we have a good and just government, and when I read that, it really got me going. It made me realize that I needed to start getting involved in political issues. And I saw that when it comes right down to it, you can’t really separate political issues from religious issues. They’re all tied up together.”•
Hanna Reitsch would have been a feminist hero, if it weren’t for the Nazism.
Like the equally talented Leni Riefenstahl, politics made her story the thorniest thing. Reitsch was a pioneering, early-20th-century test pilot, an aviatrix as she was called in that era, but her gifts and great daring were used in the service of the Nazi Party beginning in the 1930s. Her importance in the scheme of things was such that she visited Hitler in his bunker in 1945.
Although her reputation was always sullied—and, of course, should have been—Reitsch nonetheless did enjoy considerable standing despite her past, becoming a champion glider, and even being invited as a guest of the White House during the Kennedy Administration.
The text of “Girl Rode Robot Bomb To Test It, Nazis Reveal,” the July 27, 1944 Brooklyn Daily Eagle account of her most storied and dangerous mission, for which she received the Iron Cross:
In 1976, three years before her death, Reitsch was interviewed about her aerial exploits.
__________________________
Even though he remains one of the pantheon filmmakers, Fritz Lang had mixed feelings about the medium. Talkies initially left him cold and later on he found the Hollywood studio system a discombobulating compromise.
In 1972, Lang was interviewed by two reporters, Lloyd Chesley and Michael Gould, and confided in them that he had tired of directing movies by the advent of talking pictures and decided to recreate himself as a chemist. A disreputable money man dragged him back into the business and gave him the creative freedom to make the chilling classic, M. An excerpt from the interview:
Michael Gould:
Your themes changed from epic to intimate when you began making sound films.
Fritz Lang:
I got tired from the big films. I didn’t want to make films anymore. I wanted to become a chemist. About this time an independent man—not of very good reputation—wanted me to make a film and I said ‘No, I don’t want to make films anymore.’ And he came and came and came, and finally I said ‘Look, I will make a film, but you will have nothing to say for it. You don’t know what it will be, you have no right to cut it, you only can give the money.’ He said ‘Fine, understood.’ And so I made M.
We started to write the script and I talked with my wife, Thea von Harbou, and I said ‘What is the most insidious crime?’ We came to the fact of anonymous poison letters. And then one day I said I had another idea—long before this mass murderer,[Peter] Kurten, in the Rhineland. And if I wouldn’t have the agreement for no one to tell me anything, I would never, never have made M. Nobody knew Peter Lorre.•
In 1975, Lang and William Friedkin, two directors transfixed by extreme evil, engaged in conversation.
__________________________
John Cale sometimes seems exhausted talking about The Velvet Underground, and who could blame him? An unlikely rock star to begin with, the Welsh musician was a classically trained violinist with strong avant garde leanings who arrived in New York City just as its rock and art scenes were exploding into one another, collaborating almost immediately with volatile Lou Reed and soon enough vampiric Andy Warhol. Cale lasted two albums with the band, but has never escaped its reputation. How could he?
“In Chicago, I was singing lead because Lou had hepatitis, no one knew the difference. We turned our faces to the wall and turned up very loud. Paul Morrissey (later the director of Trash) and Danny Williams had different visions of what the light show should be like and one night I looked up to see them fighting, hitting each other in the middle of a song. Danny Williams just disappeared. They found his clothes by the side of a river, with his car nearby … the whole thing. He used to carry this strobe around with him all the time and no one could figure out why till we found out he kept his amphetamine in it.”
“We worked the Masonic Hall in Columbus Ohio. A huge place filled with people drinking and talking. We tuned up for about ten minutes, tuning, fa-da-da, up, da-da-da, down. There’s a tape of it. Played a whole set to no applause, just silences.”
“In San Francisco, we played the Fillmore and no one liked us much. We put the guitars against the amps, turned up, played percussion and then split. Bill Graham came into the dressing room and said, ‘You owe me 20 more minutes’. I’d dropped a cymbal on Lou’s head and he was bleeding. ‘Is he hurt?’ Graham said, ‘We’re not insured.'”
“Severn Darden brought this young chick up to meet me there and he introduced her as one of my ardent admirers. This was a long time ago and I didn’t know about such things, so I said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and walked off. Two days later in L.A., here comes Severn again with this girl. I say hello again and leave. We’re all staying at the castle in L.A., and things are very hazy, if you know what I mean. Well, this girl is there too. I smile but I still don’t understand. About two in the morning the door of my room opens and she walks in naked and gets into bed. Went on for five nights. I don’t think I even got her address.”
The Velvets suffered from all kinds of strange troubles. They spent three years on the road away from New York City, their home, playing Houston, Boston, small towns in Pennsylvania, anywhere that would pay them scale.
“We needed someone like Andy,” John says. “He was a genius for getting publicity. Once we were in Providence to play at the Rhode Island School of Design and they sent a TV newsman to talk to us. Andy did the interview lying on the ground with his head propped up on one arm. There were some studded balls with lights shining on them and when the interviewer asked him why he was on the ground, Andy said, “So I can see the stars better.” The interview ended with the TV guy lying flat on his back saying, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”•
A 21-year-old John Cale the year he arrived in NYC and the one before he met Reed, on I’ve Got a Secret.
Every political season has its boogeymen, those frightening figures raised to scare up votes, and this particularly vitriolic period in the U.S. has Muslims, Mexicans and Chinese manufacturers. The latter pair are supposedly responsible for the decline of American manufacturing, and by extension, the middle class.
Outsourcing the making of American products to other countries may have been somewhat of a problem over the last three decades, but it’s a different kind of challenge workers are facing today: Potentially widespread automation that goes far beyond the factory floor. It’s nothing new, but the current pace of robotics progress is unprecedented.
Technological unemployment has been paid scant attention by 2016 hopefuls, most of whom are promising a return to postwar American manufacturing, which is most definitely not going to happen. In a New York Times editorial, Emma Roller argues that trying to turn back the digital clock is “not an attainable, or even a desirable, goal.” An excerpt:
Republicans aren’t the only ones obsessing over reclaiming these factory jobs. Last month, Hillary Clinton mentioned factory closings when she released her own plan to restore manufacturing jobs through a network of tax credits and federal funding for research. Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, in criticizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has argued that such international trade deals are to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country.
The problem with this sort of rhetoric is that a lot of the manufacturing jobs the United States lost over the past 50 years didn’t go overseas; they simply disappeared with the advent of new technology.
James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said the trend in machines taking over factory work that was previously done by humans has been going on since the 1950s. But for presidential candidates, it’s a lot easier to blame other countries rather than robots.
“It’s those basically rote, repetitive tasks where you’re fixing the same thing,” he said. “It’s very hard to imagine any of those positions coming back. Basically, a robot is a lot more affordable than a human employee.”
The skills needed to work on a factory floor today are quite different than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Don’t blame stingy companies or over-regulation by the government; blame the rapid progress of technology.•
Eventually Virtual Reality gear will be as omnipresent as smartphones and people will be cagefighting with Genghis Khan and having sex with promiscuous ghosts. Even if the antisocial mayhem we cause in a virtual realm doesn’t directly harm anyone else, there will be psychological consequences for the individual “living” the experience. It’s important to know more about such ramifications, though any universal standards we set to limit future products won’t likely stick for very long.
Beyond the common issues facing new technologies, such as whether consumers will pony up hundreds of dollars for another device, virtual reality is grappling with questions about how it affects a user’s body and mind.
The experience can cause nausea, eyestrain and headaches. Headset makers don’t recommend their devices for children. Samsung and Oculus urge adults to take at least 10-minute breaks every half-hour, and they warn against driving, riding a bike or operating machinery if the user feels odd after a session.
Apart from the physical effects, Stanford University professor Jeremy Bailenson says his 15 years of research consistently have shown virtual reality can change how a user thinks and behaves, in part because it is so realistic.
“We shouldn’t fathom this as a media experience; we should fathom it as an experience,” said Prof. Bailenson, who also co-founded Strivr Labs Inc., which helps football players relive practice in virtual reality.
The psychological unknowns are prompting some backers to suggest setting standards for content. “We have to be very careful,” said Alex Schwartz, chief executive of maker Owlchemy Labs. “Scares in VR are borderline immoral.”•
At some point this century, and probably sooner than later, sensors will live inside pretty much all manufactured objects, moving every last thing into an interconnected data-gathering and -crunching system. Part of the mission will be to make individual lives and entire cities more efficient, constantly upgrading, but much of it will be about consumerism, creating and selling “products that respond to their owner’s tastes,” as Quentin Hardy of the New York Times notes in his really smart article about technologist Adam Bosworth attempting to bring about “data singularity.” All the world will be a “smart object,” privacy will be compromised to an unprecedented degree, and there’ll be no way to opt out. The blessing will be mixed.
An excerpt:
Imagine if almost everything — streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectric dams — had a tiny sensor. That is already happening through so-called Internet-of-Things projects run by big companies like General Electric and IBM.
All those devices and sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centers, where millions of computer servers manage and learn from all that information.
Those servers would then send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about the accident.
Think of it as one, enormous process in which machines gather information, learn and change based on what they learn. All in seconds.
“I’m interested in affecting five billion people,” said Mr. Bosworth, a former star at Microsoft and Google who now makes interactive software atSalesforce.com, an online software company that runs sales for thousands of corporations. “We’re headed into one of those historic discontinuities where society changes.”•
Here are 50 ungated pieces of wonderful journalism from 2015, alphabetized by author name, which made me consider something new or reconsider old beliefs or just delighted me. (Some selections are from gated publications that allow a number of free articles per month.) If your excellent work isn’t on the list, that’s more my fault than yours.
“Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?” (David Amsden, The New York Times Magazine) As private and public sector missions increasingly overlap, here’s an engaging look at the privatization of some policing in the French Quarter.
“In the Beginning” (Ross Andersen, Aeon) A bold and epic essay about the elusive search for the origins of the universe.
Ask Me Anything (Anonymous, Reddit) A 92-year-old German woman who was born into Nazism (and participated in it) sadly absolves herself of all blame while answering questions about that horrible time.
“It’s Not Climate Change — It’s Everything Change” (Margaret Atwood, Matter) The great storyteller speculates on the disparate paths we might take as the very real threat of climate change draws perilously close.
“One-Man Rule in Israel’s Hippy Micro-State” (Raffi Berg, BBC Magazine) Achzivland, a micronation that is, yet is not, a part of Israel, has proven too wild to reign in and too small to fail.
“The Man Who Made Trump Who He Is” (Gwenda Blair, Politico) Grandpa Friedrich Trump was a “whoremaster,” and in retrospect he was the classy one.
“Rethinking Extinction” (Stewart Brand, Aeon) The Whole Earth Catalog founder thinks the chance of climate-change catastrophe overrated, arguing we should utilize biotech to repopulate dwindling species.
“Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?” (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Magazine) The mother of invention gets her due in this excellent profile of the leader of America’s other First Family.
“Anchorman: The Legend of Don Lemon” (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ) A deeply entertaining look into the perplexing facehole of Jeff Zucker’s most gormless word-sayer and, by extension, the larger cable-news zeitgeist.
“How Social Media Is Ruining Politics” (Nicholas Carr, Politico) A lament that our shiny new tools have provided provocative trolls far more credibility than a centralized media ever allowed for.
“Clans of the Cathode” (Tom Carson, The Baffler) One of our best culture critics looks at the meaning of various American sitcom families through the medium’s history.
“We Need A Modern Origin Story: A Big History” (David Christian, Edge) The Australian academic addresses this question: Can you teach a history course that begins with the emergence of the universe?
“The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic) The author examines the tragedy of the African-American community being turned into a penal colony, explaining the origins of the catastrophic policy failure.
“The World’s Biggest Pet Store Has 250,000 Animals” (Ben Crair, Businessweek) The Zoo Zajac, a ginormous German pet shop offering both expected and exotic species, is the Harrods of hamsters and hares.
“The Koreans Who Televise Themselves Eating Dinner” (Stephen Evans, BBC Magazine) In hyper-wired South Korea, “performance eating” has become a phenomenon, a logical development in a time of democratized media.
“Perfect Genetic Knowledge” (Dawn Field, Aeon) The essayist thinks about a future in which we’ve achieved “perfect knowledge” of whole-planet genetics.
“Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78” (Margalit Fox, The New York Times) The great obituarist remembers a marketer who boozily dreamed up a novelty that ever so briefly became a national sensation.
“A Strangely Funny Russian Genius” (Ian Frazier, The New York Review of Books) Daniil Kharms was a very funny writer, if you appreciate slapstick that ends in a body count.
“Tomorrow’s Advance Man” (Tad Friend, The New Yorker) Profile of Silicon Valley strongman Marc Andreessen and his milieu, an enchanted land in which adults dream of riding unicorns.
“Build-a-Brain” (Michael Graziano, Aeon) The neuroscientist’s ambitious thought experiment about machine intelligence is a piece I thought about continuously throughout the year.
Ask Me Anything (Stephen Hawking, Reddit) Among other things, the physicist warns that the real threat of superintelligent machines isn’t malice but relentless competence.
“Engineering Humans for War” (Annie Jacobsen, The Atlantic) War is inhuman, it’s been said, and the Pentagon wants to make it more so by employing bleeding-edge biology and technology to create super soldiers.
“The Wrong Head” (Mike Jay, London Review of Books) A look at insanity in 1840s France, which demonstrates that mental illness is often expressed in terms of the era in which it’s experienced.
“Death Is Optional” (Daniel Kahneman and Noah Yuval Harari, Edge) Two of my favorite big thinkers discuss the road ahead, a highly automated tomorrow in which medicine, even mortality, may not be an egalitarian affair.
“Where the Bodies Are Buried,” (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker) Ceasefires, even treaties, don’t completely conclude wars, as evidenced by this haunting revisitation of the heartbreaking IRA era.
“Porntopia” (Molly Lambert, Grantland) The annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, the Oscars of oral, allows the writer to look into a funhouse-mirror reflection of America.
“The Robots Are Coming” (John Lanchester, London Review of Books) A remarkably lucid explanation of how quickly AI may remake our lives and labor in the coming decades.
“The Next Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Who You Might Think” (Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times) False narratives can have real-world impact, and the writer explodes one of them–the young tech genius in the hoodie–in this perfect blog post.
“Meet Venture Capital’s Teenage Analyst” (Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal) A whip-smart profile of a post-tween powerhouse making her mark in Silicon Valley’s precocious ecosystem.
“Last Girl in Larchmont” (Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker) The great TV critic provides a postmortem of Joan Rivers and her singular (and sometimes disquieting) brand of feminism.
“President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation, Part 1 & Part 2” (Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson, New York Review of Books) Two monumental Americans discuss the state of the novel and the state of the union.
Ask Me Anything (Elizabeth Parrish, Reddit) The CEO of BioViva announces she’s patient zero for the company’s experimental age-reversing gene therapies. Strangest thing I read all year.
“Why Alien Life Will Be Robotic” (Sir Martin Rees, Nautilus) The astronomer argues that ETs in our inhospitable universe have likely already transitioned into conscious machines.
Ask Me Anything (Anders Sandberg, Reddit) Heady conversation about existential risks, Transhumanism, economics, space travel and future technologies conducted by the Oxford researcher.
“Alien Rights” (Lizzie Wade, Aeon) Manifest Destiny will, sooner or later, became a space odyssey. What ethics should govern exploration of the final frontier?
“A Rare, Personal Look at Oliver Sacks’s Early Career” (Lawrence Weschler, Vanity Fair) The neuroscientist and writer, whose beginnings were incredibly complex, is sketched very candidly by his longtime friend.
“Peeling Back the Layers of a Born Salesman’s Life” (Michael Wilson, The New York Times) The paper’s gifted crime writer pens a posthumous profile of a protean con man, a Zelig on the make who crossed paths with Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger and Annie Leibovitz, among others.
“The Pop Star and the Prophet” (Sam York, BBC Magazine) Philosopher Jacques Attali, who predicted, back in the ’70s, the downfall of the music business, tells the writer he now foresees similar turbulence for manufacturing.
Donald Trump doesn’t want to force menstruating women to wear burqas, but what else can he do? I mean, he’s a businessman.
It’s amusing to listen to the hideous hotelier try to torpedo Bernie Sanders with cheap insults the way he does his fellow Republicans, the Vermont Senator impervious to taunts like “wacko” because of his gravitas, common sense and sheer likability. It’s difficult to envision Sanders faring well in Southern primaries, but perhaps he’s awakening a positive populist energy that won’t readily go away as Trump has awakened an enduring hatred. As the Occupy movement framed the 2012 election season, maybe Sanders will do the same now. Is he part of an elongated prelude to something significant?
In 2003 I wrote in my The New Ruthless Economythat one of the great imponderables of the twenty-first century was how long it would take for the deteriorating economic circumstances of most Americans to become a dominant political issue. It has taken over ten years but it is now happening, and its most dramatic manifestation to date is the rise of Bernie Sanders. While many political commentators seem to have concluded that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, polls taken as recently as the third week of December show Sanders to be ahead by more than ten points in New Hampshire and within single-figure striking distance of her in Iowa, the other early primary state.
Though he continues to receive far less attention in the national media than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Sanders is posing a powerful challenge not only to the Democratic establishment aligned with Hillary Clinton, but also the school of thought that assumes that the Democrats need an establishment candidate like Clinton to run a viable campaign for president. Why this should be happening right now is a mystery for historians to unravel. It could be the delayed effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, or of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s unmasking of the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent and the 0.1 percent of Americans, or just the cumulative effect of years of disappointment for many American workers.
Such mass progressive awakenings have happened before. I remember taking part in antiwar demonstrations on the East and West coasts in the Fall and Winter of 1967–1968. I noticed that significant numbers of solid middle-class citizens were joining in, sometimes with strollers, children, and dogs in tow. I felt at the time that this was the writing on the wall for Lyndon Johnson, as indeed it turned out to be. We may yet see such a shift away from Hillary Clinton, despite her strong performance in the recent debates and her recent recovery in the polls.
If it happens, it will owe in large part to Sanders’s unusual, if not unique, political identity.•
The Atlantic put together a predictably smart piece (“Can the Planet Be Saved?“) which asks scientists and thinkers what they feel most despairing and most hopeful about at year’s end. The first entry, by University of Arizona Law and Public Policy Professor Robert Glennon, speaks to a challenge made stark by the California droughts that worsened in 2015: water security. Our concept of H2O is baffling, as it’s priced cheap (and often wasted frivolously) yet along with oxygen the dearest thing. An excerpt:
Reason for despair: I despair that we don’t consider water to be scarce or valuable. A century of lax water laws and regulations has spoiled most Americans. We turn on the tap and out comes as much water as we want for less than we pay for cable television or cellphone service. When most Americans think of water, they think of it as similar to air—as infinite and inexhaustible. In reality, it’s both finite and exhaustible.
Because we don’t respect water as remarkable, we use needless quantities for frivolous purposes, such as growing grass in the desert. And because we don’t pay the real cost of water (only the cost of the infrastructure to provide it), we remove the incentive to conserve. Perhaps most important, our innovation economy has encouraged engineers and inventors to create water-saving technologies that extend our supply; but the price of water is so low that few of them have viable business plans.•
A BBC thought experiment proposes we carpet the Sahara with solar panels, asking experts in different fields about the feasibility of such a project. Seems like a no-brainer as a way to produce clean energy, but Helen Anne Curry, a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, points out that innovating our way out of pollution may cause new issues unless we also curb consumption. Skeptical soul that I am, I don’t see our hunger for energy being sated anytime soon. Better technology may be our only chance. An excerpt:
Helen Anne Curry: Technology alone is rarely the answer
“I am interested in exploring the persistent optimism that surrounds new technologies, even after multiple failures.
“The technological fix is appealing; it’s exciting to think we can solve problems without fundamentally having to change the way we live, the way we get to work every day or the number of cheap flights we take.
“But you can’t just take one point in the system and say ‘that’s solved’; there is much more that extends outwards.
“Think of the work that was done to solve local air pollution in the mid-twentieth century, which was to build super-tall smokestacks.
“But they don’t eliminate the pollution from the air. They just throw it up much higher in the atmosphere, so in fact it circulates further. One of the subsequent problems of building these was they created acid rain in places that didn’t have this kind of concentrated industry.
“We can use our science and technology knowledge to bring other peoples of the world into the quality of life that the global north has enjoyed for far longer.
“Yet if you look back on 60 years of policy work and intervention, there’s a lot of ways in which we’ve failed. We haven’t been able to deliver the social, scientific and technological progress which we envisioned.
“I think the only reason to pursue [solar panels in the Sahara] would be if it were a stopgap measure in which the long-term goal would be to reduce consumption of energy and to change our lifestyles to be more sustainable, so that subsequent generations don’t have to deal with as many problems as we’re going to leave them.”•
Catastrophist philosopher Nick Bostrom believes machine superintelligence may be the greatest existential risk facing humankind, that it could, perhaps sooner than later, be the end of us if we’re not careful. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about that, though I seriously doubt the sooner part. First maybe McDonald’s will be fully automated, and then much, much, much later on we face a robot-inspired endgame. I actually think it’s more likely that such computer intelligence will help us engineer our own evolution into whatever it is we become in the long run, though miscalculation leading to a cascading disaster might become a plausible scenario at some point.
In a Washington Post piece, Joel Achenbach explores the so-called Artificial Intelligence threat and the professional worriers who analyze it and exhort us to shape the future. MIT computer scientist Daniela Rus is presented as a counterpoint to Bostrom, physicist Mark Tegmark and other thinkers who fear an AI-inspired end is near. The opening:
The world’s spookiest philosopher is Nick Bostrom, a thin, soft-spoken Swede. Of all the people worried about runaway artificial intelligence, and Killer Robots, and the possibility of a technological doomsday, Bostrom conjures the most extreme scenarios. In his mind, human extinction could be just the beginning.
Bostrom’s favorite apocalyptic hypothetical involves a machine that has been programmed to make paper clips (although any mundane product will do). This machine keeps getting smarter and more powerful, but never develops human values. It achieves “superintelligence.” It begins to convert all kinds of ordinary materials into paper clips. Eventually it decides to turn everything on Earth — including the human race (!!!) — into paper clips.
Then it goes interstellar.
“You could have a superintelligence whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible, and you get this bubble of paper clips spreading through the universe,” Bostrom calmly told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M., earlier this year.
He added, maintaining his tone of understatement, “I think that would be a low-value future.”
Bostrom’s underlying concerns about machine intelligence, unintended consequences and potentially malevolent computers have gone mainstream. You can’t attend a technology conference these days without someone bringing up the A.I. anxiety. It hovers over the tech conversation with the high-pitched whine of a 1950s-era Hollywood flying saucer.•
In 1987, Omni invited Robert Heilbronerto speculate on the U.S. and global economy in 2007. He was very prescient about income inequality, the creative disruption of technology and the threats to American exceptionalism. He was also aware that a new superpower might emerge, though he believed it would be Japan, not China. His forecast:
There is an alarming possibility that our economy is moving in the direction of what some people call a two-tier society — a large population of people with middle-class or higher incomes and values, with a considerable bulge at the top. and a large number of people who have been economically and culturally uncoupled from the main society.
What’s most alarming is that the ladder that has connected the bottom to the top is now missing some important rungs. There were certain industries, like the steel and auto industries, that provided more or less continuous ladders of jobs from the bottom to the top. You could enter as an unskilled person, acquire new skills, and move up the ladder to secure, unionized, better-paying jobs. But now these industries have been seriously imperiled, and their place as employers has been replaced by what I call the McDonald’s employers. More people work for McDonald’s than work for U.S. Steel, but McDonald’s has no ladders. The problem is serious.
A great many economists, myself included, feel uneasy about the fact that 70 percent ol the economy does what is called service work and only 30 percent does what is called goods-related work. New technology keeps entering the economy and disrupting employment. When you look back at how the American economy developed, you see a migration off the farm into the factory and out of the factory into the office. The main push has come from technology. There has been relatively little new machinery to push people out of the office, but that’s changing now. If the computer creates jobs in the office, the service sector will increase and there will be no squeezing of employment. But if technology bumps service people out of work, I don’t know where they are going to go.
Personally. I think American optimism is in for a very severe challenge. We have always considered ourselves virtually to have a right to be number one in the world. But of course we don’t have any such right or assurance. And we have to resign ourselves to the unsettling fact that we are number two, or three, or four in many ways. In terms of health, for instance, we have fallen seriously behind, and that’s a big blow to our self-image.
In the next 20 years the government will have to take active steps in providing work and income tor the bottom one third of the population. The government grudgingly provides some sort of income, but it doesn’t provide work. And work is essential for people’s self-esteem and also for the building of many kinds of infrastructures that are needed in the country.
It is quite possible, it seems to me, that America will emerge from its present, wholly unaccustomed struggle for world position very worse off than it is today; that we will not find the right combination of talents and the right distribution of workforce in various occupations; that we will not develop the right technologies and will end up with a seriously disadvantaged economy. Not so long ago England was still regarded as one of Ihe most remarkable economies in the world, but it is now slightly less productive than Portugal. I think it is quite possible that the day of unquestioned American preeminence may be finished.
We could suddenly find that the way Americans live, their chances for life expectancy, their amenities of life are not as. good as, let’s just say, the Germans’ or the Swedes’. We might fail to produce the necessary output to bring our living standards and quality of life up to an acceptable level.
In the old days we tended to think about political possibilities in terms of left and right. Since Iran we’ve realized there is another dimension “up and down.” There is potential for a great deal of political mischief and sabotage in “underdeveloped” countries, and anyone who tries to think about the future has to consider that. There is going to be lots of trouble.
It is clear which countries are emerging as economic powers. It is entirely possible that Japan is going to be the England of the future — I mean the 1850’s England. Japan may be the organizer for a “Pacific Rim” economy — as England was for Europe a century ago. Japan may combine its leadership and technology with the inexpensive manpower and the intelligence of the Chinese, the Malaysians, the Taiwanese, the Indians, the Koreans. It is quite possible that there will be a new world economic “empire” out there, which will severely challenge the formerly undisputed hegemony of the West. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, as far as I can see, will continue to be very bureaucratic and will be very unlikely to make any economic changes.
Sooner or later this terrific debt problem has to be resolved, and there is only one possible way to resolve it, and that is to “forget” it. The debt is unrepayable, and it is going to be swallowed by a number of people taking their lumps— banks, corporations, and governments. And some of the borrowers will have to swallow bitter pills. The decks have to be cleared. I suspect that under international agreements the old debts are going to be washed away, forgiven, or rephased — such wonderful jargon words!
I think everyone recognizes now that the achievement of a better world is more complicated and difficult than some of us thought 20 years ago.•
Vanderbilt historian Michael Bess, author of Our Grandchildren Redesigned, believes–fears, really–that we’re on the brink of a slew of technological and bioengineering breakthroughs which in the next few decades will do much good and be attended by many problems.
In the long run–if there is one–he’s right, but while these “games” will begin being played within his timeframe, I don’t really feel most of them will play out by then. For instance: Bess wonders what lifespans of 160 years or more will mean for marriage and family. That’s not likely to be a concern this century, and if life is eventually radically extended, family will have changed greatly numerous times by then.
But I do think he identifies many of the right questions in a History News Network article he adapted from his book. The opening:
Over the coming decades – probably a lot sooner than most people realize –the next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cell phones, and the web; but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformed – it is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. This will be a shift that cuts even more deeply than the great industrial revolutions of the past. It will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states.
Through the use of pharmaceuticals, we are learning how to modulate our moods, boost our physical and mental performance, increase our longevity and vitality. Through the application of prostheses, implants, and other bioelectronic devices, we are not only healing the blind and the paralyzed, but beginning to reconfigure our bodies, enhance our memories, and generate entirely new ways of interacting with machines. Through genetic interventions, we are not only neutralizing certain diseases long thought incurable, but opening up the very real possibility of taking evolution into our own hands – redesigning the human “platform” of body and mind in a thoroughgoing way.
If you talk to the authors of this revolution – the scientists, doctors, and engineers who labor tirelessly at the vanguard of biotechnology – most of them will deny that this is what they have in mind. They are not seeking to bring about the transmogrification of the human species, they insist: they are simply doing their best to heal the sick, to repair the injured. But once you stand back and look at the big picture, sizing up the cumulative impact of all their brilliant efforts, a different conclusion emerges. Whether they intend it or not, they are giving our species the instruments with which to radically redesign itself. Those instruments are already becoming available in crude form today, and they will fully come into their own over the next few decades. By the time our grandchildren have grown to adulthood, this wave of change will have passed through our civilization.
The Chinese government is right to refurbish the nation’s many public restrooms which are in a state of disrepair, left in the past as the rest of the infrastructure was rapidly modernized. Internet access, ATMs and stall-based TV screens, however, are probably not necessary. The lavish remake is marked by another curiosity: While hi-tech gear is linked up everywhere, at least some of the loos are continuing the old-school tradition of a communal roll of toilet paper.
BEIJING — Li Wen had heard about the turbo-strength flush power and the lily-scented soap. He knew about the stalls equipped with personal television screens and wireless Internet access, the soothing cello soundtrack and the windows lined with aloe vera plants.
But Mr. Li, 39, a salesman, was skeptical when he set foot in the new public toilet at the corner of Fuqian Square in Fangshan, a district in southwest Beijing.
“What was wrong with the old one?” he said. “The government has too much money and doesn’t know how to spend it.”
Modern technology has changed nearly every facet of life in China in recent years, turning backwoods precincts into bustling cities and bringing cellphones to more than a billion people. But public restrooms in many areas have remained largely unchanged, equipped with the same squat toilets and concrete pits that Chinese people have used for generations.
As the government seeks to improve sanitation and reduce environmental waste across the country, it is planning a major overhaul of public toilets. Over the next three years, it will build or renovate 57,000 restrooms, including some that will resemble the high-tech facility in Fangshan, the first of its kind in China.•
Historian Yuval Harari thinks techno-religions are the future, with older testaments no longer relevant in a time of bioengineering and the like. Astronomy also poses a challenge for traditionalists: Will the discovery of life beyond Earth collapse the foundations of familiar faiths. I don’t know that any of it would matter to hardcore religionists somehow able to deny evolution in 2015, but more reasonable believers might rethink their beliefs if contact is made.
It seems there are two competing narratives between religion and astronomy. Religion is the story of how every single person is special, while astronomy is the long reveal of how our planet is not all that special. Is there room for coexistence?
David A. Weintraub:
It depends on what astronomers find, and then how different religions deal with that. The existence of alien life does not, in and of itself, threaten religion. A lot are quite compatible with, even happy with, the idea that extraterrestrial life exists. There are only some religions that seem worried.
Question:
So, if aliens land in Times Square tomorrow, which ones are in trouble?
David A. Weintraub:
Let me step back for a moment and say that what I was writing about was not aliens in flying saucers making contact. What astronomers are doing is detecting chemical signatures in the atmosphere that says life is out there, which is very different from aliens climbing out of flying saucers and saying, “We’re here.” But the ones that would have problems are the most conservative forms of Christianity.
Question:
Why?
David A. Weintraub:
They put the most literal weight on the creation of humanity through God creating Adam and Eve—that the Garden of Eden was a literal place on the physical Earth, and that’s how intelligent beings were created. If there are intelligent beings from another place, that would threaten the idea that evolution doesn’t occur. Because either life somehow gets started in other places and evolves to become intelligent, or God made a decision to create intelligent life in some other place, and that would seem puzzling if we’re supposed to be the favored creatures.
Question:
What religions would be cool with it?
David A. Weintraub:
Judaism could care less. That has nothing to do with other intelligent beings. If God wants to creates other beings, why should we care? Mormons seem to believe quite strongly there are intelligent beings elsewhere. Within the scriptural writings of Islam, there seem to be strong assertions of intelligent beings elsewhere. The same goes for Hindus and Buddhists. There doesn’t seem to be any contradictions for religions that believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation can happen anywhere in the universe, so why wouldn’t there be life elsewhere? There might be something special about being reincarnated in human form on Earth, a special opportunity for shedding bad karma or generating good karma, but in terms of simply the opportunity, reincarnation doesn’t preclude it from happening anywhere else in the universe.•
I learned to read on old copies of Mad and still have a special place in my heart for Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Melvin Mole (which introduced my to Existentialism long before I knew the term existed) and Elder’s haunting adaptation of Poe’s The Raven. These magazines were the gateway drug for the first two novels I read, Animal Farm and Wuthering Heights. William Gaines and the “usual gang of idiots” had prepared me well.
I never cared much for superhero comic books at a kid, but at the late, great Coliseum Books on Manhattan’s West Side, I came across copies of Raw and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which wrecked my brain (in the best sense) the way Mad had. In my early adulthood, I would alternate reading these titles with books by Nathanael West, Dostoyevsky and Kafka. It was tremendous.
Raw editor Françoise Mouly, who has gone on to do stupendous work turning out New Yorker covers, is trying to enable future generations of readers with her own panel-centric imprint, Toon Books. Jeff MacGregor of Smithsonianinterviewed her recently. An excerpt about literacy in the Digital Age:
Question:
Do you think it’s more useful to have these in school or to have them in the home?
Françoise Mouly:
You cannot, in this day and age, get them in the home. Everybody [used to] read newspapers, everybody read magazines, everybody read books. There were books in the home. Not media for the elite, [but] mass media. Books and magazines were as prevalent then as Facebook is, as Twitter is. That’s not the case anymore. Most kids at the age of 5 or 6 don’t see their parents picking up a newspaper or a magazine or a pulp novel or literary novel. So you know, [it becomes] “You must learn to read.” It’s completely abstract.
The libraries are playing an essential role. The librarians and the teachers were the ones removing comics from the hands of kids back in the ’60s and ’70s. Now it’s actually almost the other way around. Most kids discover books and comics, if they haven’t had them for the first five years of their lives, when they enter school. Because when they enter school, they are taken to the library. And librarians, once they open the floodgates, they realize, “Oh my God, the kids are actually asking to go to the library because they can sit on the floor and read comics.” You don’t have to force them — it’s their favorite time. So then what we try to do, when we do programs with schools, is try to do it in such a way that a kid can bring a book home because you want them to teach their parents.
Question:
Is there an electronic future for these?
Françoise Mouly:
One of my colleagues was saying e-books replaced cheap paperbacks and maybe that’s good. A lot of this disposable print can be replaced by stuff you didn’t want to keep. But when I read a book, I still want to have a copy of the book. I want it to actually not be pristine anymore, I want to see the stains from the coffee – not that I’m trying to damage my book, but I want it to have lived with me for that period of time. And similarly, I think that the kids need to have the book. It’s something they will hold in their hand, and they will feel the care we put into it. The moment I was so happy was when a little girl was holding one of the Toon Books, and she was petting it and closing her eyes and going, “I love this book, I love this book.” The sensuality of her appreciation for the book, I mean, that’s love.•
In 1912, daredevil Frederick R. Law, who delighted in heights, ascended to the peak of the Statue of Liberty and parachuted from the raised hand of the American icon. It was more than six decades before aerialist Philippe Petit would top him–and every other urban adventurer–with his World Trade Center high-wire stunt. The full story of the Liberty leap as told in the New York Times that year:
Frederick R. Law, listed in the telephone directory as an aerial contractor, with offices at 50 Church Street, growing tired of monotonously swaying to and fro on lofty flagpoles and of being conventionally referred to in the newspapers as a daring steeplejack, decided yesterday to startle the world with an entirely original feat.
Law is about 35 years old. He was the first man to paint the flagpoles of the Pulitzer and Singer buildings, and it has been said of him that he had to be at least 300 feet in the air with a cigar in his mouth to feel absolutely comfortable. Business has been dull in the steeple rigging line, and Law saw the necessity of doing something which no one else had ever done before.
According to one of his foremen, the boss steeplejack sat in his office all yesterday morning looking over the city’s high towers. Suddenly, it was said, he announced his intention of jumping from the Singer Building with a parachute. That seemed unpractical, however, after an investigation, and the Metropolitan Tower, a few stories higher, offered the same objections. The steeplejack did not fear the jump, but impeding traffic and the risk of causing a runaway or two deterred him.
The happy alternative of the Statue of Liberty suggested itself, and at noon the aerial contractor set out for Bedlow’s Island. At 2 o’clock he was armed with a special permit, issued by Capt. Leonard D. Wildman in charge of the post on the island, and half an hour later half a dozen moving picture machines and operators and several thousand spectators were on hand to see the jump from the top of the statue.
Law dragged his 100-pound parachute into the elevator, and in company with one of his foreman went aloft to the head of the Goddess. There he dressed his ropes and started up the remaining 50 feet through the mighty biceps and forearm until he reached the hand with supports the torch. There is an observation platform at this point which, since the issue of a recent order, cannot be visited without a special permit. This platform is 151 feet from the base of the statue and about 225 feet above sea level. It is large enough to hold twelve persons, and Law and his assistant had no trouble in arranging the parachute so that on the jump it would slide easily over the edges of the railing.
Awaiting a lull in the wind Law chose the eastern side of the statue for his descent, and at exactly 2:45 P.M., with all the moving picture machines trained in his direction, he jumped from the top of the railing, clearing the edges by ten feet.
Whistles shrieked in the harbor, and every one within seeking distance held his breath while the bulky parachute followed the man over the railing. There was fear of a tragedy for a moment, for the steeplejack fell fully seventy-five feet like a dead weight, the parachute showing no inclination whatever to open at first.
When it opened the wind blew it clear of the statue. Then Law began waving his hands frantically. It was not a sign of alarm, merely a steering method which the young aeronaut had adopted to keep his craft out of the bay. It proved practical, too, for the parachute descended gracefully.
When it neared the surface it seemed to fall fast for a moment, and Law, forgetting to jump, fell heavily on the stone coping, thirty feet from the water’s edge. He limped away from the pile of canvas and ropes, but declared that he was not injured. Later he packed up his parachute and personally carried it to his office in the Hudson Terminal Building. He did not want to be interviewed, he said.•
It’s possible that cat memes and fetish pornography may someday, indirectly, give us an extra five or so years of life. That’s because search giant Google (now under its Alphabet umbrella) is investing huge sums in Calico, a division dedicated to life extension. The ridiculous 2013 Time cover story “Can Google Solve Death?” was insanely hyperbolic, but the company’s more modest actual goals would be remarkable if achieved.
In a Re/code piece, Mark Bergen takes a look at the secretive subdivision. An excerpt:
It is evident that Levinson’s secretive company is focused on medical solutions that fend off the illnesses that come with old age; it’s not trying to give us immortality.
Calico has announced six partnerships for research and drug development, linking arms with two universities, a nonprofit, a pharmaceutical company (AbbVie) and the genealogical data firm Ancestry. Like Verily, Alphabet’s other health unit, Calico seems to be operating as a high-tech research and development lab, creating medical products that its pharma partners will take to market.
So, one day you may be able to buy a pill that extends your life, dreamed up in a lab funded by a search engine. When and how those drugs will arrive — or be priced — remains unclear.
Unlike Verily, which is focused on various diseases, Calico has a singular mission: Extending life. Currently, the company has several research teams each experimenting with different avenues of longevity research, according to people who are as familiar with its operations as outsiders can be.
And unlike Verily, Calico has not plunged into Google proper to fill its roster.•
Attempts at making our fellow animals, chimps or dolphins, mimic humans is deleterious to them, but they don’t need to speak with our language to communicate, and they don’t need to think exactly like us to have rich inner lives. As evidence mounts that there’s a lot going on inside of non-human creatures, what does that say about our current treatment of them?
The opening of a sadly un-bylined Economist essay on the topic:
IN 1992, at Tangalooma, off the coast of Queensland, people began to throw fish into the water for the local wild dolphins to eat. In 1998, the dolphins began to feed the humans, throwing fish up onto the jetty for them. The humans thought they were having a bit of fun feeding the animals. What, if anything, did the dolphins think?
Charles Darwin thought the mental capacities of animals and people differed only in degree, not kind—a natural conclusion to reach when armed with the radical new belief that the one evolved from the other. His last great book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, examined joy, love and grief in birds, domestic animals and primates as well as in various human races. But Darwin’s attitude to animals—easily shared by people in everyday contact with dogs, horses, even mice—ran contrary to a long tradition in European thought which held that animals had no minds at all. This way of thinking stemmed from the argument of René Descartes, a great 17th-century philosopher, that people were creatures of reason, linked to the mind of God, while animals were merely machines made of flesh—living robots which, in the words of Nicolas Malebranche, one of his followers, “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”
For much of the 20th century biology cleaved closer to Descartes than to Darwin. Students of animal behaviour did not rule out the possibility that animals had minds but thought the question almost irrelevant since it was impossible to answer. One could study an organism’s inputs (such as food or the environment) or outputs (its behaviour). But the organism itself remained a black box: unobservable things such as emotions or thoughts were beyond the scope of objective inquiry. As one such “behaviourist” wrote in 1992, “attributing conscious thought to animals should be strenuously avoided in any serious attempt to understand their behaviour, since it is untestable [and] empty…”.
By then, though, there was ever greater resistance to such strictures.•
Jealous President Obama is on Bear Grylls’ reality TV show, Donald Trump is building an internment camp for Shahs of Sunset.
America’s vulgar tweetbag may not be what the entire country deserves, but he sure is what the GOP has coming. For seven years, Republicans have obstructed the President and become a protest party, making immigration reform, to name one issue, impossible, allowing what should have been a moot point in 2015 to instead be the talking point. And the demographics don’t look kindly upon the nature that conversation has taken on. The GOP, in a sense, has turned itself and its voters into refugees, searching for a United States that no longer exists.
Inside the White House, poetic justice looks a lot like Donald Trump.
Past and present aides to President Barack Obama are gloating that a Republican leadership they say defined itself by blustery opposition — and used it to win the House, then the Senate, and stand in the White House’s way at every turn — is getting devoured by a candidate personifying the anger agenda.
Obama insiders would rather have immigration reform signed than lament knowingly on Sunday talk shows that the Republicans will keep losing elections until they deal with the issue. They’d rather have a longer-term approach to government spending, or more of the entitlement and tax reform deals Obama said he was eager to cut.
But on everything from guns to reproductive health to opening up Cuba, Obama’s team says it has been battling for years the very politics that paved the way for Trump’s ascendance this election cycle.
“It’s not so much a reaction to Obama,” said one person familiar with the president’s thinking about the Trump phenomenon. “It’s more of a reaction to their strategy that, ‘We’re just going to be antithetical to everything [Obama] stands for.’”
According to people in the White House, Obama doesn’t talk about Trump much. When he does, it’s with a combination of amusement and disgust at the rhetoric, occasionally mentioning his amazement at GOP leaders’ inability to understand Trump’s supporters and the long-term damage the president thinks Trump is doing to the party with the groups of voters who will decide future elections.•
When the grounds shift beneath our feet, we tend to hold on for dear life. We try to retreat into the world we knew, even if it’s no longer viable.
Our communications have been reconfigured by the Second Machine Age, and it appears the same is happening to our economic model. That’s scary. It causes fingers to be pointed, blame assigned. Such transitions may be the natural order of things, but to mere mortals they can feel very unnatural. Is the realization of the Global Village that frightened Marshall McLuhan so much what’s behind the ripples of nativism and violent expressions of fundamentalism across the globe?
Appearing recently at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the wondrous Sapiens, argues that the ferocious reactions to hierarchal transformation at the outset of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century are being replayed now in the early Digital Age. Harari feels certain that withdrawals into old orthodoxies will fail today as they did then, with ancient scriptures having no answers to new questions, leaving techno-ideologies to own the future.
I think Astra Taylor is wonderful, but I doubt her idealistic hopes for the Digital Age will be realized, not because of a lack of will, but because they’re antithetical to the very nature of a society interconnected by smart technology.
Getting rid of the corporate and government intrusion of personal data is probably as realistic as completely taming the Internet’s anarchic side. Those thorny things are with us for good. Unplugging will be all but impossible, especially as the actual plugs increasingly disappear. The Internet of Things will become thething, and going in another direction will be a bridge too far.
There’ll likely be a growing number of splinter societies that attempt to retreat from the mainstream, but they’ll be tenuous and not necessarily positive. A lack of oversight of all kinds will become the norm. I think it has already.
There are policy solutions for combating, say, the excesses of the Gig Economy and other elements of Techno-Libertarianism, but there’s really none for the larger machine we’ve placed ourselves within, one that isn’t only political or idealistic but literal as well. It’s beyond control.
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.
Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the conferees at the close of the two-day session.•
Francis Herman Pencovic had a Christ complex.
