The trouble with everyone being connected and quantified isn’t only that we’re sharing, intentionally or otherwise, so much personal information, but also what that data can further reveal once algorithms have had their way with it. It’s like an inverse game of telephone in the Smartphone Age, the information becoming more precise as it travels.
The Wall Street Journalreports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’ phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found, “generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone reveals more than you think:
Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.
Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers, working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had electricity.”
I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and trustworthiness.•
Sometimes simpler communications delivery systems can make for more complicated lives for the humans utilizing them. Case in point: baseball reportage. Just a few decades ago, during the Print Era, the information arrived at a glacial pace and was often outdated by the time you read it (e.g., Street & Smith’s annual baseball preview issue). The articles were longer and more contextualized, though it wasn’t perfect since narratives often disagreed with hidden data that had yet to revolutionize the sport. But the job seemed doable, if not easy.
Now Twitter and other channels of instant gratification rule the day, and those working in the industry need to become 24/7 insta-journalists, nearly as robotized and indefatigable as the software they work with. There are tremendous rewards for those who can keep up with the inhuman pace, but there are costs as well. It’s a harbinger, too, of the way many other sectors are developing. You don’t want to sink, but when you can never stop swimming your arms do get awfully tired.
In an insightful behind-the-scenes look at MLB’s recent Winter Meetings, Andy Martino of the New York Daily News writes of Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal, a Twitter monster who’s the reigning champ of baseball scoops, describing him as “usually winning but always anxious, forever pursuing the next victory.” For many, that’s the new normal.
An excerpt:
As much as any individual, Rosenthal, 53, is the exemplar of the methods and manners in which sports information is now disseminated — though he never expected to be anything of the sort. When he started covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1987, Rosenthal imagined a future at Sports Illustrated. He followed a trajectory familiar to talented sportswriters: He started out as a beat writer, became a columnist and got hired by a magazine, in his case the Sporting News. As the number of sports-focused TV outlets grew, he began making appearances. Early in the new century, Rosenthal realized that he had the contacts to begin breaking stories, and he decided to go for it. The news cycle was bending to new technology, and Rosenthal was connected enough to ride the wave. Now, he works on an endless hamster wheel for his 729,000 Twitter followers and millions of viewers, usually winning but always anxious, forever pursuing the next victory.
It is impossible to overstate the impact of Twitter on the baseball business, and not only for the fans and media. Just as execs work the reporters in the lobby, they sit in their Winter Meetings suites, monitoring Twitter. The Mets task a valued team official, Adam Fisher, the director of baseball operations, with watching social media, and relaying the news. Fisher, like Paul DePodesta, is a Harvard graduate with a dual background in scouting and analytics. He has vital responsibilities in both areas for the Mets. But social media is important, and part of Fisher’s job is to stay on top of it.
The first Twitterized Winter Meetings were in 2009, in Indianapolis. During the previous baseball season, beat reporters all over the country were experimenting with the medium, not realizing just how perfectly it would suit the winter months. Like many of us, Rosenthal resisted, preferring to publish full stories and columns on the Fox Sports website. But the creators of MLB Trade Rumors, a wildly successful site that aggregates baseball reporting, told him that he had to tweet to be credited.
“Basically, Trade Rumors said to me, ‘We can’t follow everybody on their website,’ ” Rosenthal says. “(Twitter) is how we follow people. If you want credit for your stories, this is how you’re going to have to do it. I was like, ‘Who are these guys to dictate to me?’ But they were right. I couldn’t argue it.”
The change brought consequences — and not all of them positive.•
Donald Trump, the pre-diabetic potentate of Apartheid America, is impressed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s rule has made his country stink worse than Lenin’s corpse. “At least he’s a leader,” says America’s aspiring flabby strongman, which is like saying that at least the captain of the Titanic was a “steerer.”
Scarborough pointed to Putin’s status as a notorious strongman.
“Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?” Scarborough asked.
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”
“But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said.
The Republican presidential front-runner said there was “a lot of killing going on” around the world and then suggested that Scarborough had asked him a different question.
“I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me [that] question, you asked me a different question. So that’s fine.”
Farhood Manjoo’s latest New York Times column, “In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers,” argues that the freestyle-chess approach of person-computer tandems tackling tasks (e.g. travel agent) is the best path forward. That’s probably a little too rosy a view.
In the short term and perhaps medium one that combination may be winning, but it also assumes that software won’t continue rapid improvement. The writer acknowledges the opaqueness of pricing that existed pre-smartphone, but seems too nostalgic to completely comprehend how much it bedeviled consumers. Companies that backpedal from a full-on software approach may reap benefits, but the question is for how long.
An excerpt:
Now, rather than consult an insurance agent, you simply search online. You never go into a bank —you just use the tireless A.T.M. — and at the supermarket, there are thoseself-checkout machines. You can buy stocks without a broker, you can publish a book without a publisher, you can sell a house without an agent and you can buy a car without a dealer. Slowly but surely, the robots seem to be replacing all the middlemen and turning the world into a self-serve society.
An economist would praise the great disintermediation for its efficiency. As a customer, you may have a different reaction: Look at all the work you’re now being asked to do. Was it really wise to get rid of all those human helpers?
In many cases, yes, but there remain vast realms of commerce in which guidance from a human expert works much better than a machine. Other than travel, consider the process of finding a handyman or plumber. The Internet has given us a wealth of data about these services. You could spend all day on Craigslist, Yelp or Angie’s List finding the best person for your job, which is precisely the problem.•
Genetic tests to screen individuals for a predisposition to obesity or cancer or some other health-threatening condition are a great thing, but they need to be uncoupled from workplaces. Companies can claim to remain unbiased toward workers who shows tendencies of poor future health, but insurance costs incentivize misuse of such information. Right now the costs of the tests make them a prime perk for employers to offer to those who voluntarily want subsidized lab work, but those prices shouldn’t remain prohibitive in the long run. Going forward, it’s more a question of what corporations will be legally allowed to require. I have a feeling, though, they’ll find out regardless.
The opening of Rachel Emma Silverman’s WSJ report:
Employers want workers to know what’s in their genes.
A handful of firms are offering employees free or subsidized tests for genetic markers associated with metabolism, weight gain and overeating, while companies such as Visa Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., Instacart Inc. recently began offering workers subsidized tests for genetic mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
The programs provide employees with potentially life-saving information and offer counseling and coaching to prevent health problems down the road, benefits managers say.
Screening for genetic markers linked to obesity is the latest front in companies’ war on workers’ weight woes.
Obesity-related conditions such as Type 2 diabetes comprise a large share of overall health-care costs, estimated to run more than $12,000 a worker this year, according to a recent survey from Towers Watsonand the National Business Group on Health.
TV has always been a box built to sell us things, no matter how the system is dressed up. Today’s next-level sets–and the even smarter ones of tomorrow–want to eavesdrop on and parse our living-room conversations for keywords to streamline the pitches, just like the Internet does. The hope is that this and other shared data enabled by the Internet of Things will lead to personalized ads that attract eyeballs. What’s inside our brains is valuable.
Set-top boxes are increasingly storing and sharing viewer data with advertisers. Broadcasters are gathering data on viewers when they sign up to their online players and services. ITV, which relaunched its online ITV player as ITV Hub in November, has more than 11 million registered users, for example. Channel 4 meanwhile replaced its 4OD platform with All4 in March. Users have to register their name, gender, date of birth and location; and the platforms also track which programmes they have watched and favourited. We might have thought we were the ones watching TV, but it turns out that the TV is now watching us.
Revolution will be televised
All this new information can be collated to create highly targeted and personalised adverts. Earlier this month, Channel 4 used the Future of TV Advertising conference in London to showcase the results of what it described as the “world’s first video ad personalisation”: its campaign to personalise Coke bottles in the summer of 2014.
The conference brought together senior advertising figures from around the world, including representatives from the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. Two buzzwords crept into every session and lunch conversation: “addressable” and “programmatic”. Addressable advertising is about creating tailored adverts such as the Channel 4 examples from viewer information collated from set-top boxes, registration details, or cookie data from online search and shopping habits. Programmatic advertising is about automating the way in which ads like these are bought and sold. Together they are seen as a revolution in TV advertising.•
Malone, N.Y. – A fire which has been raging in the forests near Lyon Mountain recently has driven the wild animals into the farming districts on the outskirts and wild cats, bears, deer, etc. have been frequently seen near here, and at a wedding two weeks ago bear meat was served, three cubs having been trapped just before the ceremony took place.•
In a beauty of a Baffler piece, Tom Carson, great stylist of the Magazine Era, thinks the bejeezus out of the history of families depicted on American TV sitcoms, what they used to tell us about ourselves and what they do now. I’ve always believed the best of the form were the shows you could imagine recalibrated with just a few small adjustments into deep drama, and I don’t mean a laugh-track–less Lou Grant at 10pm but rather Ted Baxter recognizing the dark night of his soul at 3 o’clock in the morning.
In one segment, Carson brilliantly dissects a classic, The Honeymooners, perhaps the closest thing to Beckett’s existential endgames that ever aired on U.S. television, its restless characters repeatedly running headlong into dashed hopes, diverted from utter defeat only by a hasty kiss so that the whole nightmare could be prolonged, played out again next week at the same time, same channel. An excerpt:
In the 1950s and ’60s, TV’s view of family was strikingly at odds with its view of marriage, which by default (thanks to the period’s taboos) was also its view of sex.
Midway between August Strindberg for hockey fans and Ubu Roi relocated to Eisenhower-era Brooklyn, that astounding show The Honeymooners was all about frustration and hostility. It was also presciently pro-feminist in its lampooning of men as big babies whose idiot dreams spawned messes their tuckered-out better halves were forever cleaning up. At the time, the Kramdens’ and the Nortons’ more reactionary counterparts were the Ricardos and the Mertzes on I Love Lucy, whose title character may have set back women’s lib twenty years. Her crazed aspirations to some sort of identity separate from or equal to her husband’s were the chucklesome proof she was a delightful dunce. Not least because she was a genius at it, I’ve always loathed Lucille Ball for turning herself into male chauvinism’s answer to Stepin Fetchit, especially since—off camera—she was one of the shrewdest and most resolute women ever to conquer showbiz.
In both those shows and others like them, the point was that husbands and wives were antagonists. Their dueling worldviews—and, by implication, incompatible sexual agendas—were the source of the comic friction. In TV terms, marriage was the war and children were the armistice. (For I Love Lucy, Little Ricky’s birth was the equivalent of the Peace of Westphalia.) The Honeymooners, God love it, never went that route, staying true to its name; when you think about it, the only other American classic with a title as acrid is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. That your head would explode if you tried to imagine Ralph and Alice Kramden as parents, or even Ed and Trixie Norton welcoming a little future sewer worker, is backhanded testimony to how intransigent the show was.•
The chess world–and the human race itself, by extension–was famously rocked in 1997 when Garry Kasparov was spooked and conquered by Deep Blue. Not as well known: This rise of the machines had been presaged five years earlier in the less complicated and revered game of checkers when the all-but-undefeatable champion, the mathematician Marion Tinsley, was lucky to escape with a victory after losing twice in his series against an AI known as Chinook, designed by Canadian computer science professor Jonathan Schaefer.
In the odd world of checkers—a 5,000-year-old game that almost everyone knows how to play but only a few thousand people compete in seriously—Tinsley is a legend. “Dr. Tinsley has taken the game beyond what anybody else ever conceived,” says Charles Walker, the founder and director of the International Checkers Hall of Fame, in Petal, Miss. Tinsley’s edge is his unparalleled knowledge of the game, which originated in Egypt but assumed its modern form some 700 years ago in Scotland. Holder of a doctorate from Ohio State in the mathematical discipline of combinatorial analysis, Tinsley has a better-than-computer-like grasp of the 500 billion billion or so possible moves in a checkers game, an understanding that allows him to see 30 moves ahead, as opposed to the 24-move prescience of Chinook. “I’ve got a better programmer,” he explains. “God.”
Tinsley, who is a lay preacher in the Disciples of Christ church, was born in Ironton, Ohio, to a schoolteacher and a farmer turned sheriff. The boy was reading and memorizing poetry by the age of four. But the precocious youth, who skipped four of his first eight grades, was confounded by elementary school mathematics until he discovered geometry. His family was then living in Columbus, and one day, while researching a math problem in the library at nearby Ohio State, he came across several books about checkers. He studied them, hoping to silence an elderly woman who boarded with his family and who let loose a grating cackle every time she bested him in a game. “I had visions of beating Mrs. Kershaw,” Tinsley recalls.
He never did—Mrs. Kershaw moved away before he mastered checkers—but Tinsley did win the national championship in 1948 at age 21. He won the world title several years later, in 1955, by defeating Walter Hellman of Gary, Ind. Defending his title successfully in 1958, he retired from competition to devote himself to teaching and preaching. After 11 years at Florida State in Tallahassee, he moved across town to Florida A&M, in part because he saw teaching at the predominantly black school as an extension of the preaching he did at the predominantly black St. Augustine Street Church of Christ in Tallahassee. “I had thought of going to Africa as a self-supporting missionary,’ ” he says, “until a sharp-tongued sister pointed out to me that most people who wanted to help blacks in Africa wouldn’t even talk to blacks in America.”
It wasn’t until 1970 that Tinsley was coaxed back into competition by Don Lafferty, one of the many checkers devotees who still make pilgrimages to his home in Tallahassee. He won the U.S. championship that year, and in 1975 he regained the world title from Hellman, as it now seems, for good. Despite Tinsley’s long retirement and Hellman’s having officially held the title during that time, checkers cognoscenti view Tinsley’s championship reign as continuous. “No one presumed to think they could beat him,” says Walker. “When he loses one game, it is an event.”
Small wonder that the 50 or so spectators who gathered each day in London to watch Tinsley’s title defense were stunned when Tinsley found himself down two games to one after 14 games with Chinook. Tinsley, who was hospitalized with phlebitis in Florida after the tournament, blames grueling games and jet lag for the sleeplessness that left him exhausted during the first week of play. “A London fog rolled in on me, and I made mistakes,” he says. The fog lifted in the 18th game. In tournament checkers each player must make 20 moves in an hour. Inexplicably, Chinook froze 27 minutes into the first hour of the 18th game and neither Schaeffer nor his three assistants could thaw out the program. They resigned the game to even the match at 2—all. “I think Dr. Tinsley viewed it as divine intervention,” Schaeffer says ruefully.
The following day, Sunday, Tinsley went to church, and he returned on Monday, in Schaeffer’s eyes, “revitalized.” He won the 25th game two days later, and after 13 more draws, he got his fourth victory, winning the championship in the 39th game. Tinsley was characteristically humble afterward, crediting God with his victory. He said that he was looking forward to beating Chinook again when they rekindle their man-versus-machine rivalry next August outside London.
Eventually, though, Tinsley will almost certainly fall to the Canadian computer. Schaeffer believes that checkers, like tick-tacktoe, is “solvable”—that is, that it can be played perfectly, so every game ends in a draw at worst. Already Chinook has in its memory every outcome possible with seven or fewer pieces on the board. Within the decade, Schaeffer says, the computer will know how the game will turn out even before it begins. Until then Tinsley expects no serious human challenge. “I’d be surprised if somebody could actually beat me,” he says mildly. “I really hate to lose.”•
A 1994 rematch between Tinsley and Chinook was halted after six games when the champ took ill. Subsequently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Tinsley died the following year.
_________________________
At the 16:30 mark, Tinsley appears on a 1957 edition of What’s My Line?
Juniper Research is predicting that one in ten American homes will have a robot by 2020. Unfortunately, all other Americans will be homeless by then. There’ll be robots zipping around the sewers, beating you penniless filthbags with batons. Meanwhile, the 1% will be getting blowjobs from gorgeous androids. It’s America, love it or leave it. Oh, and fuck you.
Warnings that robots will eventually wipe out humans may seem like no more than science fiction, but the machines are increasingly encroaching on the jobs humans used to do, with many Americans expected to own one in 4 years’ time.
One in ten American households will own a consumer robot by 2020, according to Juniper Research, up from 1 in 25 this year.
Juniper made it clear that the robot might not necessarily be a humanoid but more suited to performing a particular task. The research firm defined its version of a robot as an “autonomous, mobile electromechanical machine, capable of being programmed and re-programmed, that is used in the home or has non-commercial applications. It should be able to perceive its environment to some extent and react to it.”
Far from cooking us food or driving us around, robots will have a less exciting purpose to start with. Juniper said that robots will “usher in a new era of housekeeping.” The research firm pointed to Roomba, a disk shaped robot vacuum cleaner and Droplet Robotics’ Sprinkler, which helps water the yard.
Engineers have dreamed of driverless for almost as long as there have been cars. The first demo I’ve come across isone by Westinghouse in 1930, which utilized telephone instructions, electric eyes and beams of light to maneuver a robocar. It appears to have been merely a novelty, with no actual plans to commercialize the technology. In the 1970s, the efforts were much more earnest, with long-term hopes of monetization. This 1971 video about work being done by the Road Research Laboratory has been released by the Associated Press.
If he hadn’t been in his prime in the 1960s, Terry Southern couldn’t have quite been Terry Southern as we know him. The era allowed him to stretch and bend, and he did what he could to warp it in return. The cultural explosion of those years and his own personality (perceptive, not protean) made it possible for the author to co-write with Kubrick and cover a political convention with Genet and Burroughs. Southern’s literary fantasia continued for decades, never betraying the unique time when his personal narrative began to be writ large.
It must have been a gas, to borrow one of his favorite terms, to get a letter from Terry Southern. Each was its own little acid trip, streaked with innuendo and poached in a satirical kind of intellectual flop sweat. He used thin, expensive paper and sealed some of his letters with wax. People were said to read them aloud to whoever was in the room.
It must further have been a groove, to use another of his favorite terms, to get a letter from Southern (1924-95) because he seemed to know everyone, from George Plimpton and Lenny Bruce to Ringo Starr and Dennis Hopper and had stories to tell.
It’s hard to sum up how brightly Southern’s star burned in the mid-1960s. A countercultural Zelig, he was nowhere and everywhere. Tom Wolfe credited Southern’s article “Twirling at Ole Miss,” published in Esquire in 1963, with jump-starting the New Journalism. Southern helped write the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), injecting the software (wit) into the hardware (dread).•
The next phase of Artificial Intelligence may be top-heavy initially but not for long. As with the Internet, it will be unloosed into the world, into the hands of individuals, and that makes for both wonderful and awful possibilities. It’s interesting that Elon Musk, who fears superintelligence may be an existential risk for the species, favors an arrangement in which as many as possible will possess key AI information. He feels there’s safety in numbers. Perhaps. Some of the interested parties will have bad intentions, of course, bad intentions and powerful tools.
As you know, I’ve had some concerns about AI for some time. And I’ve had many conversations with Sam and with Reid [Hoffman], Peter Thiel, and others. And we were just thinking, “Is there some way to insure, or increase, the probability that AI would develop in a beneficial way?” And as a result of a number of conversations, we came to the conclusion that having a 501c3, a non-profit, with no obligation to maximize profitability, would probably be a good thing to do. And also we’re going to be very focused on safety.
And then philosophically there’s an important element here: we want AI to be widespread. There’s two schools of thought — do you want many AIs, or a small number of AIs? We think probably many is good. And to the degree that you can tie it to an extension of individual human will, that is also good.
Steven Levy:
Human will?
Elon Musk:
As in an AI extension of yourself, such that each person is essentially symbiotic with AI as opposed to the AI being a large central intelligence that’s kind of an other. If you think about how you use, say, applications on the internet, you’ve got your email and you’ve got the social media and with apps on your phone — they effectively make you superhuman and you don’t think of them as being other, you think of them as being an extension of yourself. So to the degree that we can guide AI in that direction, we want to do that. And we’ve found a number of like-minded engineers and researchers in the AI field who feel similarly.•
Jacques Inaudi had a great brain–more than one, in a sense.
He was what was known more than a century ago as a “Lightning Calculator,” a sideshow performer who solved complicated mathematical problems in his head in front of live audiences. Few had the facility for numbers displayed by Inaudi, an Italian who toured extensively with vaudeville shows demonstrating his prodigious abilities. The Brooklyn Daily Eagleprofiled the math manon October 15, 1901 (and misidentified his nationality). An excerpt:
Haven’t yet read Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which I blogged about last month, though it’s on my list, my fucking list. Bookforum has published an excerpt. The authors are hopeful that a technological future–“Marxism basically dressed up with robotics,” as they’ve termed it–will free us from drudgery if we can ever unloose ourselves from the Puritan work ethic. I think regardless of work hours or mindset, the menial, physical or otherwise, will always be part of the human experience. There’s just something small about us.
A passage:
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
One of the most difficult problems in implementing a universal basic income (UBI) and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. Indeed, the failure of the United States’ earlier attempt to implement a basic income was primarily because it challenged accepted notions about the work ethic of the poor and unemployed. Rather than seeing unemployment as the result of a deficient individual work ethic, the UBI proposal recognized it as a structural problem. Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatized as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed—the surplus population—meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favor of a basic income. Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world. Neoliberalism has established a set of incentives that compel us to act and identify ourselves as competitive subjects. Orbiting around this subject is a constellation of images related to self-reliance and independence that necessarily conflict with the program of a post-work society. Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realization, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this. Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good. This is the mantra of both mainstream political parties and most trade unions, associated with rhetoric about getting people back into work, the importance of working families, and cutting welfare so that “it always pays to work.” This is matched by a parallel cultural effort demonizing those without jobs. Newspapers blare headlines about the worthlessness of welfare recipients, TV shows sensationalize and mock the poor, and the ever looming figure of the welfare cheat is continually evoked. Work has become central to our very self-conception—so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, “But what would I do?” The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.
While typically associated with the protestant work ethic, the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions. These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life. More contemporary forms of this imperative have taken on a liberal-humanist character, portraying work as the central means of self-expression. Work has come to be driven into our identity, portrayed as the only means for true self-fulfilment. In a job interview, for instance, everyone knows the worst answer to “Why do you want this job?” is to say “Money,” even as it remains the repressed truth. Contemporary service work heightens this phenomenon. In the absence of clear metrics for productivity, workers instead put on performances of productivity—pretending to enjoy their job or smiling while being yelled at by a customer. Working long hours has become a sign of devotion to the job, even as it perpetuates the gender pay gap. With work tied so tightly into our identities, overcoming the work ethic will require us overcoming ourselves.
The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward.•
In a must-read FT Alphaville post, Mackenzie Weinger writes about the U.S. Department of Defense’s plans for warfare of the future, which puts a heavy accent on human-machine tandems. Perhaps such a focus will ease the minds of soldiers who fear they’re on the verge of being technologically unemployed. The U.S. military has long desired to robotize the military as much as possible, and the freestyle-chess approach to combat will only be employed as long as its the most effective (and cost-effective) means. I don’t think we’ll get to choose the future as much as it will be decided by the progress of AI. That, of course, is a troubling prospect.
An excerpt from Weinger:
So what’s the DoD looking at in terms of technology for the future of the US military? As one would expect, there’s a handy set of “five building blocks” they’ve identified regarding AI and autonomy, along with plenty of acronyms. Take a look at the US military’s take on AI and weapon tech, as laid out in Work’s speech (bolding, links and brackets our own):
The first are autonomous deep learning machines systems. Now deep learning systems are already changing the way we analyse data in the financial community, in the intelligence community, but we are going to use them to improve indications in warning. The AI guys say that what is happening in the grey zone with ‘little green men’ is nothing more than a big data analytics problem. And they are absolutely convinced that we can create learning machines that will give us indication and warning that something is happening in the gray zone [conflicts that aren’t formal wars and don’t resemble conventional warfare. Think Russia and Crimea/Ukraine] … we believe strongly that humans should be the only ones to decide when to use lethal force, but when you’re under attack, especially at machine speeds, we want to have a machine that can protect us. So an example is air defense systems, where the engagement windows are steadily shrinking… and on cyberdefense, you cannot have a human operator operating on human speed fighting back a determined attack. You’re going to have to have a learning machine that does that.
The second component is what we call human machine collaboration. Decision making. 1997, computer beats Kasparov, world champion in chess. Everyone goes ‘wow’. But in 2005, two amateurs working with three PCs defeated a field of chess champions and machines themselves. … [it’s about] the strategic analysis of a human combined with the tactical acuity of a computer.•
Mostly because of cost, I’ve never been a theatergoer despite living in NYC, but I have to say that Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, which meditates on AI and memory and how the two interact and inform us, seems like my worlds colliding. Or at least my thoughts. Another one of the dramatist’s “cerebral playgrounds,” as they were described in 2008. Michael Almereyda, a really thoughtful filmmaker I interviewed at the time of his excellent documentary about photographer William Eggleston, is currently adapting the play for the big screen. Two excerpts from reviews of the Playwrights Horizon production follow.
Walter is Marjorie’s husband. Or, rather, he is the exact image of Marjorie’s husband (and Tess’s father), now deceased, as he was some 60 years earlier. Walter is what is called a Prime, the latest device for helping people whose memories are fading, as Marjorie’s definitely is. As Jon says of Walter, “It’s amazing what they can do with a few zillion pixels.”
Primes like Walter, provided by a company called Senior Serenity, are given the outward form that best suits the individual they are created to assist. Then they are fed, word by word, with data about the life of that individual and her (or his) relationship with the person who has been simulated. The recollections that Primes salvage and store are only as accurate and complete as those of the human beings who feed them information.
I think that’s more or less right. Mr. Harrison doesn’t work with such blunt blocks of exposition, but by indirection. The tomorrow he envisions — a bit like that of George Saunders’s sci-fi-flavored short stories — is one that its residents take for granted, and we infer its details gradually by listening to them, the way we might pick up a foreign language.
These people remain people like us, though. A technologically smoother universe hasn’t ironed out classic familial discords and distances or the uncomfortable questions of existence posed when those we love are transformed by age almost beyond recognition. As Jon says to Tess, who has qualms about using the Prime for Marjorie, “How much does she have to forget before she’s not your mom anymore?”
All the humans in this play — which unfolds in a fluid series of naturalistic conversations — wind up feeling reservations about Primes. Yes, these replicants comfort, but in limited and perhaps dangerous ways.•
Walter is a “prime”: a holographic companion customized by a company called Senior Serenity to offer Marjorie comfort and encouragement. “A few zillion pixels” make him appear to be the youthful Walter that Marjorie most wants to see; presumably Marjorie’s daughter, Tess, and son-in-law, Jon, have provided the necessary photographs to feed the illusion. They have also provided the necessary biographical and psychological data, which through the self-improving algorithms of artificial intelligence, and instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge base in the ether, have by the time of the play’s action brought Walter Prime so close to Walter that Marjorie often forgets he’s a simulacrum. So do we, except that in some ways he’s better than a real spouse: When not in use, he sits pleasantly on a sofa, smiling and ready and silent.
The year is 2062 — not so far in the future as it may seem. (Toddlers today will just be pushing 50 then, and Harrison himself, like Marjorie, will be 85.) Likewise, the prime technology isn’t a far leap from the chatbots and virtual-reality holography already in use. The play subtly yet assiduously closes any expected emotional gap as well: Daughters still struggle with their mothers; mothers still flirt with doctors; everyone still grieves as the losses pile up. (The primes are not just for the elderly but for anyone craving the companionship of a departed loved one.) It is a wholly recognizable world — a “prime” of ours, if you will; even though the sterile environment in which Marjorie lives is wired to play Vivaldi at the mere mention of his name, Vivaldi is still being played. (And Jif peanut butter is still being preferred to the natural kind.) The point is that this is not science fiction: “Science fiction is here,” says Tess, who has trouble warming to Walter Prime as a pseudo-father. “Every day is science fiction.”•
“Average is over,” Tyler Cowen told us, and in his new Foreign Affairs piece, Klaus Schwab argues that this will be increasingly true in what he terms the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” a time when the fabric of society may be especially prone to tearing. We have already witnessed the ugly rise of nativist politics in developed nations that are growing in the aggregate but leaving behind what used to be the middle class. We’re richer, yet poorer. “A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction,” writes Schwab, asserting that only the highly skilled will thrive in this new arrangement. But I bet a lot of them will also struggle as the talents that are valued will shift frequently and violently.
An excerpt:
Like the revolutions that preceded it, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. To date, those who have gained the most from it have been consumers able to afford and access the digital world; technology has made possible new products and services that increase the efficiency and pleasure of our personal lives. Ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film, or playing a game—any of these can now be done remotely.
In the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.
At the same time, as the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, particularly in its potential to disrupt labor markets. As automation substitutes for labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor. On the other hand, it is also possible that the displacement of workers by technology will, in aggregate, result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs.
We cannot foresee at this point which scenario is likely to emerge, and history suggests that the outcome is likely to be some combination of the two. However, I am convinced of one thing—that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production. This will give rise to a job market increasingly segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions.
In addition to being a key economic concern, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.•
Writer Lucian Truscott IV is one of the figures featured in the latest 3 Videos, and here’s a little more about him from a 1979 People piece penned by Cheryl McCall at the outset of his very abbreviated marriage to writer-photographer Carol Troy. In an age when people cared at least somewhat about print journalists, the couple was apparently, fleetingly, an F. Scott and Zelda, which is a mixed blessing, of course. An excerpt:
Lucian Truscott IV and Carol Troy both write. His current book is the best-selling novel Dress Gray; hers is Cheap Chic Update. But literary achievement isn’t the only reason the New York Times compared them, a little waspishly, to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Take Truscott and Troy’s enthusiasm for disagreement.
When they met in 1975 at a party in his New York loft, she found him “awfully gruff.” The following year they were fixed up by a mutual friend. It started off disastrously. “Vassar girls and West Point guys hated each other,” ex-cadet Truscott recalls. “We wouldn’t dance with them at mixers,” Troy (Vassar ’66) explains. They went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant—”Dutch,” Troy says dryly, “and got into a huge fight.” Truscott agrees: “Sparks were flying,” and then adds, “We didn’t know they were sparks of love.”
As befits New York’s literary darlings, they were married in a Roman Catholic church in the artsy SoHo district this past St. Patrick’s Day. Then 250 guests, including Norman Mailer, were bused uptown with champagne aboard to the swank Lotos Club for the reception. (“Our only salvation is in extravagance,” Fitzgerald once wrote.)
Bride and bridegroom are not only handsome and well-thought-of; they’re rich. Dress Gray, a thriller about homosexuality and murder at the military academy, earned $1.4 million before a copy was sold—thanks to subsidiary rights negotiated by the author without an agent. Paramount bought the movie option and Gore Vidal is writing the screenplay.
…
“I wanted to go to West Point my whole life,” says Truscott, 32. His grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., was a World War II hero who commanded the Allied landing at Anzio Beach in Italy. Lucian III was West Point ’45, retiring as a colonel to become a watchmaker in 1971. Lucian’s mother, Anne, is a medical secretary; he’s the eldest of five children. The family lived in eight states, Germany and Japan, and Lucian recalls: “I grew up liking Army officers. I bagged their groceries, I washed their cars, I mowed their lawns.”
At West Point he was, however, less than a model cadet. In his sophomore year he began a letter-writing campaign to New York’s Village Voice. One epistle, he remembers, contained the line: “Jerry Rubin is palpably full of sh**.” On campus he challenged compulsory chapel attendance (it was found unconstitutional three years after he graduated).
But Truscott’s most serious transgression was getting caught—with three other cadets—using a telephone credit card number that reportedly belonged to the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. “Hell, I wasn’t calling a subversive,” Truscott claims. “I was calling my grandmother.” Nevertheless, West Point slapped him with 30 demerits for “gross lack of judgment.” Truscott barely graduated—658th in a class of 800.
He began serving his five-year Army commitment in 1969 as an infantry lieutenant at Fort Carson, Colo. There he wrote an article on heroin addiction among enlisted men for the Voice, in which he admitted he had smoked marijuana. That, plus a refusal to serve on courts-martial because “they were patently unfair and ridiculous,” led to his resignation and a general discharge under “other than honorable conditions” in 1970. Conservative military columnist Col. Robert Heinl wrote that Truscott had “disparaged and derogated” West Point’s creed: “Duty, honor, country.”
Truscott settled on a barge in New Jersey and joined the Voice staff, freelancing on the side. Five years later he met Troy. The daughter of Francis Troy, a Borden executive, and his wife, Bernice, she grew up living American Graffiti in the suburbs of San Francisco. Dolled up in tight skirts, sweater sets and Weejuns, she liked to cruise in her parents’ hot-pink Mercury with black interior (she still owns it). After Vassar and studying film at Stanford, she turned journalist, working for Newsday, Oui and a pre-publication issue of People, among others.
During this time she made a virtue of scrimping, developing the skills she later wrote about in Cheap Chic. (It was a hit even though Troy recalls Barbara Walters describing the book on the Today show as “written only for skinny young girls who didn’t have jobs.”) Now she and Truscott visit flea markets and garage sales to furnish their New York loft and a $100,000 Victorian carriage house in Sag Harbor.
Lucian, purposely avoiding military subjects, has begun a novel about a businesswoman. “Writing doesn’t have to be a painful, gut-wrenching experience, the 3 a.m. of the soul that Fitzgerald talked about,” he says cheerfully. “I like the experience of writing.” Troy, 34, is doing a screenplay about the fashion industry and pondering a magazine editing job.
Though Fiat heiress Delfina Rattazzi has thrown a party for them and they rate a table at Manhattan’s celebrity feeding trough, Elaine’s, Truscott and Troy have an unpretentious side. Evenings they may show slides or reminisce about souvenir matchbooks and place mats. They hang out in unsung places like the Spring Street Bar in SoHo. Carol takes modern dance classes and when in Sag Harbor Lucian body-surfs. He gave up tennis, which he learned at West Point from Lt. Arthur Ashe, and skiing because “that stuff has become so chichi.”
They expect to have children within the decade, though Troy isn’t quivering with anticipation. “I don’t know anything about kids,” she says, “because I was an only child. But I’m sure Lucian will be a good father. I don’t know how many we’ll have. They make so much noise. One sounds like a lot.”•
Paris–Walter Finker, the Viennese biologist, has succeeded in transplanting the heads of insects. Before the Academy of Vienna yesterday he gave an account of his operation and the results, about which the Matin‘s scientific editor says “if true it means a real revolution in the science of physiology and biology.”
The Matin adds:
“This discovery is so astonishing that before discussing it we must make all possible reserves.
“Finkler took a series of insects–butterflies and caterpillars–and with fine scissors cut their heads off. He then immediately grafted these heads onto which [another] head had originally belonged. After a few weeks the insects operated on began to recover, but to the intense surprise of the professor the newly formed insects began in every case to assume the characteristics of the heads which had been grafted on to them.
“Bodies lost their original color and took the color of the insect whose head they were wearing. A female insect on to which a male head had been grafted became a male.
‘Not only did the professor succeed in changing the heads of insects and larvae of the same species, but he grafted the heads of one species on to another, an operation hitherto considered quite impossible.•
Always enjoy reading Adrienne Lafrance in the Atlantic. Her latest article explores the competition to create the first truly driverless car, with the entrants including contemporary tech powerhouses (Google, Tesla, Uber, Apple) and Big Auto stalwarts. Google, having entered the race early and conducted ample road-testing, is commonly believed to have the advantage, but that may not be so. Certainly there were plenty of “champions” crowned early in the original automobile race of the late 1800s and early 1900s, before the game played out.
My guess is that as in that competition, there’ll be quite a few winners in the sector and many more losers. Should 3D printers become ubiquitous after driverless is perfected, the field will shift again, with smaller players no longer barred from entry. One important question is whether the implementation of the technology should be gradual or if the machine should be “born whole.” Such a decision is considered crucial because, as Lafrance writes, “the amount of money at stake is potentially unprecedented.”
An excerpt:
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet’s most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
“This is an arms race,” said Larry Burns, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and a former GM executive who also serves as an advisor to Google. “You’re going to see a new age for the automobile.”
* * *
Many people have declared Google the frontrunner in the race for self-driving cars. The company has the road experience, mapping databases, artificial intelligence know-how, and, presumably, a significant head start. As of October, its fleet of vehicles had logged 1.3 million miles of test-driving in fully-autonomous mode since 2012—the distance-equivalent of 90 years of human driving, the company said. But that doesn’t mean Google will ultimately win. The major players each bring unique and formidable advantages.•
As far as I can tell, Edward Luce of the Financial Times was the first to argue that even should Donald Trump’s candidacy dissolve, the hatred he unloosed would remain. It was waiting for agency, and the GOP opportunist–or worse yet, hatemonger–supplied it. Now it’s here for the long haul, regardless of who’s the eventual nominee.
In Luce’s latest column, he pens a letter to America in the guise of Joe Biden, appealing to the fading American middle class to say no to their worst impulses. He wonders if U.S. politics is merely a reality show now, accepting of a bachelor who hands out only thorns. An excerpt:
Fellow Americans, we are in danger of electing someone who could do great damage to our country. When fear takes over, humans forget reason. Since 9/11 almost a quarter of a million Americans have died ingun violence. Thousands were children. Some of them were gunned down in their classrooms. We did not call these acts of terrorism. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting we take away everyone’s guns. I am realistic. But you should know that your chances of being killed in everyday gun violence are several thousand times greater than dying from terrorism on US soil. Forty Americans have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. We need to keep our sense of perspective.
Who are we? Is America turning into a game-show democracy that can be manipulated to laugh and cry and boo on a whim by the host with trophy wives? Are we the kind of people who would close our shutters to a fifth of the world and two per cent of our law-abiding citizens? Would we set up a police state so that we could round up 11m Mexicans? Is that who we are?•
Lucian Truscott IV, the great, great, great, great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and graduate of the United States Military Academy, began his writing career penning pieces on hippies and heroin addiction, eventually making his mark at the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. In 1972, he was assigned by the former to reviewHunter S. Thompson’s genius, drug-fuelled phantasmagoria Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. An excerpt:
Hunter Thompson lived in Aspen then, and his ranch, located outside town about 10 miles, tucked away up a valley with National Forest land on every side, was the first place I stopped. It was late afternoon and Thompson was just getting up, bleary-eyed and beaten, shaded from the sun by a tennis hat, sipping a beer on the front porch.
I got to know him while I was still in the Army in the spring of 1970, when he and a few other local crazies were gearing up for what would become the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, a spectacular which featured Thompson as candidate for sheriff, with his neighbor Billy for coroner. They ran on a platform which promised, among other things, public punishment for drug dealers who burned their customers, and a campaign guaranteed to rid the valley of real estate developers and ‘nazi greedheads’ of every persuasion. In a compromise move toward the end of the campaign, Thompson promised to “eat mescaline only during off-duty hours.” The non-freak segment of the voting public was unmoved and he was eventually defeated by a narrow margin.
In the days before the Freak Power spirit, Thompson’s ranch served as a war room and R&R camp for the Aspen political insurgents. Needless to say there was rarely a dull moment. When I arrived last summer, however, things had changed. Thompson was in the midst of writing a magnum opus, and it was being cranked out at an unnerving rate. I was barely across the threshold when I was informed that he worked (worked?) Monday through Friday and saved the weekends for messing around. As usual, he worked from around midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning and slept all day. There was an edge to his voice that said he meant business. This was it. This was a venture that had no beginning or end, that even Thompson himself was having difficulty controlling.
“I’m sending it off to Random House in 20,000-word bursts,” he said, drawing slowly on his ever-present cigarette holder. “I don’t have any idea what they think of it. Hell, I don’t have any idea what it is.”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“Searching for The American Dream in Las Vegas,” replied Thompson coolly.•
In 1974, Truscott, again representing the Voice, tagged along with another gonzo character, Evel Knievel, at the time of his Snake River Canyon spacecycle jump, a spectacle promoted (in part) by professional wrestling strongman Vince McMahon Jr. Truscott shows up in this awesome video at 6:22, giving the event all the respect it deserved while simultaneously summing up his reporting career. (Because of privacy settings, you have to click through and watch it on the Vimeo site.)
___________________________
Oriana Fallaci did as much serious journalism as anyone during her era, but she wasn’t above the lurid if the story was good and the check likely to clear. Case in point: Her 1967 Look magazine article “The Dead Body and the Living Brain,” about pioneering head-transplant experimentation. In the piece, Fallaci reports on the sci-fi-ish experiments that Prof. Robert White was conducting with rhesus monkeys at a time when consciousness about animal rights was on the rise. The opening:
Libby had eaten her last meal the night before: orange, banana, monkey chow. While eating she had observed us with curiosity. Her hands resembled the hands of a newly born child, her face seemed almost human. Perhaps because of her eyes. They were so sad, so defenseless. We had called her Libby because Dr. Maurice Albin, the anesthetist, had told us she had no name, we could give her the name we liked best, and because she accepted it immediately. You said “Libby!” and she jumped, then she leaned her head on her shoulder. Dr. Albin had also told us that Libby had been born in India and was almost three years, an age comparable to that of a seven-year-old girl. The rhesuses live 30 years and she was a rhesus. Prof. Robert White uses the rhesus because they are not expensive; they cost between $80 and $100. Chimpanzees, larger and easier to experiment with, cost up to $2,000 each. After the meal, a veterinarian had come, and with as much ceremony as they use for the condemned, he had checked to be sure Libby was in good health. It would be a difficult operation and her body should function as perfectly as a rocket going to the moon. A hundred times before, the experiment had ended in failure, and though Professor White became the first man in the entire history of medicine to succeed, the undertaking still bordered on science fiction. Libby was about to die in order to demonstrate that her brain could live isolated from her body and that, so isolated, it could still think.•
Fallaci wasn’t always insightful when assessing her subjects, missing out entirely on Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial leanings and Alfred Hitchcock’s deep seediness, but she was accurate in her judgment of Muammar el-Qaddafi when conversing with that shock jock Charlie Rose in 2003.
___________________________
In Fran Lebowitz’s 1993 Paris Review Q&A, the writer’s maternal nature, or something like it, came to the fore. An excerpt:
Question:
Young people are often a target for you.
Fran Lebowitz:
I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté. I mean, unless you have an erotic interest in them, what other interest could you have? What are they going to possibly say that’s of interest? People ask me, Aren’t you interested in what they’re thinking? What could they be thinking? This is not a middle-aged curmudgeonly attitude; I didn’t like people that age even when I was that age.
Question:
Well, what age do you prefer?
Fran Lebowitz:
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them. I like people older than me and children, really little children.
Question:
Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom?
Fran Lebowitz:
No, I’m just intrigued by them, because, to me, they’re like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don’t have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don’t know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves. They have a fresh approach.•
In this 1977 Canadian talk show, Lebowitz, selling her bookMetropolitan Life,was concerned that digital watches and calculators and other new technologies entitled kids (and adults also) to a sense of power they should not have. She must be pleased with smartphones today.
Donald Trump, who’s cheating on his third wife with a veal parm, doesn’t really want to win the Republican nomination, but he also doesn’t want to not win it. That would be a loss.
The most important matter at hand isn’t whether Beefsteak Charlie is really in it for good, but rather that he’s appealed to the worst of us, stoked vile hatred that will survive him. When Trump supporters tell you that they’re tired of being forced to be politically correct, what they really mean is they feel like they can’t say racist things without retribution anymore, something that once was possible.
Adding to the fury is the seismic financial and demographic shifts that the former white working class is enduring. That economic decline is the result of many factors, among them the tax codes instituted by those GOP pols who claimed to champion them. They’ve been let down, and now with Trump’s assistance they’ll let loose, and many who are not to blame will be blamed.
About half of Trump supporters in North Carolina and in New Hampshire want to “see the mosques in the country shut down.” In the North Carolina poll, only one-quarter of Trump supporters said they thought Islam should even be legal in the United States; 44 percent thought not.
This suggests that there is an enormous constituency favoring this set of (probably unconstitutional) ideas, despite the fact that they have been rejected by most of the American political class. Trump didn’t generate this constituency with a few brash statements. He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. Even if Trump leaves the stage by springtime, he has galvanized, gathered and given voice to all these Americans.
America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age. Trump isn’t winning those Americans who tend to experience this change as a tailwind. But he has enthralled millions who experience it as a headwind, and his relentless campaign against “political correctness” has given voice to their fears: about terrorism; about a country passing into new hands, with the attendant loss of privileges and certainties; about a democracy that will never solve problems if we cannot call radical Islam radical Islam. This anti-P.C. sentiment, so vital to Trump’s brand, is often minimized on the left as simple intolerance. But the longing for less-muzzled debates is to many on the right what campaign finance is to many on the left: the issue we must solve to be able to solve any other issue.
This is how Trumpism might outlast Trump — by gelling this anxiety and longing into a movement, by giving a new permission to question who is American, by redrawing the borders of respectable debate.•
The dominant idea in space colonization today is that we’ll fill up the moon or Mars in a large-scale settlement of 4D cities, try to make it approximate another Earth, with all the comforts of home. But while something with such familiarity may appeal to the masses, Freeman Dyson has long dreamed of exploration on the margins, of something stranger, more diffuse and, perhaps, more dangerous: He wants pioneers to grow vegetables on asteroids.
In a 1978 interview with Omni’s Monte Davis about artificial biodomes and smart clouds, the physicist stood in contrast to his fellow Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill, who envisioned massive, standardized space habitats. Regardless of which schemes are superior, Dyson presciently realized at the time that the future of space settlements might be powered by private interests, and in 2015 those entrepreneurs favor O’Neill’s scenario over his. An excerpt:
Freeman Dyson:
I’ve done some historical research on the costs of the Mayflower’s voyage, and on the Mormon’s emigration to Utah, and I think it’s possible to go into space on a much smaller scale. A cost on the order of $40,000 per person would be the target to shoot for; in terms of real wages that would make it comparable to the colonization of America. Unless it’s brought down to that level, it not really interesting to me, because otherwise it would be a luxury that only governments could afford.
Omni:
Where would your Mayflower-style colonists go?
Freeman Dyson:
I’d put my money on the asteroids. Dandridge Cole and others suggested using a solar mirror to melt and hollow out an iron asteroid, and in O’Neill’s book his homesteaders build their own shells from the minerals available out there. I wouldn’t accept either of those as the most sensible course: I think you should find an asteroid which is not iron or nickel, but some kind of soil you could grow things in.
Omni:
What do you mean by soil?
Freeman Dyson:
Well, we have specimens of meteoritic mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which looks like soil–it’s black, crumbly stuff containing a good deal of water; it has enough carbon, nitrogen, oxygen so that there’s some hope you could grow vegetables in it, and it’s soft enough to dig without using dynamite.
Omni:
So you think it would be worth looking for an asteroid like that rather than trying to transform a raw stone or metal asteroid?
Freeman Dyson:
Yes, if it’s to be done on a pioneer basis, you’d jolly well better find a place where you can grow things right away. Otherwise it’s inevitably a much slower and more expensive job.
Omni:
Is the sunlight at a distance adequate to grow plants?
Freeman Dyson:
I think so. Plants are very flexible in their requirements, you know, and they could be genetically altered if it’s needed. After all, a lot of things grow very well even in England…
Omni:
What about colonizing the moon? Too much gravity?
Freeman Dyson:
That…and it’s simply too close to home. Too easy for the tax man to find you. And choosing a place to go is not just a question of freight charges. There have always been minorities who valued their differences and their independence enough to make very great sacrifices, and it seems obvious to me that it’s going to happen again.
Omni:
So you think we may not go in for the big O’Neill-type colonies after all?
Freeman Dyson:
We may not, but others may. I was in Russia two years ago for a conference on telescopes, and all that anyone there wanted to hear about was O’Neill’s ideas. They knew that he and I were both at Princeton, and assumed I could tell them everything about space colonies. The point is that in Russia, they have very little of our current mistrust of technology on the grand scale–in fact, it fits very well with their ideas about our relationship to nature. Thousands of engineers working on a giant framework floating in space, that’s a picture that excited them very much. I wouldn’t be surprised if they choose that.
If they do, the historical analogy becomes very strong: the Russians play the role of Spanish colonies in the New World, and people like me are more like the English, with smaller, scattered, decentralized colonies. Of course, it took the English much longer to get going, but when we did go we did a better job.•
