It was supposed to be the Year of Rand, the day when Libertarianism was to have its moment, or that was the story the media was selling last year. But the GOP had plenty of other none-of-the-above candidates, and Rand Paul couldn’t out-wack the Trumps and Carsons and Cruzs.
Just as unlikely to come to fruition was Paul’s brand of socially conservative, anti-immigrant Libertarianism being a hit in Silicon Valley. The opening of Tony Romm’s well-written Politico piece:
SAN FRANCISCO — When Rand Paul announced plans to set up shop in Silicon Valley, he portrayed it as a bid to reverse Republicans’ fortunes in deep Democratic territory: “If we want to win the presidency,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2014, “we have to figure out how to compete in California.”
Other Republicans had similarly high hopes that Paul’s message against big government — and Big Brother — might strike a chord among this city’s tech elite and engineers alike. “He’s hopeful it’s a libertarian incubator of future Ayn Rands,” Shawn Steel, a past chairman of the California Republican Party, told POLITICO last year.
But seven months after the Kentucky senator’s team finally found an outpost here, not even a campaign sign hangs above the gated door outside StartupHouse, the shared, rented work space where his aides toil alongside app makers and Web designers. At times, nobody from Paul’s presidential campaign can be found among the doodle-covered walls, concrete floors and rows of computer-lined tables.
“They come in every now and then,” said StartupHouse founder Elias Bizannes, whose work space boasts about being blocks away from tech companies like Slack and Yahoo, during an interview. The Paul campaign hasn’t held a public event here since it hosted a “hackathon” in June, a quiet streak matched these days by the senator’s lackluster fundraising in the Bay Area.
This isn’t the way it was supposed to be for Paul.•
The anarchy of the Internet will be unloosed into the physical world more and more as we move forward, with 3D printers and gene-editing kits and the like. That will be mostly good, but what if just a little bit of it is catastrophically bad? Assault rifles won’t be the only untraceable weapons to fall into the wrong hands.
In a thought-provoking IEEE Spectrum essay, Phil Torres wonders if positivists like Steven Pinker aren’t missing a small explosive truth while admiring the hopeful big-picture data. An excerpt:
If one actually looks at the statistics, the world is steadily becoming more peaceful. This is the conclusion of Steven Pinker’s monumental 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, as well as Michael Shermer’s excellent 2015 follow-up The Moral Arc (essentially a “sequel” of Pinker’s tome). The surprising, counterintuitive fact is that the global prevalence of genocides, homicides, infanticide, domestic violence, and violence against children is declining, while democratization, women’s rights, gay rights, and even animals rights are on the rise. The probability that any one of us dies at the hands of another human being rather than from natural causes is perhaps the lowest it’s ever been in human history, even before the Neolithic Revolution. If that’s not Progress with a capital ‘p’, then I don’t know what is.
The oceanic evidence that Pinker and Shermer present is robust and cogent. Yet I think there’s another story to tell — one that hints at a possible future marked by unprecedented human suffering, global catastrophes, and even our extinction. The fact is that while the enterprise of human civilization has been making significant ethical strides forward in multiple domains, a range of emerging technologies are, by nearly all accounts, poised to introduce brand new existential risks never before encountered by our species
…
the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals. This is notable because just as there are many more terrorist groups than rogue nations in the world, there are far more deranged psychopaths than terrorist groups. Thus, the number of possible offenders armed with catastrophic weaponry is likely to increase significantly in the future.
It’s not clear how the trends that Pinker and Shermer identify could save us from this situation. Even if 99% of human beings in the year 02100 were peaceable, the remaining 1% could find themselves with enough technological power at their fingertips to initiate a disaster of global proportions. Or, forget 1% — what about a single individual with a death wish for humanity, or a single apocalyptic group hoping to engage in the ultimate mass suicide event? In a world cluttered with doomsday machines, exactly how long could we expect to survive?•
Simon Winchestertold the New York Times about the reading that’s important to him and the kind unimportant. An excerpt:
Question:
Which writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Simon Winchester:
Billy Collins; Paul Muldoon; Ian Buruma; William Boyd; Simon Schama; Paul Theroux; Pico Iyer; Salman Rushdie.
Question:
What genres do you especially enjoy reading?
Simon Winchester:
I’m unashamedly drawn to tales of the remote, the lonely and the hard — like Willa Cather on Nebraska or Ivan Doig on Montana. The Icelandic Nobelist Halldor Laxness, with his “Independent People,” still is, for me, the supreme example. But I also like railway murder stories and timetable mysteries, especially those involving Inspector French and his Dublin-born creator, Freeman Wills Crofts.
Question:
And which do you avoid?
Simon Winchester:
Frankly, anything that has the name Derrida in it.
Question:
What kinds of stories are you drawn to?
Simon Winchester:
I enjoy the bizarre and the fantastic — Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, or Borges and his “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which I still think one of the cleverest things I’ve read. I also want to revive the reputation of the detective writer John Franklin Bardin, whose books are so richly insane that you feel your own sanity slipping away as you read, The Deadly Percheron being a fine instance.
Question:
And which do you avoid?
Simon Winchester:
Sensible people tell me I should like stories with zombies, but try as I might, I don’t.•
This week, Justice Scalia, trying to recover from his antiquated racist statements, said he appreciates the contributions of all African-Americans, including that tall butler in the White House.
For all his many flaws, Timothy Leary did prove to be prescient in numerous ways. One was his abandonment of LSD for a new and more powerful drug: computer software. The good doctor believed psychedelics, while a useful first step out of conformity, would become a crutch. He wanted to “plug into” a better machine. Computers (and space travel), he believed, would offer far wider horizons and deeper questions about reality. It is funny that Leary wanted us to stop being “beloved robots” only to devote his attention to actual ones. But he was right: Even yesterday’s bleeding-edge drugs were blunt instruments.
On a related topic, Steven Levy has written “Inside Deep Dreams: How Google Made Its Computers Go Crazy,” a beauty of a Backchannel piece about computer scientist Alexander Mordvintsev, who fell into a terrible dream and awoke to the possibilities of artificial neural networks. He educated himself in the way of NNs and then rerouted them in a novel way, from passive to active, from literal to metaphorical. Of his initial experimentations, Levy writes that the “image looked like the work of a mad person. Or someone on LSD.”
The opening:
In the very early hours of May 18, 2015, Alexander Mordvintsev was wrenched from sleep. A nightmare, he later described it to me, in the first interview he has granted on the experience. Or, at least, a dream, a deeply disturbing dream, where an intruder had crossed the threshold of the Zurich apartment that he, his pregnant wife, and his 3-year-old son had been occupying for the past few months. They had moved to Switzerland from St. Petersburg that last November, when the Russian computer scientist got a job at Google’s engineering center there.
Now it was darkest night and Mordvintsev, jarred awake by his savage slumber, leapt from the bed to check the door. It was closed; all was quiet. But his mind was afire. Okay, it’s 2 a.m., but I can’t sleep, he told himself. So time to write a few lines of code.
It would be a decision that would eventually unleash a torrent of fantastic images, torn from an alien perspective, that intrigued and twisted the minds of those who viewed them. A decision that would reveal the power of artificial neural nets, our potential future overlords in an increasingly one-sided relationship with machine intelligence. And a decision that would change Mordvintsev’s own life.•
DARPA is on one hand a sort of moonshot laboratory, but it doesn’t engage in the frivolous end of futurism. Like Bell Labs, it chooses outlandish visions it believes can be realized (the Internet, driverless cars, humanoid robots). A Tech Insider report by Paul Szoldra surveys the defense wing’s thoughts about life three decades on. An excerpt:
So what’s going to happen in 2045?
It’s pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leapfrom the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.
But DARPA scientists have even bigger ideas. In a video series from October called “Forward to the Future,” three researchers predict what they imagine will be a reality 30 years from now.
Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, believes we’ll be at a point where we can control things simply by using our mind.
“Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment,” Sanchez said. “Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain.”
According to Sanchez, DARPA is currently working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms.•
For a 1975“Talk of the Town” piecein the New Yorker, Anthony Hiss toured Los Angeles, that strange and fascinating turf, enjoying near journey’s end an audience with Philip K. Dick, whose visions weren’t fully appreciated during his abbreviated lifetime and were even sort of undersold in this article. An excerpt:
In the afternoon, we drove over to Fullerton to see Philip K. Dick, my favorite science-fiction writer, author of 33 novels and 170 short stories. Past the House of Egg Roll, past Moy’s Coffee Shop (Chop Suey, Hot Cakes), past Bowser Beautiful, through Bel Air. We drove to the end of Sunset Boulevard, where we saw seagulls, 18 surfers in wet suits, a blue suggestion of Catalina to the southwest, and an Indian girl in a green-and-gold sari on the beach. Then south, past a concrete wall painted ‘TOMMY SURKO SAYS FOR MY KIND OF GIRL THERE’S ONLY ONE! TOMMY SURKO!’ Behind the tall palms on Venice we could see snow on the mountains. Kids were skateboarding down a hill on Lincoln. Past Woody’s Smorgasburger, onto a freeway to Fullerton.
Philip K. Dick lives in an apartment full of books and records and photographs with his wife, Tessa; his small son, Christopher; and two cats, Harvey Wallbanger and Sasha. He is jolly and tubby and bearded. His books, which are hilarious, are popular in France, because the French think they are about how grim everything is. Dick showed us a French newspaper piece about him—the subtitles were ‘Le Chaos,’ ‘L’Acide,’ ‘Le Suicide,’ ‘Les Machines’ ‘La Société Totalitaire,’ ‘La Paranoïa.’ Dick has just finished a book about Tim Leary and the LSD crowd, and what happened to them.
We had stopped in to make a short call of homage, and wound up talking along for hours, drinking wine, and Tessa going out for some Chinese food, and then talking about cosmologies until it was almost time for our plane back to N.Y. The apartment also contains a two-foot-high metal rocket ship on a wooden base—this is his Hugo Award, the highest award in science fiction. The plaque is missing, though, because Dick once used the award to break up a fight. ‘It grabs good,’ he says. As for the cosmologies, this is what emerged from our discussions: cosmologies all seem to be based on repetition—you know, first the universe expands, then it contracts, then it expands again, etc.—but maybe that’s not so. Maybe this whole expansion business that the universe is currently embarked upon is going to happen only once. That would mean that every day really is a new day, right? Also, maybe it’s not true that Einstein was smarter than Newton. Maybe Newton’s laws accurately described the universe as it then existed. But since then it’s expanded and got more complicated, and can be accurately described only by Einstein physics. Which will eventually become outdated, maybe.•
_______________________
In 1977, PKD described tangential, alternative worlds which he felt may have existed in reality–or perhaps just his mind.
MIT’s David Autor has bet the under on the Second Digital Age destroying jobs, though you might not agree these days if you invested your life savings in the value of a taxi medallion. He believes the short- and mid-term fears of the rise of the machines are unfounded and have crossed into hysteria. Time will tell, but he does acknowledge that the shifting of McJobs from high school juniors to those approaching senior citizen age is a downward spiral.
Inconversationwith Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer, Autor explains how two very different nations, Norway and Saudi Arabia, have taken vastly different approaches to abundance, a wonderful thing not always evenly distributed. What’s left unspoken is that the latter state has hidden beneath its vast wealth aquiet epidemic of poverty.
An excerpt:
Take, for example, two countries: Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both of them have huge amounts of sovereign wealth. You could say it’s like they have a machine that creates wealth for them. It’s not a computer, it’s just oil, but that’s okay; it creates surplus. You could say, “In those countries, maybe no-one needs to do anything, because they just have so much money,” but Norway and Saudi Arabia have handled this completely differently.
In Saudi Arabia only a little bit more than 10% of the private-sector workforce is Saudi, and the rest is guest workers. That is a recipe for long-term economic and social problems. In Norway just about everybody works, men and women, much more than most other European countries, but they don’t work that many hours. They have kept themselves relevant, and engaged, and prosperous, and actually pretty happy if you believe the data.
So, there are ways to deal with the challenge of abundance, but it’s not a bad problem to have on the scale of social problems that one could face. That’s what we’re talking about here, it’s the problem of abundance – in other words, abundant productivity, abundance of capability to do things with machines that we used to require human labour and toil for.
There are challenges that come with that. One is the leisure challenge; the other is, of course, some skills become less relevant faster than others. The people who have clearly been affected by the thrust of technological change, over the last 30 years especially, have been low-educated adults whose skills are more closely replaceable by automation, not actually necessary in the lowest-skilled jobs, but many have been displaced from middle-skilled jobs.
If I’m a clerical worker or a production worker and that type of work no longer exists, I can still do table waiting, I can still do security, I can still do cleaning, and actually I’ll probably displace an even less-educated worker who wanted that job. For example, in the US we see very few teenagers anymore working at so-called ‘teen’ jobs; they’re held by adults.
It does create challenges and they are distributional challenges.•
Donald Trump, a gout-ish dummkopf who makes Juggalos wince, has no interest in being President, a position that requires commitment, foresight and maturity, qualities he sorely lacks. He jumped into the race impetuously during one of his many glucose spikes, demanding attention for his man-baby ego, and has been unable to disqualify himself from the odious GOP race no matter how disgraceful his behavior. The fledgling fascist will just have to keep upping the ante as he tries to dream up some exit from the trail.
Early in the campaign, Edward Luce of the Financial Timesmade a prediction already realized: The miserable mogul may accomplish an egress after sullying the season, but the hatred he stirs up isn’t going anywhere.
The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike. And former Louisiana Rep. David Duke reports that the businessman has given more Americans cover to speak out loud about white nationalism than at any time since his own political campaigns in the 1990s.
As hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump’s rhetoric is conducive to anti-Muslim violence, white nationalist leaders are capitalizing on his candidacy to invigorate and expand their movement.
“Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” said Stormfront founder Don Black, who reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career.•
The sixth person to walk on the moon, American astronaut Edgar Mitchell fell back to Earth not with a thud, like, for instance, Buzz Aldrin, but into the warm embrace of Me Decade pseudoscience. A legit Ph.D. taken with ESP, telekinesis, remote healing, etc., the spaceman set up shop to study paranormal fields not long after his egress from Apollo 14. From “Edgar Mitchell’s Strange Voyage,” a 1974 People profile:
Like most men who have felt a huge booster rocket light up on the pad beneath them and the beginning vibrations of a launch into space, Ed Mitchell is never far from some reminder of his most astounding hours. The walls of his cramped office in Palo Alto, California, where his esoteric business is the study of parapsychological phenomena, are hung with photographs celebrating the Apollo 14 mission, in which Mitchell was the lunar module pilot and became the sixth man to walk on the surface of the moon. One of the pictures shows the U.S.S. New Orleans, the recovery ship that picked up the Apollo crew in February 1971. As Mitchell pointed out to a visitor, his first name is misspelled “Egar” in the commemorative inscription. In a wry Cockney imitation, Mitchell said of that error, “It keeps me ‘umble.”
Humble or not—and the topic has priority among people who know him—Ed Mitchell has maintained a high public profile. Interest in him has even increased since his flight, a rarity in astronaut fame shared only by John Glenn. The reason for this is twofold: Mitchell had a transcendent personal experience during his moon flight, and he has been proclaiming it ever since—on the lecture circuit, to influential listeners wherever he can collar them, and in a book coming out in June. To an extent that seems almost to contradict his native skepticism and training in hard science, Ed Mitchell has become a man obsessed by the idea that the world can be changed by the right application of human awareness, and he has quite literally made it his business to apply it.
To his determination Mitchell brings great self-confidence, not exactly a new acquisition. He is remembered by some from his pre-moon flight days at NASA as rank-conscious and overbearing. Apparently more mellow now, the president and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences nonetheless explained his forgivable ignorance about the identity of Pop Star Mick Jagger by saying not long ago, “I’m too busy making history. I don’t have time to read about it.”
Still, there are ample grounds to support his good opinion of himself. At 43, Mitchell has come a head-swelling distance to his present eminence in a field on the frontier of behavioral studies. From a modest start in a Southwest ranching family during the Depression (he used to wash down crop dusters’ airplanes to get free rides), he gained the top academic rank, or very near it, at every school he attended. He holds a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. Before his retirement from NASA in 1972 (and from the U.S. Navy as a captain) he was generally regarded as one of the brightest and most intellectually adventurous of the astronauts. His credentials as a pilot were most impressively stated by Alan Shepard, the cool and utterly unhumble boss of the Apollo 14 crew. “He’s a great flyer,” said Rear Admiral Shepard, a man frugal in praise of others, “simply outstanding.” And, of course, Mitchell has kicked up moon dust, which puts him in a very special brotherhood. In some substantial way, that experience has profoundly marked the life or outlook of each of the 12 men who have known it. One, Jim Irwin, became an evangelist preacher, and Alan Shepard described his own transformation. “I used to be a rotten s.o.b.,” he has said. “Now I’m just an s.o.b.”
It was Mitchell’s moon visit—or the changes it wrought in him—that led to his current total preoccupation with the frontiers of psychic research and parapsychology, fields in which there is a booming interest but that are still considered only marginally respectable by many scientists.
“The experience I had on the flight was akin to a religious experience,” explained Mitchell in a soft, weary voice, the gray hair just beginning to show in his reddish-brown beard. “It was euphoric, one of those rare moments in life when you seemed to be able to reach out and touch the universe, when you had an intuitive flash about the real meaning of truth.”
After between 25 and 30 hours of such mystic perceptions, Mitchell came back to earth determined to do something about the truth he understood so starkly from a lunar distance. The solution, he felt, lay in a sort of planet-wide consciousness-raising, which would be accomplished through the scientific applications of parapsychology (sometimes called psi). It was a field he had been interested in long before the flight, and indeed, without NASA’s knowledge he had set up an experiment in extrasensory perception to be conducted during the mission with four men back on earth. The test involved the men on earth guessing the correct order of certain standard symbols as Mitchell “sent” them from space by telepathy and it was later judged to be a moderate success.
At any rate, in Mitchell’s new resolution, such psi techniques could include ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy and psychokinesis (the use of psychic energy to bring about physical changes, like bending forks with well aimed thinking). All these and more could be employed in the quest for greater realization of the power of the human mind.•
In a New York Times editorial, neurobiologist Ji Xiaohua (who writes under the pen name Ji Shisan) sees the Google Glass as half full, believing jobs disappeared by new technologies and systems will be replaced by heretofore unimagined ones. Well, it’s always worked that way in the past.
The pivotal element is the timeframe of such advances. If we ease into a new normal over the rest of the century, we probably would be able to adjust, if in an often lurching manner. But what if, for example, driverless is perfected and widely implemented in the next two decades? That would mean an abrupt end of tens of millions of jobs in the U.S. alone. Degree of difficulty and mountains of bureaucracy may prevent us from finding out how we’d cope, but the scenario is possible.
An excerpt:
It seems likely that developed countries will undergo the most disruptive changes — in some economies, the service sector accounts for over 70% of gross domestic product. In developing countries, the impact on white-collar workers is unlikely to be immediate, due to slower adoption of AI technology, though such regions may experience a decline in outsourced manufacturing jobs with further advances in robotics. This sounds worrisome only because we can’t anticipate the new jobs that these technologies will bring and the new businesses that people will devise, as they always have. The future’s still bright, thanks to our creativity — our unique trait.
In July, an open letter from more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers and other prominent figures — Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak among them — warned against using AI in warfare and called for a ban on autonomous weapons. Even that technology is not as advanced as the sentient robots envisioned in the 2015 movies Ex Machina or Chappie. These movies imagine “strong” AI, or AI that is generalized, and able to carry out most human activities, as opposed to “weak” or narrow AI, which is task-specific. No one can say whether strong AI will be created, and if so, when. I asked some Chinese AI scientists about it, and given their responses, I may as well have been asking about the possibility of alien life.
That would be a world in which perhaps even child care jobs are threatened, but thank goodness we have many years before the dawn of strong AI-directed robots. In that future, we may not need to work very hard to support ourselves. The robots will be doing most of the labor, while we will have the time and leisure to explore what it is to be human.•
If you have a New Yorker subscription, it’s very worth checking out “Bytes and Chips,” a 1977 “Talk of the Town” piece by Tony Hiss, which profiled the burgeoning personal computer culture. It’s the magazine’s first mention of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, though not by name. The central figure in the brief article is Vern Crawford, a Texas electronics entrepreneur. An excerpt:
I’m also sitting on one of the big stories of the late seventies and early eighties: the personal computer–a full-sized computer (in function) available in kit form for less than two thousand dollars, which when completely assembled is about as big as an Olivetti typewriter. Hackers, as personal-computer constructors have dubbed themselves, are already building the machines by the thousand all over the country; they’ve formed clubs like the Homebrew, and they’re serviced by a number of small retail computer stores and by national magazines, including one called Byte, which is published in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and which, after twenty monthly issues, has grown to a press run of eighty-eight thousand. Vern, a typical hacker, worked in electronics in the Air Force for fourteen years as a radio technician, following two years as a merchant seaman. He also has a degree in economics from San Jose State and is a former personnel officer in Lockheed, and likes to call himself a former merchant seaman and a roughneck. The kits that Vern and his compeers are working on require a certain basic knowledge of digital electronics, but within six months, according toCarl Helmers, the editor of Byte, the field will be completely accessible to ignoramuses like me: Heathkit, the famous kit people, who already market a color-TV kit that an orangutan can assemble, will offer a computer kit next fall. And in just a matter of weeks a couple of men in their twenties from Los Altos, California, the next town over from Mountain View, will start selling Apple II, which Helmers calls the first appliance computer–a fully assembled briefcase-size unit, with a large memory and a keyboard, that can play any number of computer games, draw pictures on your color TV, and operate like any other computer, using the TV as its display. Cost of Apple II: thirteen hundred dollars.•
Clamor for Stan Smiths is such that Adidas is building a new automated factory to meet demand. The company hopes robots will help it respond more nimbly to rapidly changing tastes, but promises this people-less plant and others like it will merely complement existing suppliers. Of course, it’s really a harbinger of a worker-less direction. The jobs that would have been will never be, and then the ones that actually are will be gone. Why would it be any other way?
The new “Speedfactory” in the southern town of Ansbach near its Bavarian headquarters will start production in the first half of 2016 of a robot-made running shoe that combines a machine-knitted upper and springy “Boost” sole made from a bubble-filled polyurethane foam developed by BASF.
“An automated, decentralized and flexible manufacturing process… opens doors for us to be much closer to the market and to where our consumer is,” said Chief Executive Herbert Hainer.
Larger rival Nike is also investing heavily in new manufacturing methods. But it has not yet put a date on when it expects that to result in more U.S.-based production.
Adidas plans high volume production in the near future and will establish a global network of similar factories, although it expects them to complement existing suppliers rather than replace them as it seeks to keep growing fast.
“This is on top. It is a separate business model,” Gerd Manz, head of technology innovation at Adidas, told journalists.
Adidas currently makes about 600 million pairs of shoes and items of clothing and accessories a year. It plans to grow sales by almost half again by 2020.
The new factory will still use humans for parts of the assembly process, around 10 people will be on the ground for testing purposes during the pilot phase, but Adidas is working towards full automation.•
In addressing the Bank of England, the institution’s Chief Economist Andrew G Haldane tries to answer if it’s different this time in regard to technological unemployment. Haldane argues that even successful long-term technological transitions have been visited by “hollowing out” effects which have exacerbated wage gaps. As for the Second Machine Age, a time when AI may become highly competent at cognitive processing, the economist sees job value shifting from IQ to EQ, with emotional intelligence becoming the supreme skill. He further thinks wealth distribution of some sort may become necessary.
An excerpt that provides a thumbnail account of the tech job threat through history:
Certainly, the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome wrestled with the problem of how to deal with the consequences of workers displaced by technological advance. The responses then included large-scale public work programmes and income support policies for the needy. Indeed, they have an eerie echo in many of today’s public policy debates.
The debate about technological unemployment really picked up pace in the 19th century, with the blossoming of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Then, it spilt over into the streets with worker protests and machine breaking, most notably by the Luddite movement. These fears about technological displacement gathered intellectual support from no less a figure than the classical economist, David Ricardo (Ricardo (1821)).
Yet the intellectual tide was by no means in one direction. It was accepted that technological advance could damage some workers in the short run. But its benefits to most workers in the longer-run were felt likely to dominate. In the middle of the 19th century, that view came to prominence through such figures as John Stuart Mill (Mill (1848)) and Karl Marx (Marx (1867)), two unlikely intellectual bedfellows.
The technology debate was re-stirred in the 1930s, at the time of mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In his essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, Keynes predicted on-going technological advance and workers being replaced by machines (Keynes (1930)). Yet far from being a threat, Keynes viewed this as a huge opportunity. He predicted that, by 2030, the average working week would have shrunk to 15 hours. Technology would give birth to a new “leisure class”.
Debates on the relationship between jobs and technology stirred again during the 1960s in the US, during the 1970s in advanced economies, and again in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and parts of Europe. In each case, the prompt was rising rates of unemployment. And in each case, this debate subsided as unemployment rates fell.
Moving into the 21st century, this debate has once again been re-kindled.•
Ted Koppel hasn’t morphed into late-life Jim Bakker, hasn’t exactly become a preacher for preppers, but he does suggest those who can afford it should build a supply of freeze-dried food and water in case of a cyberattack on our power grid. The former Nightline anchor thinks such a potentially devastating event has a good chance to occur. In addition to penning a book on the topic, Lights Out, which seems to be The Day After for the Digital Age,Koppel conducted a Reddit AMA to raise consciousness. A few exchanges follow.
_________________________________
Question:
What are the likely odds of such an attack happening and in which grid do you foresee the most damage occurring? It seems almost unfathomable that such an event could occur but you must know some things that we don’t, considering you wrote a book about the subject.
Ted Koppel:
I’ll give you the answer that former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, gave me when I asked. “Very, very likely. 80-90%.” The most damage would undoubtedly be caused by a cyber attack on the Eastern Interconnect. There are three grids in the country and the Eastern Interconnect is by far the largest covering the entire east coast westward past Chicago. Essentially everything I know about the subject I put into my book, Lights Out. You’re right, it does seem unfathomable that such an event could occur, but when you consider just how many companies have already been hacked over the last few years, it would be foolish to assume that only the electric power industry is immune. Former NSA director, Keith Alexander, likes to say there are only two kinds of companies out there: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t yet know it.
_________________________________
Question:
What can I do right now as a U.S. citizen, to prepare my home for such an attack?
Ted Koppel:
If you can afford it (and I recognize that many people cannot) start building up a backup supply of storable food. This, ideally, would be something like freeze-dried products which have an incredibly long shelf life (about 25 year) or items as simple as sacks of dried beans and rice. Also, water is critical. Again, this is much easier for people who live in houses and in rural areas; not so easy for apartment dwellers in our cities.
_________________________________
Question:
Do you think the presidential candidates should be addressing the threat of a cyberattack? This seems to be a topic that is under represented even when terrorism and national security are a huge concern.
Ted Koppel:
Absolutely! I think there are a couple of factors that inhibit our candidates from talking about cyberattacks: One, they know very little about the subject themselves, and two – when you raise an issue/problem, there’s an expectation that a candidate will offer solutions. That’s a high bar in a campaign atmosphere that focuses more of Trump’s railing than substantive issues.•
One who sees the curtain coming down sooner than later is the Christian evangelist and dapper apocalypse salesman Hal Lindsey, co-author with Carole C. Carlson of the meshuganah 1970 bestseller,The Late Great Planet Earth,which estimated 1988 as the Judgement Day. Missed by that much. Lindsey, who’s still alive as are many of us, spends his dotage accusing President Obama of being “the Antichrist.” Whatever.
In 1979, when the batshit book had been made into a film–with Orson Welles picking up late-life wine-and-bullfight money for handling the narration–Lindsey was profiled in a People pieceby Lucretia Marmon. The opening:
In 1938 Orson Welles terrified radio listeners with War of the Worlds, an imaginative report of a Martian invasion. Now Welles, as gloomy-voiced narrator of a film, The Late Great Planet Earth, out this fall, tells another frightening tale. This time it is a movie version of the end of the world, based on a scenario by evangelist-author Hal Lindsey. The script, claims Lindsey, really isn’t his. It’s all in the Scriptures.
Lindsey’s book Earth, published in 1970, has been translated into 31 languages and 10 million copies have been sold. The public also snapped up five subsequent Lindsey books on the same subject, running his sales total to over 14 million.
Thus Lindsey, 47, may now be the foremost modern-day Jeremiah. ‘If I had been writing 15 years ago I wouldn’t have had an audience,’ he concedes. ‘But a tremendous number of people are worried about the future. I’m just part of that phenomenon.’
Lindsey splices Bible prophecies of doom with contemporary signs. For instance, he says the Bible pinpoints Israel’s rebirth as a nation as the catalyst to Judgment Day, which will probably occur by 1988. The intervening years will see the emergence of a 10-nation confederacy (prophet Daniel’s dreadful 10-horned beast) or, as Lindsey sees it, the European Common Market. Eventually Russia (biblical Magog) will attack Israel and precipitate a global nuclear war. Only Jesus’ followers will be spared. Hence, Lindsey advises, “the only thing you need to understand is that God offers you in Jesus Christ a full pardon.”
Meanwhile, is Lindsey cowering in his fallout shelter? Not at all. Sporting a gold Star of David around his neck and another on his pinky (‘After all, Jesus was a Jew’), Lindsey zips around Southern California in a Mercedes 450 SL. He conducts services on the beach and indulges in his hobbies of photography and surfing.•
Perhaps the greatest surprise about heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is that he chose boxing instead of MMA, but then again he’s an old-fashioned guy.
Fury believes the Old Testament is not just a document but documentary. He argues that his pronouncements, equally apocalyptic and bigoted, are supported by the scriptures, and he has a point. Fury is full of rage and hate speech, but then so is the bible. How can such “righteousness,” he asks, be wrong?
A week before beating Vladimir Klitschko, Fury gave a jaw-dropping interview to Oliver Holt of the Daily Mail, one that put every ounce of his lunatic world view on display. Since his victory, he’s been considered by most in his native England (and the few others who still care about his sport) as the Donald Trump of prizefighting, in the lead despite being a crude caricature of evil.
From Holt:
Tyson Fury is sitting on a sofa in his hotel room. His bed is unmade. A pillow lies on the floor. An empty water bottle sits on the table. Apart from that, the room is bare. The conversation has just started and Fury is talking in a stream of consciousness, fast and freely. Things turn dark very, very quickly.
‘We live in an evil world,’ he says. ‘The devil is very strong at the minute, very strong, and I believe the end is near. The bible tells me the end is near. The world tells me the end is near. Just a short few years, I reckon, away from being finished.
‘Abusing the planet, the wars in the Middle East, the famines, the earthquakes, the natural disasters, all these things are talked about 2000 years ago before they even happened. Prophesised. So now it’s all coming true…’
There is a breathlessness about his speech and an intensity, too. He is an articulate man and his words are littered with references to the scriptures. It feels as if he has taken sections of the Old Testament and swallowed them whole. There is no filter. He begins to make sweeping and repugnant statements about what he interprets as the evils that he says are hurrying us towards the apocalypse. It is hard not to feel worried about his mental well-being. He says that always happens when men are ‘filled up with God’.
‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia. Who would have thought in the 50s and 60s that those first two would be legalised?
…
‘This is a funny world we live in and an evil world,’ Fury says. ‘People can say, “Oh, you are against abortions, you are against paedophilia, you are against homosexuality, you’re against whatever”, but my faith and my culture is all based on the bible. The bible was written a long time ago, from the beginning of time until now, and if I follow that and it tells me it’s wrong, then it’s wrong for me. That’s just my opinion.•
Donald Trump, a colostomy bag dipped in bronzer, is a bully with scant self-awareness who needs to be reminded who he is in the most frank terms. It didn’t stun me that the favored son of a privileged family (Hi, Jeb!) didn’t know how to disarm a bully. He hasn’t had the practice. It did shock me, though, when in the wake of disgraceful comments about Mexicans at the outset of his campaign that he was treated by the media as merely a harmless joke. A joke, okay, but someone making fascistic comments isn’t funny. Aspiring despots often initially come across as vulgar clowns. You deal with them early and often.
The interview that peeved me most early on was conducted by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who matched the hideous hotelier in buffoonery when she portrayed him as a somewhat naughty great-uncle instead of a deeply bigoted demagogue. The Economist Q&A that followed in its wake was likewise far too friendly, if not as clueless. Not even Trump mocking POWs and the disabled was enough to fully stifle the press guffaws. It’s taken talk of a Muslim ban and internment camps to finally awaken some commentators. This poor journalistic performance isn’t necessarily responsible for Trump’s ascension in the polls, but it’s poor, nonetheless.
Trump on Tuesday abruptlycanceleda pre-planned interview with Yahoo’s Katie Couric. The interview was previously scheduled for Wednesday. He has also generally increased his rhetoric on the media, which he regularly describes as mostly made up of “scum.” At Monday’s rally, he described an NBC reporter in the crowd as “third-rate,” and encouraged the audience to boo her.
These changes come amidmuch hand-wringingwithin the media itself. Journalists have noted repeatedly in recent weeks that Trump appears to be completely resistant to fact-checking. He bandies about the false claim that he saw New Jersey Muslims celebrate the 9/11 attacks on TV, despite being rebuked by former officials and fact-checkers. Coverage of prior shocking incidents has generally corresponded with a bump in his poll numbers. Some wonder whether the media’s treatment of Trump as an entertaining curiosity allowed his haphazard campaign to coalesce into a viable candidacy, but that’s a hard claim to prove or disprove.
The Morning Joe snafu and [Arianna] Huffington’s change of heart might indicate a souring mood, but they’re hardly cutting the air off of Trump’s visibility. CNN carried Trump’s Monday night rally live. Fox News’s Greta van Susteren interviewed him shortly after his proposal was published. In addition to his nearly 30-minute Morning Joe appearance, Trump also called into Good Morning America on Tuesday.
The idea that Trump has suddenly crossed some decency line is also tenuous: the man built his campaign for the White House on half-truths and impossible-to-enact proposals.•
How long will our species or some next-level version of it continue to exist? If we go on long enough, it’s not theoretically impossible that humans could replace our old “parts” with new bio-printed ones. A kidney here, a kidney there, it all adds up. Or maybe they’ll be remarkably good bioengineering that will allow us to repair and upgrade what we have, regardless of its condition. I said “we,” but we actually won’t enjoy these marvels. Perhaps some future iteration of us will.
Organovo was set up by Hungarian-born Dr Forgacs, after he made the decision to quit his career as a theoretical physicist and retrain as a biologist – taking classes with undergraduates.
Those classes left him with a pretty lofty ambition – to grow organs that could mimic or even improve on existing ones.
He set about developing a process to print multi-cellular tissues – dubbed bio-printing – in 2005, and two years later founded Organovo with colleagues Keith Murphy and Dr Eric Michael David.
Its ultimate aim is to mass produce organs that could create a future in which humans, like cars, have regular services that keep them living indefinitely.
“If we could replace organs, we could live forever, and then it is up to us whether we want that,” he told the audience at the recent Wired conference in London.
He admits there is currently a lot of hype around bio-printing, particularly the idea of “growing” full organs.
“Bio-printing does not result in a viable biological structure. We cannot yet make big structures like livers or hearts,” he said.
“If it is possible, it will take a long time, so don’t smoke or drink too much.”•
The “Fox” in Fox News, a 24-hour House Un-American Activities Committee sponsored by Bush’s Baked Beans, is taken from the surname of pioneering film producer William Fox, whether he would be happy with the contemporary association or not.
One of Fox’s great innovations was the launching, in 1929, of the Embassy Newsreel Theatre in Manhattan, as a showcase of continuous non-fiction fare, presaging around-the-clock cable by many decades. Newsreels–or “film newspapers“–had been popular since the beginning of cinema, but until Fox they were secondary to the main attraction in the United States. He redefined them as the attraction.
By 1930, the proprietor had lost control of his film company and theaters, having been knocked out by a near-fatal automobile crash and the stock-market collapse. This reversal was followed by legal problems, a commission of perjury and a prison stint. Fox died in 1952, largely forgotten by the media he helped define. Text follows of a brief, understated article from the November 4, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, unwittingly announcing the moment when news in America–or something resembling it–became an infinite loop.
There’s nothing quite like the IBT columns of antisocial antivirus expert John McAfee, pieces that read like PKD-esque fever dreams propelled by acute paranoia, actual knowledge and perhaps pharmaceuticals. In a recent article, he warned that Electromagnetic Pulse generators (or EMPs) could be used to destroy an American city at any moment. An excerpt:
EMPs can be generated in many ways. Much has been said about nuclear EMPs, but that threat concerns me far less than other, more specific means of generating EMPs. The US recently announced our ownEMP weapon, which can be carried aboard a missile. Using a technology based on hydraulically compressing and decompressing rods made of specific elements, the device is able to create multiple EMPs very quickly.
The weapon can be focused to take out individual buildings within a city and can take out dozens of individual buildings in a single pass of the missile. I will admit that such technology is beyond the reach of the average individual. But what if the individual is not concerned with precision strikes and merely wants to take out an entire city block or the entire city? Well, that technology is readily available, cheap, and simple to construct.
…
I am not going to give a course on constructing EMP weapons. I am only trying to raise the awareness of the world to a real and imminent threat.
I also received many questions about how an EMP could kill people. The answer is easy. A large-scale localized attack that involved all of our power stations would leave us all permanently without power. An attack that included our water processing plants would leave us without potable water, except that which we could purchase at the supermarket.
Localized attacks on food processing plants, attacks on mass transportation and attacks on centralized communication organizations would leave us without food and communications. Attacks on oil processing plants would ultimately leave us without individual transportation. What percentage of the population do you think would survive such a catastrophe? And all of this without a single nuclear explosion.•
In our facacta political season, McAfee is, of course, running for President, decrying the cyber illiteracy of the average Washington representative. Despite being an erstwhile murder suspect, he’s not even close to the most deplorable candidate. Here he is in September announcing his campaign to Greta Van Susteren, a Scientologist with an unsustainable face.
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Racing legend Jackie Stewart was king of a sport in which his competitors–his friends–kept dying, one after another on the dangerous-as-can be-courses of the ’60s and early ’70s. The opening of Robert F. Jones 1973 Sport Illustrated article “There Are Two Kinds of Death“:
Contrasted with the current woes of the real world—the new Arab-Israeli war, the old Watergate maunder-ings—it might have seemed a week of minor tragedy on the Grand Prix circuit. But for John Young Stewart, 34, the finest road racer in the game, it was perhaps the most agonizing week of his life. A month earlier, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Stewart had captured his third world driving championship in five years. During the course of this racing season he had become the most successful Formula I driver ever, with 27 Grand Prix victories to his credit (compared with 25 for his late Scottish countryman, Jim Clark, and 24 for his idol, Argentina’s Juan Manuel Fangio). And certainly Stewart had outdone both of them in the main chance of racing: money.
Jackie Stewart is the canniest man ever to don a fireproof balaclava—and certainly the gutsiest ever to con a sponsor. Earning close to $1 million a season in prize money and other emoluments, Stewart seemed to have turned motor racing into some kind of a private treasure trove—and survived to enjoy it. Then why not retire?
That was the first source of his agony last weekend. At Watkins Glen for the 15th running of the U.S. Grand Prix, Stewart played coy with the question. Indeed, even his business agent claimed that the wee Scot was hung on the horns of that old sportsman’s dilemma: quit on a peak of success, or press on to try for even greater rewards? The business agent also was well aware that the timing of a retirement statement by a figure so prominent as Stewart could bring in lots of bucks, and perhaps the coyness was merely a question of timing to suck up more cash. “If Jackie were single,” said his lovely wife Helen, “there would be no question. He would continue to race. I would like to see him retire, but I cannot press him. No, there is nothing that could fill the role of racing for him if he were to quit.”
Stewart himself was brusque on the question. He sidestepped it with every slick word at his command—and they are as many and as evasive as the black grouse of Scotland’s moors. But still it all seemed a game.
Then, on qualifying day before the race, Stewart’s good friend and teammate, Francois Cevert, was killed in a smashup during practice. Stewart had already lost three close friends to the sport: Clark in 1968, Piers Courage and.Jochen Rindt in 1970. In his poignant account of that last tragic season in his recent book, Faster! A Racer’s Diary, Stewart had likened Grand Prix racing to a disease and wondered in painful print if he himself were not a victim. With Cevert’s death last Saturday, it seemed to many that Stewart must at last accept the prognosis. He must—finally—retire and let sad enough alone.•
A 1973 documentary about Formula One racing, known at various times as One by One, Quick and the Dead, and Champions Forever, this interesting period piece with a funked-up score focuses on Stewart, Peter Revson and their peers. Stacy Keach is the cool-as-can-be narrator, but Cévert sums it up simply and best, admitting, “steering is hard.”
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My favorite book published in the U.S. in 2015 isSapiens, a brilliant work about our past (and future) by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In a New Statesman essay, the author argues that if we’re on the precipice of a grand human revolution–in which we commandeer evolutionary forces and create a post-scarcity world–it’s being driven by private-sector technocracy, not politics, that attenuated, polarized thing. The next Lenins, the new visionaries focused on large-scale societal reorganization, Harari argues, live in Silicon Valley, and even if they don’t succeed, their efforts may significantly impact our lives. An excerpt:
Whatever their disagreements about long-term visions, communists, fascists and liberals all combined forces to create a new state-run leviathan. Within a surprisingly short time, they engineered all-encompassing systems of mass education, mass health and mass welfare, which were supposed to realise the utopian aspirations of the ruling party. These mass systems became the main employers in the job market and the main regulators of human life. In this sense, at least, the grand political visions of the past century have succeeded in creating an entirely new world. The society of 1800 was completely destroyed and we are living in a new reality altogether.
In 1900 or 1950 politicians of all hues thought big, talked big and acted even bigger. Today it seems that politicians have a chance to pursue even grander visions than those of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. While the latter tried to create a new society and a new human being with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and supercomputers. In the coming decades, technological breakthroughs are likely to change human society, human bodies and human minds in far more drastic ways than ever before.
Whereas the Nazis sought to create superhumans through selective breeding, we now have an increasing arsenal of bioengineering tools at our disposal. These could be used to redesign the shapes, abilities and even desires of human beings, so as to fulfil this or that political ideal. Bioengineering starts with the understanding that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For four billion years natural selection has been tinkering and tweaking with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoebae to reptiles to mammals to Homo sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in the genome, the neural system and the skeleton were enough to upgrade Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – to Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what the outcome of a few more changes to our genome, neural system and skeleton might be? Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old sapiens body and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance and grow entirely new body parts.
On top of that, we are also developing the ability to create cyborgs.•
In a London TED Talk from earlier this year, Harari details why Homo sapiens came to rule the world, and why that development wasn’t always such a sure bet.
Being great at one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you possess any general genius (e.g., Ben Carson, neurosurgeon). Michael Bloomberg believed the financial sector needed a certain type of information terminal and he created it with a ridiculous $10 million golden parachute he was handed after getting shitcanned by Salomon Brothers. About the terminals, he was right. It made him one of the richest people in the world, but his wealth should never have been taken as a sign of competence or rectitude.
As Mayor of New York, he did some great things and bungled major projects like Build It Back. He was tone deaf enough to want to proceed with the marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy turning New York City into a necropolis. Crime was kept low but policing got out of hand on his watch. The poorer people he claimed to champion often did worse. His paternalism knew no bounds, often seeming petty. He even scammed a third term, writing his own law in a back-office deal with another billionaire, voters be damned.
As a businessperson, Bloomberg is likewise a mixed bag. Unencumbered with the mayoralty, he’s returned to his namesake business, slicing and dicing his way through the journalistic side, an area for which he holds no great regard. All the while, those terminals keep updating, making general rightness or wrongness seem almost irrelevant on a large scale but often troubling on the micro one.
Visitors to the building could be forgiven for thinking that the heyday of journalism was still ongoing. Staff exit the elevator into a light-filled foyer that feels like the lobby of a designer hotel. The eye is drawn to orange sofas and white lacquered counters, upon which rest bowls stuffed with apples, oranges and diced melon. There are carrot sticks and broccoli, as well as fresh roasted coffees that would put any Starbucks to shame. The employees scurrying by can help themselves free of charge. Bloomberg wants his people to be comfortable.
But his paternalism can at times seem condescending. The potato chip bags are free, but they’re only available in the smallest size possible. Bloomberg would like his people to eat healthily. And the elevators don’t stop on each of the building’s 25 floors — only on those marked with a white circle — forcing employees to take the stairs.
In nearly every Bloomberg bureau around the world there is at least one saltwater aquarium with purple and yellow fish and corals — to foster relaxation, Bloomberg says. Those who work for him should be proud of their job. One of his favorite sentences is: “The best for us.”
‘Scientology on Speed’
Those who jump ship, though, get a taste of his colder side. Bloomberg once confessed that he doesn’t attend going-away parties out of principle, saying that he couldn’t wish departing employees all the best. “That just wouldn’t be honest of me,” he said. Whoever turns his or her back on the company is no longer one of us, but one of “them.” Bloomberg’s employees must enter a binding contractual agreement to not divulge company secrets, including a clause that permits the company to scan an employee’s e-mails even after that person has left. The microcosm of Mike Bloomberg is a whimsical world of good and evil, one with its own unique — some might say sect-like — view of things. An insider jokingly refers to it as “Scientology on speed.”•
