From the August 9, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Tags: August Schmitt
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- john c lilly dolphin computer experiments
- chimpanzee glands transplanted into human
- can humans outrun animals?
- bob guccione going bankrupt
- henry wirz civil war atrocities
- richard brautigan attitude toward technology
- wilhelm reich’s sex cult
- al capp interviewing rev. sun myung moon
- the truth about bridey murphy’s reincarnation
- what became of don king?
This week, after much consideration, Joe Biden finally made a decision.
I’m fairly certain I’d like a vanilla waffle cone.
- Old Print Articles: Charles Curtis, Native American, becomes Vice President (1929) + Circus legend George Conklin recalls his brilliant career (1921).
- President Obama interviews novelist Marilynne Robinson about politics, etc.
- David Brooks expertly sums up the GOP descent into madness.
- Donald Trump should have just put his dad’s money in a mutual fund.
- Bill Gates says gov’t R&D and carbon taxes are needed to fight climate change.
- Venkatesh Rao thinks climate-change austerities are unlikely to occur.
- Malcolm Gladwell did an AMA related to his article about school shootings.
- A refugee bears witness to North Korea’s murderous Orwellian circus.
- Liz Parrish said she’s using BioViva’s genetic therapy. That’s complicated.
- Mathematician Ben Goertzel talks intelligent machines, life extension, etc.
- Corporations want to use technology to collect data from consumers’ brains.
- Mysterious megastructures move rapidly around a distant star.
- Ray Kurzweil thinks in 20 years we’ll plug our brains into the Internet.
- Moore’s Law has encouraged lots of irrational technological overpromising.
- A new Robohow project demonstrates how customizable AI may become.
- Intelligence Augmentation aids existed long before HoloLens and such.
- On driverless: GM embraces the technology, robotrucks working in Australia.
- Overcrowded American prisons may not be the result of drug laws.
- Even Steve Jobs’ story is fodder for Aaron Sorkin’s internal struggles.
- Karl Lagerfeld seems a nightmarish character from a German horror film.
- A brief note from 1901 about a friendly wager.
- A brief note from 1901 about a handsome girl.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
There’s a shocking possibility that an enigmatic array of debris neighboring a distant star may be a large-scale structure built by alien intelligence, perhaps to collect solar energy. Or maybe not. It doesn’t seem explainable as a natural phenomenon, but whatever is it is that citizen astronomers detected when crowdsourcing the Northern Hemisphere skies, the find is awakening in scientists and non-scientists alike the suspicion that something could be out there. In an Atlantic article, Ross Andersen introduced the baffling scenario to a wider audience. An excerpt:
We know that something strange is going on out there.
When I spoke to [Yale’s astronomy postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”•
Completing driverless cars isn’t exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy but the increasing time and money invested in autonomous will likely lead to a large victory at some indeterminate point in the future. Excerpts follow from two pieces on the topic, the first one about GM going all in on the technology at its Warren Technical Center and the other about automated trucks outperforming human workers in Australia.
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From Alex Davies at Wired:
It’s a fitting locale for this kind of testing: Since 1956, the Eero Saarinen-designed Warren campus has served as the automaker’s main research hub. Since 2009, it’s been the home of the country’s largest battery lab, where GM develops and tests the all-important lithium-ion batteries that power the Volt, and will power the Bolt, the affordable car with 200 miles of electric range it intends to introduce in 2017.
And the Volt is a fitting car for the project: an electrified system makes it easier for engineers to tap into the controls, but more importantly, it’s the most forward-looking car in the GM stable. There’s a reason nearly every autonomous prototype out there is electric: When you’re talking bout one technology of the future, it makes sense to pair it with another.
[CEO Mary] Barra adds a third category: connectivity. “You need embedded connectivity to make autonomous work. And that’s where General Motors has a lead,” with nearly two decades of OnStar-equipped vehicles on the market. It’s moving from there to vehicle to vehicle communication, starting with two Cadillac models next year.
Barra says GM isn’t going to rely on the traditional owner-driver model to keep its business going, and will “absolutely” make cars for an age when human driving is defunct. “We are disrupting ourselves.”•
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From Peter Klinger at Yahoo! News:
Rio Tinto says the use of automated trucks in the Pilbara is outperforming its traditional people-driven fleet by 12 per cent as it ramps up technology deployment in its iron ore business.
Addressing the Nikkei Asia Review Forum in Sydney today, Rio Tinto group executive of technology and information Greg Lilleyman said its Mine of the Future program and “pioneering” collaboration with Japanese manufacturer Komatsu “had helped lead the way in our industry”.
Tesla unveils autopilot cars
Mr Lilleyman, who ran Rio’s Pilbara mines before taking on the Brisbane-based technology role two years ago, credited a decision to seek the input of Japanese suppliers with his company’s ability to lower operating costs, cut capital expenditure and “seize growth opportunities in Asia”.
The Mine of the Future program, which had automated trucks as one of its first targets, has been extended to automated drills, drones and use of big data.•
Tags: Alex Davies, Greg Lilleyman, Mary Barra, Peter Klinger
It is more than a little maddening that Americans freaked out over Ebola, which had very little chance of becoming plague here, yet aren’t a fraction as flustered over a potential catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, a far more likely outcome. Even astoundingly successful capitalist Bill Gates–the sweater-clad, avuncular 2.0 version–has called for serious government curbs on free markets to combat climate change.
In advance of COP 21, Venkatesh Rao has penned an Atlantic piece about the need for a wartime-level approach to reworking the whole of global infrastructure, explaining why it’s possible but not probable to succeed. If death is in the distance but not yet in our faces, are we likely to surrender our luxuries to austerity? Rao acknowledges that a “single cheap and effective solution [could] emerge,” but that’s also not a plausible scenario. An excerpt:
We are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.
What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.
Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.
None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospace and computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker: Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolution driven primarily by inventors, private investors, and market forces before technocrats got involved.•
Tags: Venkatesh Rao
When he retired from the Big Top, George Conklin, a celebrated animal trainer and all-around circus legend, collaborated with journalist Harvey Woods Root on a book about his career, which began in the raffish, hurly-burly circuit of 1866, carrying on through the more-corporate world of the early twentieth century. Conklin, an odd choice to work with four-legged performers given his phobia about horses, shared some trade secrets (e.g., the “Moss-Haired Girl” used alcohol to manicure her small, flowerless coiffure). The excerpt that follows is from a February 19, 1921 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the volume.
…
Tags: George Conklin, Harvey Woods Root
Despite being witness to the murderous Orwellian circus that is contemporary North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee, who escaped that insane state as a teenager and has authored the book The Girl With Seven Names, believes the two Koreas will eventually reunite, free of tyranny. She told Michael Rundle of Wired UK of her experiences. An excerpt:
“North Koreans are tragically oppressed,” she said. “Despite the risks to my personal safety I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.”
That nightmare leaves North Koreans unable to rely on anyone, she said — including each other. “We have to learn that we can’t trust anyone […] classmates are forced to report on each other and spy on each other […] Someone will hear you. The walls have ears and the fields have eyes [my mother] said,” Lee told WIRED 2015.
“We are forced to watch public executions. I watched my first one at the age of seven as I watched a man hanging by his neck from a bridge […] Due to hate, fear and oppression the North Koreans cannot help themselves.”
In a harrowing description of her former home, Lee described a process by which young girls were routinely forced to perform and be judged by the state, to compile a “pleasure group” for the leader and regime — effectively to serve as sexual slaves.•
Tags: Hyeonseo Lee, Michael Rundle
Overpromising is cruel.
In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.
When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.
Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:
Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.
Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•
Tags: David A. Mindell, John Markoff, Martin Ford
Donald Trump, a nest of rats wearing a power tie, is a self-made man, if you don’t count a huge inheritance, massive bank bailouts and government-sponsored land grabs. From Deborah Friedell’s London Review of Books piece about Michael D’Antonio’s Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success:
“I have made myself very rich,” Trump says (over and over again). “I would make this country very rich.” That’s why he should be president. He insists that he’s the ‘most successful man ever to run’, never mind the drafters of the constitution or the supreme commander of the allied forces. Bloomberg puts Trump’s current net worth at $2.9 billion, Forbes at $4.1 billion. The National Journal has worked out that if Trump had just put his father’s money in a mutual fund that tracked the S&P 500 and spent his career finger-painting, he’d have $8 billion. Wisely, D’Antonio refrains from offering an estimate of Trump’s net worth. When Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times journalist, suggested in Trump Nation (2005) that Trump probably wasn’t a billionaire at all, he was sued for libel. The case was eventually thrown out, as Trump must have known it would be, but O’Brien’s publisher is thought to have spent much more money defending the book than it could have made.
It’s not just vanity that requires Trump to claim that all his deals make gazillions: his current business requires it. Even when his projects fail – his golf course in Aberdeenshire, to take one example, has lost £3.5 million over the last two years – he makes money through letting other people put his name on their projects: no risk, little work, just a licensing fee upfront or a share of the profits. He doesn’t actually own the Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Palace or Trump Place or Trump Plaza or Trump Park Avenue or Trump Soho, or the many Trump buildings throughout South America, Turkey, South Korea and the Caucasus. Developers buy the use of his name because enough customers believe in it: “It’s not even a question of ego. It’s just that my name makes everything more successful,” he says. And so there have been Trump board games and phone contracts, credit cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars that look like gold bars, cologne sold only by Macy’s (“Success by Trump“). He made $200 million over 14 seasons by being the star of The Apprentice, playing “Donald Trump.” the richest, tycooniest man in the world. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump made more than $40 million from thousands of students who enrolled in entrepreneurship classes at “Trump University.” Some say it was a scam, and many of them have joined class action lawsuits to get their money back (one says that “for my $35,000+ all I got was books that I could have gotten from the library”). The attorney general of New York has filed a lawsuit against Trump for fraud.•
American drug laws are dumb beyond belief, and apart from selling these substances to children, no one should go to prison for their sale or use. There are more effective (and less-expensive) ways of managing the situation.
While our perplexing “war on drugs” might be silly, it may not be the reason for mass incarceration, a belief echoed resoundingly this political season, even by politicians who were calling for mandatory minimums not too long ago. In a Washington Post editorial, Charles Lane writes of a new study that seems to dispel the myth that our cells are bulging because of nonviolent drug offenders. An excerpt:
At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that “two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related.” …
Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. Fiorina’s numbers, for example, are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent of all state and federal inmates were in for violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault), according to the latest Justice Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, since the definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 federal prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time for weapons violations.
Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, heroin and meth, not “smoking marijuana.”
Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 — a stunning 363 percent increase — though it has been on a downward trajectory since the latter date.But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, not more recently, according to a review of government data reported by Fordham law professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of Legislation. More than half of the overall increase was due to punishment of violent offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.•
Tags: Charles Lane
A recent post concerned Liz Parrish, the BioViva CEO, who surprisingly announced herself as patient zero for the company’s experimental youth-restoring gene therapies, a move whose specifics are shrouded in secrecy. This treatment will not be cheap and widely available in three years, despite what the firm says, but many other questions are left unanswered. Antonio Regalado of Technology Review looks into the turbulent aftermath of the shocking proclamation. An excerpt:
Elizabeth Parrish, the 44-year-old CEO of a biotechnology startup called BioViva, says she underwent a gene therapy at an undisclosed location overseas last month, a first step in what she says is a plan to develop treatments for ravages of old age like Alzheimer’s and muscle loss. “I am patient zero,” she declared during a Q&A on the website Reddit on Sunday. “I have aging as a disease.”
Since last week, MIT Technology Review has attempted to independently verify the accuracy of Parrish’s claims, particularly how she obtained the genetic therapy. While many key details could not be confirmed, people involved with her company said the medical procedure took place September 15 in Colombia.
The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging. It also raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators. The field of anti-aging research is known for attracting a mix of serious scientists, vitamin entrepreneurs, futurists, and cranks peddling various paths to immortality, including brain freezing.
Parrish’s assertions set off a scramble among members of her company’s scientific advisory board to understand what had occurred. •
I’ve always thought Karl Lagerfeld a nightmarish character from a silent German Expressionist horror film, but, unfortunately, one with sound. After reading Andrew O’Hagan’s new portrait of the designer in T Magazine, it all makes sense. An excerpt:
He hates it when people talk to him about their illnesses. (‘‘I’m not a doctor!’’) And he thinks psychoanalysis is the enemy of creativity. ‘‘Analysis?’’ he said. ‘‘What for? To get back to normality? I don’t want to be normal.’’
‘‘Maybe that’s why you like silent movies,’’ I said. ‘‘Because you don’t like the talking cure.’’
‘‘Yes, the discovery of silent movies,’’ he said, ‘‘was much more important to me than discovering the talkies. To me they are images. Like illustrations. I remember when I was at school I saw the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I could not sleep for three weeks because I thought the strange marionette played by Conrad Veidt would come onto my balcony and then kill me the same way. I have stills from the making of the movie and the only surviving German poster of the opening. I bought it for a fortune.’’•
Tags: Andrew O’Hagan, Karl Lagerfeld
Malcolm Gladwell has written a powerful New Yorker piece about the new abnormal in America of mass violence perpetrated by teenage boys and young men, often at schools. While these acts are a small fraction of U.S. gun violence, they leave deep scars. Gladwell looks for answers at the intersection of developmental disorders, the easy access to weapons and a fatal type of “fan fiction” that has gone viral in the past two decades, with Columbine in 1999 being the shot heard ’round the world.
The article’s most important point, I think, is that there’s no pattern of history among the killers, who come from backgrounds good or bad. What they seem to share is a seemingly inexplicable attraction to spectacles of public violence that have preceded them and provided a modus operandi.
As a dedicated reader of newspapers from the 19th and early-20th century, I can assure you there were always very deeply troubled people in America, probably way more than there are now (per capita, anyhow). They just didn’t have such easy access to guns or at least the type of automatic weapons that exist today, nor were they easily connected to the violent delusions of others.
I don’t see much of a realistic answer for arms control in the long term. The laws should certainly be rewritten to address gun proliferation, but the country is already awash in weapons and with 3D printers coming our way, it will be a tricky battle to win, even without discussing the thorny politics. Similar frustrations are likely in trying to prevent copycat violence among teenage boys, perhaps ones on the autism spectrum, in the Internet Age. For all the good the democratization of media has encouraged, we’re also prone to its dark mirror.
Gladwell conducted a really good Reddit AMA about the subject. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
That was the toughest article I had to get through in a while but that is a testament to your writing style. What do you think are the ways we can fix this culture of violence? Do you think pop culture is to blame?
As a member of the media, what are the steps you can take to stop this kind of problem?
Malcolm Gladwell:
Pop culture is to blame, absolutely. But the issue is that pop culture today is not what it was thirty years ago. The internet has created a rabbit warren for the all sorts of twisted fantasies: the paradox of the internet is that the group who seem to use it the most (teenagers) are those least well-equipped to deal with its pathologies.
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Question:
Mass shootings (and even more so school shootings seem to be the very definition of outliers (1% or less). Why are we focusing on those instead of the 60% of gun deaths that are suicides or 30% that are non-mass homicides? It seems we have it all backwards.
Malcolm Gladwell:
Another very good question. Yes, you are quite right. The magnitude of gun violence in the U.S. is such that school shootings represent a very minor part of the problem. In a logical world, we would be talking way more about the other 99 percent. That said, I think the issue with this particular genre of violence is that it has the potential to spread: that was the point of my article. What began as a problem specific to teens were serious troubles and disorders has now engulfed teenagers who are, for all intents and purposes, normal. That’s scary, because we don’t know where the epidemic will lead.
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Question:
Are you concerned that your article’s focus on autism spectrum disorders as a correlate for schooling shooting behavior plays into the typical distraction of “mental health” we hear about after most mass shootings? America doesn’t have a monopoly on mental illness, but we seem to have one on school shootings.
Relatedly, do you worry that a story like this stigmatizes the mentally ill even further?
Malcolm Gladwell:
Very important question. First of all I was writing about a case in which the subject’s ASD was at the center of his entire legal experience. It was his diagnosis with mild ASD that led to him being put on probation–instead of behind bars. So I had to deal with it. The second half of the piece, which I gather you’ve read, is explicitly about trying to explain how we should NOT confuse John LaDue’s attitudes and condition for those of the classic school shooters, like Eric Harris. That’s why I have the long discussion of “counterfeit deviance”–the notion that we need to be very careful in assessing the criminality of people with ASD when it comes to certain kinds of behaviors: someone like John LaDue might be very innocently drawn into a troubling pattern of behavior. I was trying to fight the tendency to stigmatize those with ASD. I hope that came across.
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Question:
Do you believe that curbing this school attack trend is more a matter of understanding/addressing the psychological condition you describe in the article, or equally or more to do with gun control?
Malcolm Gladwell:
I think that gun control is crucial for lowering the overall homicide rate: there’s no question in my mind that the easy availability of guns in the U.S. is a huge contributor to the fact that we have a homicide rate several times higher than other industrialized nations. But school schooters are a far more complicated issue: they are a subgenre of homicide that is about a specific fantasy that has taken hold of some teenaged boys. We could crack down on guns and still have a Columbine.
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Question:
A lot of people will put these shootings down to sheer ‘craziness’ and they consider them isolated incidents, but here in Ireland we too have ‘crazy’ people and people who aren’t stable, but they don’t have guns so they don’t end up killing people. So surely guns are the problem? Because if you don’t have a gun then you aren’t mobilised to shoot, so this idea of ‘copycats’ you have is really interesting to think about, I couldn’t agree with you more. Excellent article and I look forward to a response!
Malcolm Gladwell:
I couldn’t agree more. Except that I have no idea how to get American “back” to the “pre-gun” condition like Ireland or England or any other Western nation is in. Remember its not just guns that are the issue here. It is the existence of an accompanying powerful fantasy about how they ought to be used.•
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell
Tags: Miss Jennie Sears
During the 2012 Presidential election, Mitt Romney took the Obama Administration to task for wasting taxpayer money with stimulus funds loaned to Solyndra and Tesla, two failed companies. The former had indeed gone belly up, while Elon Musk’s auto company paid back the money ahead of scheduled and has since become a substantial firm, one whose batteries may be repurposed to help cultivate a wider green revolution.
Anyone who’s spent time around venture capital folks knows they have more misses than hits, but they can end up far ahead in the aggregate if they continually take wise risks. In trying to combat climate change with research-and-development monies, governments should be held to this same standard and not an impossible one. The free market isn’t incentivized to change to alternative energies, and change is dearly needed.
In an Atlantic interview by James Bennet, Bill Gates names gov’t R&D and carbon taxes as desperately needed tools, stressing that “by 2050, wealthy nations like China and the United States…must be adding no more carbon to the skies.” An excerpt:
On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:
Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.
And for energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market. So the R&D amount in energy is surprisingly low compared with medicine or digital stuff, where both the government spending and the private-sector spending is huge.
On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:
Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.•
Tags: Bill Gates, James Bennet
When you continually appeal to the margins, that’s where you end up. The GOP found the radicals and paranoiacs in their midst useful for a good while. The Reagan, Gingrich and Limbaugh surges were built on pandering to those with rigid feelings about race, religion and rights. In the early days of coded language and manipulation, the Republicans were still about winning governance and trying to do something with it. But the ante was gradually upped, the most fervent of the loyalists they’d cultivated demanded it, the discourse grew vicious, and disdain for government born in the public consciousness during the Reagan years became a full-grown monster. Now the party is a Frankenstein supported by a torch-carrying mob.
David Brooks’ opinions in the NYT often appall me, but in his latest column he sums up the party’s slow passage into insanity, how the sideshow moved to the center ring, better and more succinctly than anyone on the Left or Right has. An excerpt:
By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible. Conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions. They also see the nation as one organic whole. Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they are still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love.
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.•
Tags: David Brooks
It’s pretty needless to have a robot maître d’ take orders in an autonomous restaurant–beyond novelty, of course–but a Robohow project that’s used Wikihow instructions to train machines in this function demonstrates how customizable and flexible AI may become: One machine that can be taught different tasks depending on need.
From Michelle Starr at Cnet:
The team has been using the website WikiHow as a robotic learning tool. It turns out that WikiHow’s step-by-step instructions are perfect for breaking down an activity into its component tasks, and teaching robots to understand verbal, rather than programmed, commands.
To date, they have trained the Willow Garage PR2 robot to make pancakes and pizza using WikiHow. They have also taught a robot named Rosie to make sandwiches and popcorn. This is part of a broader mission to advance machine learning, as well as teach robots how to perform human-scale manipulation activities that can be spoken by an operator, an interface anyone can use.
The latest step in this research involves the humanoid robot Romeo from Aldebaran robotics. Romeo has been trained to act as a waiter, greeting and taking a food order from a human “customer” in a restaurant simulation.•
Tags: Michelle Starr
My guess, and we’re all only guessing, is that the superintelligence so many philosophers and technologists fear will ultimately be a tool for the next iteration of humans, who’ll be just as human as we are, even though they’ll differ from us even more radically than we do from, say, Homo floresiensis. Is there a chance that we can be subsumed by intelligent machines? Sure, but I think a merger more likely.
In a Conversation essay, Alvin DMello writes of Intelligence Augmentation aids, from papyrus to HoloLens. An excerpt:
Lately there has been some major speculation about the threat posed by superintelligent AI. Philosophers such as Nick Bostrom have explored many issues in this realm.
AI today is far behind the intelligence possessed by any individual human. However, that might change. Yet the fear of superintelligent AI is predicated on there being a clear distinction between the AI and us. With IA, that distinction is blurred, and so too is the possibility of there being a conflict between us and AI.
Intelligence amplification is an old concept, but is coming to the fore with the development of new augmented reality devices. It may not be long before your own thinking might be enhanced to superhuman levels thanks to a seamless interface with technology.•
Tags: Alvin DMello
Ray Kurzweil, who will never die, is a brilliant and amusing inventor and thinker, but I believe he’s wrong in predicting that in 20 years or so we’re going to have nanobots introduced into our systems that allow us to directly plug our brains into the Internet. In what appears to be a Singularitarian circle jerk, some other futurists, including his associate Peter Diamandis, are very excited by his pronouncement, though let’s remember that Kurzweil has sometimes been wildly off in his prognostications. Remember when computers disappeared in 2009 because information was written directly onto our retinae by eyeglasses and contact lenses? Neither do I.
Such developments aren’t theoretically impossible, but such an aggressive timeline and so little attention to the downsides is puzzling. From Diamandis at Singularity Hub:
The implications of a connected neocortex are quite literally unfathomable. As such, any list I can come up with will pale in comparison to reality…but here are a few thoughts to get the ball rolling.
Brain-to-Brain Communication
This will deliver a new level of human intimacy, where you can truly know what your lover, friend or child is feeling. Intimacy far beyond what we experience today by mere human conversation. Forget email, texting, phone calls, and so on — you’ll be able to send your thoughts to someone simply by thinking them.
Google on the Brain
You’ll have the ability to “know” anything you desire, at the moment you want to know it. You’ll have access to the world’s information at the tip of your neurons. You’ll be able to calculate complex math equations in seconds. You’ll be able to navigate the streets of any cities, intuitively. You’ll be able to hop into a fighter jet and fly it perfectly. You’ll be able to speak and translate any language effortlessly.Scalable Intelligence
Just imagine that you’re in a bind and you need to solve a problem (quickly). In this future world, you’ll be able to scale up the computational power of your brain on demand, 10x or 1,000x…in much the same way that algorithms today can spool up 1,000 processor cores on Amazon Web Service servers.•
Tags: Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil
When I wrote a brief piece a few years back about Coma, the 1978 Michael Crichton film about corporatized organ theft in a world of wealth disparity, I suggested that no business of tomorrow would want our organs, but they would desire the content of one organ in particular, our brains. It started with search engines and software tracking preferences, locations, etc. The Internet of Things will make the process ubiquitous, yet it’ll seem mundane.
From Brooks Barnes’ NYT article about Disney providing seed money to start-ups:
Roughly half of the companies selected this time involve using data – in one case collected directly from people’s brains – to make products more appealing.
Emotiv, for instance, relies on neuroscience and futuristic headgear to “measure emotions in real time to make actionable business decisions,” Tan Le, the company’s chief executive, said during her presentation. Emotiv technology also allows users to move objects – Jedi-like – with only their thoughts.
Decisive collects information from social media (shares, emojis, comments) to provide a real-time score for how consumers respond to products. (Red images apparently generate less interest than purple images.) Using artificial intelligence software, Imperson allows fans to chat seamlessly online with people who don’t exist, namely cartoon characters. Some details can be “remembered” by the character from chat to chat to enhance the depth of the interaction.•
Tags: Brooks Barnes, Tan Le
Nine decades before the election of President Barack Obama, a mixed-race person who identifies as African American, Charles Curtis, a mixed-race man who identified as Native American, was elected as Herbert Hoover’s Vice President.
A child of a French, Kaw, Osage and Potawatomi mom and an English, Scotch and Welsh father, Curtis was born in the Kansas Territory and raised on a Kaw reservation. He was known as “Indian Charlie” as a boy and was a spectacular rider of horses and an accomplished prairie jockey. His mother died when he was three, and Curtis was cared for at various times by both sets of grandparents, taking an education in Topeka. A career in law led to one in politics, the biggest horse race of them all, which he also mastered. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle profiled Curtis in early 1929, soon after he he was sworn into executive office.
Tags: Charles Curtis
Marilynne Robinson (the writer) and Barack Obama (the President) are the type of people I’m happy if surprised America still turns out. They seem of this time but of another as well, with a sense of history that feels as if it’s being rapidly churned out of the collective memory.
In a conversation that took place recently in Iowa, and is now being published in two parts in the New York Review of Books (read part one), the pair have a wide-ranging talk, touching on many topics, including how fear–and the exploitation of it–is a large part of the contemporary political discourse. Obama, despite having his Administration and supporters mentioned in the same breath as slavery and Nazism by Ben Carson alone, is confident the madness will pass. An excerpt:
President Obama:
Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.
President Obama:
So you just kind of mash them all together?
Marilynne Robinson:
I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?
President Obama:
Yes.
Marilynne Robinson:
Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.
President Obama:
Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.•
Tags: Barack Obama, Marilynne Robinson
Say what you will about Bill Simmons, but the guy knows talent, as he abundantly proved when staffing up Grantland, his ESPN pop-culture-and-sports combo, which has gone far deeper in analysis of screen and sound and society than anyone had a right to expect. It’s been feared that an exodus of gifted people would follow his ugly divorce from the company, and that now seems to be the case. Sad, but even before the industry itself became fragile, the dynamic of the masthead always was. Erase the wrong name and others magically disappear.
Alex Pappademas, one the really perceptive critics there, has written about Aaron Sorkin’s new Steve Jobs dreamscape. An excerpt:
In Steve Jobs, Sorkin takes interactions and confrontations that occurred at different points in Jobs’s life, or not at all, and reimagines them as having taken place backstage in the minutes immediately before Jobs unveiled one of three new products — Apple’s Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Computer in 1988, and the original Bondi blue iMac G3 in 1998. (Each sequence gets its own distinct look: grainy/nostalgic 16-millimeter for the Mac, sumptuous 35 for the NeXT, warts-and-all digital for the iMac.) The film’s more-than-a-little-bit cockamamy sub-premise is that on each of these crucially important days, Jobs also found himself scheduled for back-to-back come-to-Jesus meetings with people he’d wronged on his way to the top, including Lisa and her mother, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston); Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, putting deepening wrinkles of hurt in his Fozzie Bear rumble); and the company’s third CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels, perfectly wry and wounded).
Sculley shows up as a slayable father figure/level boss in all three chapters, even though in real life he and Jobs rarely spoke after spring 1985, when Jobs fought Sculley for control of Apple’s board and lost. And while Mac marketing guru Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) did follow Jobs from Apple to NeXT and was famously one of the few people who could stand up to him and live to tell the tale, she’d moved on to a position at General Magic and then to retirement by the time the iMac hit. I’m also going to assume Hoffman was more than the sassy-but-supportive Sorkin work-wife figure this movie makes her out to be. Of course, Sorkin has freely admitted that if any of these scenes actually happened the way he’s written them, it’d be news to him — but when you see the movie, chances are you’ll understand exactly why he played so fast and loose with history. By tossing out the biopic beat sheet and zeroing in on the parts of Jobs’s business that most resembled show business, Sorkin has moved Jobs’s story into his own comfort zone. It’s now a three-act backstage-panic comedy/melodrama about a brilliant, work-fixated white guy whose genius far exceeds his emotional intelligence and the people who can’t help but love him anyway.•
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Alex Pappademas, Bill Simmons, Steve Jobs
Ben Goertzel, the Brazilian-born, U.S.-trained mathematician, is an academic and entrepreneur focused on the big thoughts of our age: intelligent machines, life extension, uploading brain content, etc. He guesses the Singularity will happen this century (I would bet the over), but in general speaks of amazing things that are theoretically possible without stamping an overly aggressive ETA on them. He’s certainly right in saying that AI is going to be developed no matter what, so it’s best as many conscientious people as possible are involved in that process.
Goertzel lives part of the time in Hong Kong, and here’s a piece of a South China Morning Post Magazine article by Sarah Lazarus in which he discusses his ideas:
MANUFACTURING EVIL All new technologies come with potential risks and rewards. Since the beginning of humanity, we have pushed forwards regardless. When we switched from hunter-gathering to agriculture, when we created the industrial revolution, we had no idea whether these transformations would bring danger. It’s the same with AI. The worst possible outcomes are extremely dark. This does worry me – I don’t want to see my kids disassembled so their molecules can be used to make more hard-drive space for machines. The best possible outcomes are utopic and amazing. I have a research team called iCog Labs, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. When I visit, it seems like half the people live on the street, suffering from hunger and disease. If we can resolve these problems with AI, by making it so cheap to create material wealth that, even with our perverted economic system, everyone has enough to get by and be happy, that’s a big plus. AI will be created whether I’m involved or not. I hope to have a positive impact on how it’s used – to my mind it’s better that the work’s done by people who want to benefit the planet, than by people in a top-secret military project.
ACHIEVING IMMORTALITY I work on AI for various companies. The range of applications is huge. I’m collaborating with Hanson Robotics to create robots that look and think like humans, and with investment management firm Aidyia Holdings, which uses AI to outperform human traders on the stock market. I’m also interested in life extension. I remember realising, at a very young age, that everyone was going to die one day. I couldn’t understand why others just accepted this. It seemed like a really bad idea to me. I’ve signed up to have my body transported to a facility in Arizona and frozen, if I die. When the technology’s ready, I will be brought back to life. Ideally, though, we’ll find a cure for ageing before I die. The best way would be to build a superhuman thinking machine and let it solve all the hard science problems.
I can’t resist seeing what the current technology can do. I’m working with a team to compare the DNA of supercentenarians – people who have lived to 110 years or more – with the DNA of people who lived to 80. We’ve found specific genes we think are responsible for their longevity and we’re applying for patents. The question is, can you edit the DNA of an adult human to give them that capability?•
Tags: Ben Goertzel, Sarah Lazarus