Adrienne LaFrance

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“The Idea Of A City Without Street Signs Is A Bit Startling”

August 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If and when driverless cars become the way to travel, whether that day is approaching as fast as Elon Musk thinks or if it’s a further patch down the road, the ramifications will be many. Car ownership won’t be required, nor will it even be necessary for fleets of taxis to be “owned” in any traditional sense. Traffic fatalities will likely plummet, and there should be a salubrious impact on the environment. Of course, the bottom will be pulled out from under the middle class should driving jobs (and all the other enterprises they support) disappear.

Even smaller changes will snake their way through our streets and highways. Case in point: The sun will set on the SUNSET BLVD. street sign and all the rest. Signage won’t be required to direct vehicles and pedestrians provided real-time mapping and augmented reality are adequately developed.

From an Adrienne LaFrance article at the Atlantic:

A map that’s unchanging is actually a map that’s inaccurate. Reality, including the places around us, is always in flux.

Increasingly, digital mobile maps reflect this more liminal state, and—with the help of satellites and GPS and traffic reports and street-level photography—do so with improved precision. (Incidentally, Uber is embarking on its own mapping efforts so it can rely less on Google.) That precision will matter more and more as we head toward a future in which the markings of human-made maps will be read by computers, like the machines that will drive themselves from one place to the next with us sitting inside of them.

And when that happens, the other markers of the old world—like street signs—will eventually disappear. The idea of a city without street signs is a bit startling. Or it was to me, anyway, when my colleague Ian Bogost wrote about it last month. He touched on the same thing that preoccupied the Uber driver I spoke with. Modern maps are free, but they’re enormously valuable.

Google or Apple might restrict access to their mapping services in areas that don’t adopt political positions convenient to their corporate interests. They might even elect to alter the physical environment accordingly. In America, street signs are yoked to signage built for human drivers, mounted atop traffic signals and stop signs. Once those devices aren’t needed, their attached markings might also disappear. Perhaps tech giants could persuade municipalities to remove street signs and markers to realize cleaner, less distracting urban conveyance via the synergy of app-street-and-car transit networks.

It’s jarring to imagine a physical world stripped of these familiar markers, but street signs have already changed dramatically since the early mile markers that dotted the roads of ancient Rome.•

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“I Believe We Are Going To See A Tremendous Increase In Demand For Public Transit”

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

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In Adrienne LaFrance’s latest smart Atlantic piece on technology, the writer suggest Honolulu as the ideal place for Google to import its driverless technology, since the Oahu city has optimal weather conditions and terrible traffic. Embedded in the latter part of the article is a counterintuitive contention that makes sense: The rise of the autonomous car may lead to a greater, not lesser, demand for public transit, even if the eternal search for parking spots is removed from the equation. The excerpt:

If driverless cars are going to take off anywhere, Oahu seems like a strong candidate for early adoption. That’s still no guarantee.

“I believe that driverless taxis are going to induce a large-scale abandonment of car-ownership in urban areas over the next two to three decades,” said Shem Lawlor, the director of Clean Transportation at the Blue Planet Foundation in Honolulu. “However, since the pricing will still not be as cheap as walking, biking, or transit—and since it’s logistically impossible for driverless taxi services to ever move a sizable percentage of peak-hour traffic volume, I believe we are going to see a tremendous increase in demand for public transit, biking infrastructure and walkable neighborhoods.”•

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“It’s Sort Of Soft Fascism In A Way”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic article “What Is a Robot?” is one of my favorite pieces thus far in 2016. As the title suggests, the writer tries to define what qualities earns a machine the name “robot,” a term perhaps not as slippery as “existential” but one that’s nebulous nonetheless. The piece does much more, presenting a survey of robotics from ancient to contemporary times and asking many questions about where the sector’s current boom may be leading us.

Two points about the article:

  • It quotes numerous roboticists and those analyzing the field who hold the opinion that a robot must be encased, embodied. I think this is a dangerous position. A robot to me is anything that is given instructions and then completes a task. It’s increasingly coming to mean anything that can receive those basic instructions and then grow and learn on its own, not requiring more input. I don’t think it matters if that machine has an anthropomorphic body like C-3PO or if it’s completely invisible. If we spend too much time counting fingers and toes, we may miss the bigger picture.
  • Early on, there’s discussion about the master-slave relationship humans now enjoy with their machines, which will only increase in the short term–and may eventually be flipped. The following paragraph speaks to this dynamic: “In the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a passage known as the master-slave dialectic. In it, Hegel argues, among other things, that holding a slave ultimately dehumanizes the master. And though he could not have known it at the time, Hegel was describing our world, too, and aspects of the human relationship with robots.” I believe this statement is true should machines gain consciousness, but it will remain a little hyperbolic as long as they’re not. Holding sway over Weak AI that does our bidding certainly changes the meaning of us and will present dicey ethical questions, but they are very different ones than provoked by actual slavery. Further, the human mission being altered doesn’t necessarily mean we’re being degraded.

From LaFrance:

Making robots appear innocuous is a way of reinforcing the sense that humans are in control—but, as Richards and Smart explain, it’s also a path toward losing it. Which is why so many roboticists say it’s ultimately not important to focus on what a robot is. (Nevertheless, Richards and Smart propose a useful definition: “A robot is a constructed system that displays both physical and mental agency, but is not alive in the biological sense.”)

“I don’t think it really matters if you get the words right,” said Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “To me, the most important distinction is whether a technology is designed primarily to be autonomous. To really take care of itself without much guidance from anybody else… The second question—of whether this thing, whatever it is, happens to have legs or eyes or a body—is less important.”

What matters, in other words, is who is in control—and how well humans understand that autonomy occurs along a gradient. Increasingly, people are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. “People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date,” Markoff told me. “That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace. Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.”

“A society-wide discussion about autonomy is essential,” he added.•

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“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Our information is inside the machine now, but soon we’ll be there, too.

We now enter queries and likes and itineraries into a networked machine that continues to learn more about us and people like us. Soon the Internet of Things will be established, and the machine will escape its casing and live among us, so quiet, not even making a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. Driverless car technology will mature and we’ll be sitting inside a computer which will be inside another computer. In our pockets will be more computers. They’ll all be measuring and tracking, tabulating, taking a pulse, all the time, not just following us but guiding us. The data will be worthwhile, will help us achieve a safer and, in some ways, saner world, but it will be almost impossible to opt out, to be left alone. We’ll be a known quantity. It will seem like progress.

The opening of “How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy,” a wonderfully lucid Atlantic essay by Adrienne LaFrance, which opines that the “price of convenience [will be] surveillance”:

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.

Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office—our destination—automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. “Good morning,” says the car’s humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day.

You decide you’d like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so. “Peet’s coffee, half-a-mile away,” it confirms. Peet’s, as it turns out, is a few doors down from Suds Cleaners. The car suggests you pick up your dry cleaning while you’re in the neighborhood. “After work instead,” you say. The car tweaks your evening travel itinerary accordingly.

As we run into Peet’s to grab coffee, the car circles the block. Then, we’re back in the vehicle, en route to your office once again. There’s a lunch special coming up at the vegetarian place you like, the car tells you as we pass the restaurant. With your approval, it makes a reservation for Friday. We ride by a grocery store and a list of sale items appears on the screen. With a few taps, you’ve added them to your existing grocery list. The car is scheduled to pick up and deliver your order this evening.

We’re less than a mile from your office now. Just like every morning, your schedule for the morning—a conference call at 10 a.m., a meeting at 11 a.m.—appears on the screen, along with a reminder that today is a colleague’s birthday.

This is the age of self-driving cars, an era when much of the minutiae of daily life is relegated to a machine. Your commute was pleasant, relaxing, and efficient. Along with promising unprecedented safety on public roadways, driverless cars could make our lives a lot easier—freeing up people’s time and attention to focus on other matters while they’re moving from one place to the next.

But there’s a darker side to all this, too.•

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“You’re Going To See A New Age For The Automobile”

December 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Always enjoy reading Adrienne Lafrance in the Atlantic. Her latest article explores the competition to create the first truly driverless car, with the entrants including contemporary tech powerhouses (Google, Tesla, Uber, Apple) and Big Auto stalwarts. Google, having entered the race early and conducted ample road-testing, is commonly believed to have the advantage, but that may not be so. Certainly there were plenty of “champions” crowned early in the original automobile race of the late 1800s and early 1900s, before the game played out.

My guess is that as in that competition, there’ll be quite a few winners in the sector and many more losers. Should 3D printers become ubiquitous after driverless is perfected, the field will shift again, with smaller players no longer barred from entry. One important question is whether the implementation of the technology should be gradual or if the machine should be “born whole.” Such a decision is considered crucial because, as Lafrance writes, “the amount of money at stake is potentially unprecedented.”

An excerpt:

Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.

If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet’s most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.

“This is an arms race,” said Larry Burns, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and a former GM executive who also serves as an advisor to Google. “You’re going to see a new age for the automobile.”

* * *

Many people have declared Google the frontrunner in the race for self-driving cars. The company has the road experience, mapping databases, artificial intelligence know-how, and, presumably, a significant head start. As of October, its fleet of vehicles had logged 1.3 million miles of test-driving in fully-autonomous mode since 2012—the distance-equivalent of 90 years of human driving, the company said. But that doesn’t mean Google will ultimately win. The major players each bring unique and formidable advantages.•

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“Every 26 Million Years, There Were Huge Impacts And Major Die-Offs”

November 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

We enter into a world that amazingly allows for complex, multicellular life, but is hostile to it. It’s not just diseases, quakes, storms and other relatively small-scale horrors out to get us, but now and again calamity writ large, like comet showers. We are born to die, of course, but sometimes terrifyingly and en masse. We are all dinosaurs, in a sense.

The opening of Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic piece about the regularity of mass extinctions, though not all the news is bad:

One thing we know for sure is that conditions on Earth were, shall we say, unpleasant for the dinosaurs at the moment of their demise. Alternate and overlapping theories suggest the great beasts were pelted with monster comets, drowned by mega-tsunamis, scorched with lava, starved by a landscape stripped of vegetation, blasted with the radiation of a dying supernova, cloaked in decades of darkness, and frozen in an ice age.

Now, a pair of researchers have new evidence to support a link between cyclical comet showers and mass extinctions, including the one that they believe wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, and Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, traced 260 million years of mass extinctions and found a familiar pattern: Every 26 million years, there were huge impacts and major die-offs. Their work was accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in September.•

 

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“Amazon Will Not Exist As We Know It In 100 Years”

October 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

A rose is a rose is a rose, but if you purchase an e-book written by Gertrude Stein, it isn’t what it seems.

When we bought literature in paper form, the “hardware” and “software” were ours for as long as we held onto the physical item, but virtual books (and articles, films, etc.) are leasing agreements that depend on all sorts of infrastructure remaining intact. And to quote the title of the most famous book by another author, Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. When the next companies destabilize today’s tech giants, Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple, will there be a hole in the culture that’s difficult to recover?

From “When Amazon Dies,” an excellent piece on the topic by Adrienne LaFrance at the Atlantic:

Increasingly, the purchase of digital works is treated like the purchase of software, which has gone from something you buy on a disc to something downloadable with an Internet connection. “You might think you’re buying Microsoft Office, but according to your user agreement you’re merely leasing it,” [media studies professor Siva] Vaidhyanathan said. “You can think of music and video as just another form of software. There is a convergence happening.”

That convergence is built for a streaming world, one that’s driven by an expectation of instant gratification. “One of the things we’re doing increasingly is opting for convenience over dependability. And we’re doing it somewhat thoughtlessly,” Vaidhyanathan told me. “We have to recognize that it is temporary. Anything that is centrally collected in a server somewhere on Earth is ephemeral. Even if Amazon doesn’t go out of business in 20 years, Amazon will not exist as we know it in 100 years.”•

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“Highly Technical Changes To Computing Architecture Could Usher In A New Way Of Thinking About What A Computer is”

July 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Quantum computing would change everything, of course, amplifying our potential for good and bad alike. Saying it would let us go from zero to sixty in a second doesn’t do it justice–it would be more like sixty million. But figuring out how to manage the anarchy inherent to such a system has long seemed a bridge too far.

In “The Computers of Our Wildest Dreams,” Adrienne Lafrance’s Atlantic article, engineers at IBM and Google claim we’re close to a tipping point. An excerpt:

We are at an analogous crossroads today, a moment in which seemingly incremental and highly technical changes to computing architecture could usher in a new way of thinking about what a computer is. This particular inflection point comes as quantum computing crosses a threshold from the theoretical to the physical.

Quantum computing promises processing speeds and heft that seem unimaginable by today’s standards. A working quantum computer—linked up to surveillance technology, let’s say—might be able to instantly identify a single individual in real-time by combing through a database that includes billions of faces. Such a computer might also be able to simulate a complex chemical reaction, or crack through the toughest encryption tools in existence. (There’s an entire field of study dedicated to post-quantum cryptography. It’s based on writing algorithms that could withstand an attack by a quantum computer. People still aren’t sure if such security is even possible, which means quantum computing could wreak havoc on global financial systems, governments, and other institutions.)

It’s often said that a working quantum computer would take days to solve a problem that a classical computer would take millions of years to sort through. Now, theoretical ideas about the development of such machines—long relegated to the realm of mathematical formula—are being turned into computer chips.

“As we started making these better controlled, engineered systems that do the physics as written down in the textbook, we start to engage more theorists and people who are more interested in these systems actually existing,” said Jerry Chow, the manager of the experimental quantum computing group at IBM. “It’s definitely exciting because we’re starting to really make systems which are of interest in terms of not only potential applications but also underlying physics.”•

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“How Do We Build Machines That Will Make The World Better, Even When They Start Running Themselves?”

February 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

One tricky point about designing autonomous machines is that if we embed in them our current moral codes, we’ll unwittingly stunt progress. Our morality has a lot of room to develop, so theirs needs to as well. I don’t think Strong AI is arriving anytime soon, but it’s a question worth pondering. From Adrienne LaFrance at the Atlantic:

How do we build machines that will make the world better, even when they start running themselves? And, perhaps the bigger question therein, what does a better world actually look like? Because if we teach machines to reflect on their actions based on today’s human value systems, they may soon be outdated themselves. Here’s how MIRI researchers Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom explained it in a paper last year:

Suppose that the ancient Greeks had been the ones to face the transition from human to machine control, and they coded their own values as the machines’ final goal. From our perspective, this would have resulted in tragedy, for we tend to believe we have seen moral progress since the Ancient Greeks (e.g. the prohibition of slavery). But presumably we are still far from perfection.

We therefore need to allow for continued moral progress. One proposed solution is to give machines an algorithm for figuring out what our values would be if we knew more, were wiser, were more the people we wished to be, and so on. Philosophers have wrestled with this approach to the theory of values for decades, and it may be a productive solution for machine ethics.•

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