Andrew Leonard

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“Changing The Human Body Will Eventually Be As Routine As Changing Clothes”

March 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If I had to guess when we’d be able to bio-print fully functioning human organs, like kidneys, I would think it would be sometime in the twenty-first century but probably many decades down the line. Of course, who knows? In a Backchannel article, Andrew Leonard investigates the bold claims of controversial doctor Vladimir Mironov, “a one-time PETA-funded synthetic meat researcher who believes that eventually we will be bioprinting complete humans with bio-chipped brains.” The sci-fi reaching of some in the sector may be obscuring real advances. An excerpt:

Last November, a news report in Russia Today sent a shudder of excitement through the cluster of blogs and tech sites that cover bioprinting. Scientists at a Moscow laboratory called 3D Bioprinting Solutions announced that they would be able to print a functioning mouse thyroid gland by March 2015. Even better, declared the director of the lab, Vladimir Mironov, by 2018 the lab would start printing fully transplantable kidneys.

“The one who will be the first to print and then successfully transplant the kidney to the patient—who will stay alive—will for sure get a Nobel prize,” said Mironov.

Mironov was probably not wrong in his prediction that whoever first successfully bioprints a working human kidney will be showered with worldwide acclaim. Never mind the psychological benefits of improved techniques for breast reconstruction; the need for more kidneys is a pressing issue of life and death. In the U.S. alone more than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant right now—but only 17,000 transplants took place in all of 2013. Successful bioprinting of human kidneys will save thousands of lives.

I don’t normally put huge stock in Russia Today as a reliable news source, but I was very curious. I wanted to know, for example, how Mironov intended to solve the vasculature problem? My efforts to reach him, however, failed.

My efforts to Google him, on the other hand, were highly entertaining.

For starters, in 2011 Mironov wrote an article for The Futurist predicting that we would soon be printing out entire human beings.

It is not difficult to predict that changing the human body will eventually be as routine as changing clothes. Cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion.

Human-printing technology would eliminate the need to wait 18 years in order to get a fully developed adult: Humans could theoretically be printed on demand and be functionally ready in days or weeks. The brain could be replaced with biochips, though brain research would need to advance to such a level that brains could be reverse engineered and manufactured.

The line “cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion” contains some nuances that could apply to bioprinted breast nipples. But the notion of bioprinting complete humans on demand in days or weeks? To paraphrase Thomas Boland, such a task seems likely to prove very difficult.•

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“People Online Are Free To Act Out Their Worst Impulses”

September 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m not surprised we’re anonymously assholes online, but I am a little stunned by how much of this virtual ill behavior has ricocheted back into the offline world. The line is blurring. The opening of Andrew Leonard’s Salon interview with OkCupid founder Christian Rudder, whose new book, Dataclysm, paints a grim picture of how his customers behave in regards to race, sex and other matters, when searching for a mate online:

“Question:

So men are sexists, and we’re all racist?

Christian Rudder:

The more you look at the data, the more it does confirm the cynics’ intuition about humanity. People online are free to act out their worst impulses with very little incentive to act out their best. I guess it just goes to show how politeness or propriety keeps us decent human beings. Offline, society actually has a very good effect on behavior in a very large sense.

Question:

That raises an uncomfortable question: Does our wholesale move online undermine how society traditionally keeps us in line?

Christian Rudder:

I’m not qualified to give a real opinion on where society as a whole is headed, but I think when you look at stuff like rage storms on Twitter, or even the thing that happened yesterday — the celebrity nude photos being leaked — you see that there are definitely some disgusting impulses that the Internet can gratify instantaneously. In the same way Cool Ranch Doritos gratify certain taste receptors that are probably not very good for my digestive tract, things like Twitter or Reddit or even OkCupid gratify our tastes in ways that should probably best be left unsated.

Question:

How does that make you feel as a researcher? Have you become more cynical as a result of what you’ve learned by watching how people behave on OkCupid?

Christian Rudder:

I definitely have a certain amount of ambivalence about the Internet generally and what we do at OkCupid. OkCupid does a lot of great things. We do find people love, we do create marriage and children and happiness in a pure sense, in a way that, say, Amazon does not. But there is a downside: In the process of finding that love or sex or whatever they’re looking for, people are able to be more judgmental. It’s a fraught thing. I can see the good and the bad in all this, but where it all comes out in the end, I’m not sure. I think the existence of the Internet is a good thing, but I do wish people exercised more humanity in using these tools.”

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“Society Is Going To Realize That Power As Great As Uber’s Needs To Be Checked”

September 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Andrew Leonard of Salon might be getting ahead of himself when he sees a triumphant Uber getting its comeuppance from regulators, not only because the ride-share leader hasn’t yet won, but because Amazon, which has won and rolled over many an industry in the process, has been able to avoid legal curtailment simply because it gives people what they want and is willing to absorb short- and mid-term losses to do so. For the foreseeable future–and perhaps permanently–convenience will rule the day. But in the very long run, Leonard’s scenario is possible. An excerpt:

“The real question we should be asking ourselves is this: What happens when a company with the DNA of Uber ends up winning it all? What happens when the local taxi companies are destroyed and Lyft is crushed? When Uber has dominant market position in every major city on the globe? ‘UberEverywhere’ isn’t a joke. It’s a mantra, a call to arms, a holy ideology.

What happens when Uber’s priorities turn to generating cash rather than spending it? What happens to labor — the Uber drivers — when they have no alternative but Uber? What happens when it rains and the surge-pricing spikes and there’s nowhere else to go? A company with the street-fighting ethos of Uber isn’t going to let drivers unionize, and it certainly isn’t going to pay them more than it is required to by the harsh laws of competition. It will also dump them entirely in a nanosecond when self-driving cars prove that they are cheaper and safer. Making the case that drivers are benefitting from the current recruitment wars starts to look like a pretty short-term play. The more powerful Uber gets, the more leverage it will have over labor.

So here’s what’s going to happen. Society is going to realize that power as great as Uber’s needs to be checked. Uber, by virtue of its own success, will demonstrate where the lines need to be drawn for the general good. When Uber is the only game in town, the necessity for comprehensive requirements for commercial insurance and background checks will be obvious. When Uber starts using its logistics clout and unlimited investment capital to go after UPS and Hertz and FedEx, regulators will start wondering about antitrust issues.”

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“An Algorithm Doesn’t Boast Any Particular Party Identification”

August 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While Grover Norquist is baking his Libertarian ass at Burning Man, he’s simultaneously planning for Republicans to win back urban American by bogarting the Uber, riding the sharing economy to voting-booth victory. Of course, as Emily Badger pointed out last month in the Washington Post and Andrew Leonard expands on today in Salon, this economic disruption isn’t really staying within traditional Right and Left lanes. From Leonard’s piece:

“The semiotics of the announcement of David Plouffe’s hiring by Uber are fascinating. For example, consider how Plouffe used the word ‘inexorable’ in an interview with the New York Times.

‘We’re on an inexorable path of progress here,’ said Plouffe. Which translates as: Uber and the rest of Silicon Valley’s innovative disrupters are going to conquer us all in the long run, so we might as well just get used to it and stop throwing roadblocks in their way.

Beware! When a company with a name like ‘Uber’ is associated with ‘inexorable,’ resistance is obviously futile. And it’s worth recalling, this isn’t just about crushing existing taxi ‘cartels.’ Uber has made no secret of its ambitions to become a logistical hub that will compete with the likes of UPS and FedEx and Hertz, that will deliver groceries, as well as human beings, more efficiently than any other company. Uber’s algorithm is what’s inexorable. And an algorithm doesn’t boast any particular party identification: It’s just there to make consumers happy.

But fast on inexorability’s heels comes the issue of what the word ‘progressive’ really means. As Emily Badger reported, John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, supported Uber’s hire by saying that Plouffe will bring the same ‘progressive approach’ to campaigning for Uber as has been demonstrated by Colorado’s ’embrace of innovation and disruptive technology.’

When you pull your phone out of your pocket, click a couple of buttons, send a signal that bounces off a satellite, and a car-for-hire magically appears in front of you in a few minutes, it certainly feels like we are living in an age of technological progress. But the jury is still out on whether this kind of innovation is truly socially progressive. A society that puts consumers first has obvious disadvantages for workers.”

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“Increasingly, The Workers Are Invisible”

July 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Andrew Leonard’s new Salon article about the Digital Age’s emergent servant class:

“Fancy Hands — ‘Do What You Love — We’ll Do The Rest’ — is just one entrant in a growing cohort of companies that are outsourcing all kinds of humdrum work to the ‘cloud.’ The biggest names — Task Rabbit and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — have offered similar services for years. The market niche seems sure to boom further, propelled by a generation completely comfortable with turning to the smartphone as the first place to look for work.

The best cloud labor start-ups have received plenty of laudatory press coverage and rave reviews from users. In the specific case of Fancy Hands, one can instinctively understand the appeal. Who wouldn’t want their own executive assistant on hand 24/7 to deal with the drudgery that clogs up daily life. You know you would love to ‘automate all the boring parts of your life.’ Fancy Hands democratizes access to what previously was only available to the very well off.

That’s progress — for the consumer of the service. But one thing you discover when reading reviews of these services is that the vast majority of commentary focuses primarily on the users. Far less discussion is devoted to the producers, to the phenomenon of a new and growing class of drudges — the peons now making your phone calls and conducting your Google searches and washing your cars and toilets. These are not your father’s jobs. The typical Task Rabbit or Fancy Hands employee is invariably an independent contractor eligible for no benefits, quite often working for rates well below minimum wage, and able to exert zero leverage to resist employer abuse.

There are no paid holidays, no sick days and no health benefits in this new ‘distributed workforce.’ There are no unions in the world of ‘cloud labor,’ a class of worker that fits neatly into what some academics have dubbed the ‘precariat.’ Nor is it hard to understand why coverage of services like Fancy Hands rarely considers such things as working conditions, because, increasingly, the workers are invisible. They’re just another computer process working behind the scenes, albeit powered by coffee, rather than electricity.

Is this the future of work?”

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“Once You Create These Databases Is It Very Easy To Fall Into Function Creep”

April 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a discussion about why facial-recognition software didn’t work in the case of the Boston Marathon bombers but will likely be able to verify identity in such instances in the near future, Andrew Leonard of Salon asks Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Alessandro Acquisti about the potential downsides to improving this technology. The first part of his answer doesn’t bother me so much since witnesses and reporters and juries are very flawed anyway, but the second part does. An excerpt:

“Question:

Looking forward, are there reasons why improved facial recognition should worry us?

Alessandro Acquisti:

I am concerned by the possibility for error. We may start to rely on these technologies and start making decisions based on them, but the accuracy they can give us will always be merely statistical: a probability that these two images are images of the same person. Maybe that is considered enough by someone on the Internet who will go after a person who turns out to be innocent. There’s also the problem of secondary usage of data. Once you create these databases is it very easy to fall into function creep — this data should be used only in very limited circumstances but people will hold on to it because it may be useful later on for some secondary purpose.”

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