Things I’ve Read
Here is a semi-random selection of most fascinating articles I read over the last year. Should be enough here to keep you busy for a while!
(It’s an experiment; if you find any of the links useful and would like me to compile another (shorter) selection again in a few months, please let me know by hitting “recommend.”)
The Anthropocene, Cunning Men, Climate Victims and Algorithmic Persons
An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene
“I think we can make it through this current, calamitous time period. I envision a two-part process. First, we need to learn what to do in ecological terms. That sounds tricky, but the biosphere is robust and we know a lot about it, so really it’s a matter of refining our parameters; i.e. deciding how many of us constitutes a carrying capacity given our consumption, and then figuring out the technologies and lifestyles that would allow for that carrying capacity while also allowing ecosystems to thrive. We have a rough sense of these parameters now.
“The second step is the political question: It’s a matter of self-governance. We’d need to act globally, and that’s obviously problematic. But the challenge is not really one of intellect. It’s the ability to enforce a set of laws that the majority would have to agree on and live by, and those who don’t agree would have to follow.
“So this isn’t a question of reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics, or perceiving the strings of string theory. Instead it involves other aspects of intelligence, like sociability, long-range planning, law, and politics. Maybe these kinds of intelligence are even more difficult to develop, but in any case, they are well within our adaptive powers.
[Warren Ellis gives one of the smartest talks you’ll hear about futurism, scientific magic and working “in league with the fantastic.”]
How “Titanic” is helping a South Pacific tribe understand why their island is disappearing
“Not far from Kulenus, I met a family that had been planning to leave their shrinking island the week before, but chose to postpone to wait out stormy weather. They’d go in just a few days, moving to a larger island nearby. With her five-year-old granddaughter hugging her waist, Evodia Elias pointed over the water to show me how far the land once stretched: “This island was down there,” she said. “It was a big island, and now it’s getting small.” As on Kulenus, the area where she once gardened was gone, eroded into the water; sometimes, she said, when rough seas keep people from leaving the island to fish or visit gardens elsewhere, there isn’t enough food. She was the first “official climate refugee” I’d ever met, and she had a question for me about the water that was forcing her out of her home: “Some people were telling us that it depends on the ice melting, and that’s why we have these high tides,” she said. “Is that true?”
“Elias had heard that ice was melting, but hadn’t heard why. No amount of reading or writing about climate change can really prepare you to look into the face of someone who will soon flee her home and explain the greenhouse effect. It was hard to know where to begin — which new terms and concepts would need further explanation? — and I stumbled. When I awkwardly described the role of distant cars and factories (“putting something in the atmosphere that traps the heat of the sun”), I expected anger but got a resigned, knowing nod. In Papua New Guinea, where most people see little benefit from an export economy based on poorly regulated mining, logging, and agribusiness, people are familiar with paying a local cost for foreign gain.”
“The distinction between a corporation and an algorithm is fading. Does that make an algorithm a person? Here we have this interesting confluence between two totally different worlds. We have the world of money and politics and the so-called conservative Supreme Court, with this other world of what we can call artificial intelligence, which is a movement within the technical culture to find an equivalence between computers and people. In both cases, there’s an intellectual tradition that goes back many decades. Previously they’d been separated; they’d been worlds apart. Now, suddenly they’ve been intertwined.
“The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There’s always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn’t be a program. There has been a domineering subculture — that’s been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world — that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there’s an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we’re inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us.”
The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk
The leaders of our armed forces know what’s coming next — but deniers in Congress are ignoring the warnings
Sea-level rise is only one of the climate-driven threats that are making the world more dangerous and volatile. Drought contributed to the escalating food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, in 2011; it also helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and killing thousands of Nigerians…
As the world warms, the U.S. military will inevitably be called upon to conduct more disaster relief and humanitarian-aid missions. The U.S. military… also prides itself on its practical-mindedness, both in times of war and of peace. Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what color. “It’s our job to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it could be,” says Robert Freeman, a meteorologist and member of the Navy’s climate-change task force.
Google Cabs And Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs ‘Below The API’
[The gig economy and why workers stuck “below the API” find themselves in an economic dead end. We need terms like this to even understand what’s already happening around us.]
“Drivers are opting into a dichotomous workforce: the worker bees below the software layer have no opportunity for on-the-job training that advances their career, and compassionate social connections don’t pierce the software layer either. The skills they develop in driving are not an investment in their future. Once you introduce the software layer between ‘management’ (Uber’s full-time employees building the app and computer systems) and the human workers below the software layer (Uber’s drivers, Instacart’s delivery people), there’s no obvious path upwards. In fact, there’s a massive gap and no systems in place to bridge it.”
A solar future isn’t just likely — it’s inevitable
Will solar PV provide enough energy? Right now, you couldn’t power a city like New York fully on solar PV even if you covered every square inch of it with panels. The question is whether that will still be true in 30 or 50 years. What efficiencies and innovations might be unlocked when solar cells and energy storage become more efficient and ubiquitous? When the entire city is harvesting and sharing energy? When today’s centralized, hub-and-spoke electricity grid has evolved into a self-healing, many-to-many energy web? When energy works like a real market, built on millions of real-time microtransactions among energy peers, rather than the crude statist model of today’s utilities?
Systems that use energy will co-evolve alongside this new model of energy production, storage, and sharing. They will be smarter and more efficient, not only in the incremental ways current technologies are becoming more efficient, but in stepwise, nonlinear ways, replacing whole systems rather than parts.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Aurora” — space is bigger than you think
Cory Doctorow sums up my own thoughts on post-Space Colonization extraterrestrial science fiction:
The problems that Robinson’s characters experience in their interspatial adventures are contrived, of course. As with all lifeboat stories, the crisis of the lifeboat is created by the author’s invisible hands, off-stage, arranging the scenery to contrive the emergency.
But what Robinson’s furtive scenery-arranging points out is that the easy times all our other science fiction stories have given to their colonists were every bit as contrived. By pointing out an alternative, in the same engineering/troubleshooting frame as those other stories, Robinson points out that what we’d taken for an obvious and natural axiom was actually a militant position about the universe’s willingness to be colonized, despite the Fermi Paradox, a position so dominant in sf that it was nearly impossible to notice that it even was a position, as opposed to a law of nature.
The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world
The intrinsic challenge to our legal framework is that technical standards have to be precisely defined in order to be fair, but this makes them easy to detect and defeat. They assume a mechanical universe, not one in which objects get their software updated with new lies every time regulatory bodies come up with a new test. And even if all software were always available, checking it for unwanted behavior would be unfeasible — more often than not, programs fail because the very organizations that made them haven’t or couldn’t make sure it behaved as they intended.
So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your tv is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it.
A fascinating new simulation finds that self-driving cars will terraform cities: 90% of cars will be eliminated, acres of land will open up, and commute times will drop 10%. A team of transportation scientists at the Organization for Cooperation and Development took data on actual trips in Lisbon, Portugal and looked at how a fleet of self-driving, shared “taxibots” would change city landscape.
These taxibots, the researchers imagine, are a marriage of mass carpooling and UPS delivery intelligence: they constantly roam throughout cities and match carpool routes with mathematical elegance. “Nearly the same mobility can be delivered with 10% of the cars. Taxibots combined with high-capacity public transport could remove 9 out of every 10 cars in a mid-sized European city,” the paper concludes.
End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile
Rikhard Manninen is another man with a plan — a very large plan, which is laid out on a table in his office in the centre of Helsinki. Manninen is director of the city’s strategic urban planning division. The project is a vision of how the city will look in 2050. It will have a lot more people — the population is projected to rise by 50% — but with much less dependence on cars. The city’s population density will be increased; many of the new high-rise apartment blocks will not have residents’ car parking; key arteries into the city will be replaced by boulevards; more and more space will be given over to cycle lanes. A report on the plan in the Helsinki Times last year confidently predicted: “The future resident of Helsinki will not own a car.”
In many cities, the era of the suburban commuter, along with the era of the car, is drawing to a close. Manninen no longer wants a city with a single centre; he envisages a multi-polar city with half-a-dozen hubs where people live, work, shop and play. This will reduce transport congestion and generate a series of vibrant, efficiently organised, semi-autonomous units — that’s the plan, anyway.
The Seeds of a New Labor Movement
SEIU’s David Rolf — virtuoso organizer and mastermind of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage campaign — says labor needs radically new ways to champion worker interests.
[The single best article I’ve read on the state of the American Labor Movement in years. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for suggesting it.]
Over the past 15 years, no American unionist has organized as many workers, or won them raises as substantial, as Rolf. Which makes it all the more telling that Rolf believes the American labor movement, as we know it, is on its deathbed, and that labor should focus its remaining energies on bequeathing its resources to start-up projects that may find more effective ways to advance workers’ interests than today’s embattled unions can.
…
Most labor leaders and activists concur that the union movement is in something close to mortal peril. With Rolf, they believe that the inadequacies of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), which union-busting employers are able to violate with impunity, have made it almost impossible to organize private-sector workers. Unable to grow, labor has also seen its ranks diminished by the offshoring of millions of jobs and the relegation of millions more to the ranks of contingent labor or ostensible self-employment. Today, the percentage of private-sector workers in unions has dropped to a bare 6.7 percent — roughly its level at the beginning of the 20th century, before the advent of a sizable middle class.
…
This October, with funding from his local, from the national SEIU, and from several liberal foundations, Rolf will unveil The Workers Lab, housed at the Roosevelt Institute in New York. The center will study and, in time, invest in organizations that, in Rolf’s words, “have the potential to build economic power for workers, at scale, and to sustain themselves financially.” Whatever those organizations may be, they won’t be unions — at least, not unions as they currently exist.
…
Rolf’s favored metaphor for the role that he believes today’s unions should play is that of a “nurse log” — a term used by forest ecologists. A nurse log is a fallen tree that, as it decays, provides nourishment and protection to seedlings, some of which will grow to become new trees. “That’s our choice,” he says. “We can preserve the dying model, or we can use the resources of our model to give birth to what replaces it.”
Adblocking as Civil Rights Activism and as Consumer Boycott
What happens next will amaze you
What was the most damaging data breach in the last 12 months?
The trick answer is: it’s likely something we don’t even know about.
When the Snowden revelations first came to light, it felt like we might be heading towards an Orwellian dystopia. Now we know that the situation is much worse.
If you go back and read Orwell, you’ll notice that Oceania was actually quite good at data security. Our own Thought Police is a clown car operation with no checks or oversight, no ability to keep the most sensitive information safe, and no one behind the steering wheel.
The proximate reasons for the culture of total surveillance are clear.
Storage is cheap enough that we can keep everything.
Computers are fast enough to examine this information, both in real time and retrospectively.
Our daily activities are mediated with software that can easily be configured to record and report everything it sees upstream.
But to fix surveillance, we have to address the underlying reasons that it exists. These are no mystery either.
State surveillance is driven by fear.
And corporate surveillance is driven by money.
Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history
According to Business Insider, ad blocking is now “approaching 200 million.”
Calling it a boycott is my wife’s idea. I say she’s right. Look at the definitions:
Merriam-Webster: “to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions.”
Wikipedia: “an act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for social or political reasons. Sometimes, it can be a form of consumer activism.”
Cheating software, VW and the Future of Oversight
VW scandal could just be the beginning
Computers allow people to cheat in ways that are new. Because the cheating is encapsulated in software, the malicious actions can happen at a far remove from the testing itself. Because the software is “smart” in ways that normal objects are not, the cheating can be subtler and harder to detect.
We’ve already had examples of smartphone manufacturers cheating on processor benchmark testing: detecting when they’re being tested and artificially increasing their performance. We’re going to see this in other industries.
The Internet of Things is coming. Many industries are moving to add computers to their devices, and that will bring with it new opportunities for manufacturers to cheat. Light bulbs could fool regulators into appearing more energy efficient than they are. Temperature sensors could fool buyers into believing that food has been stored at safer temperatures than it has been. Voting machines could appear to work perfectly — except during the first Tuesday of November, when it undetectably switches a few percent of votes from one party’s candidates to another’s.
The Amazon Rainforest as Rewilded Landscape
Myth of pristine Amazon rainforest busted as old cities reappear
What is today one of the largest tracts of rainforest in the world was, until little more than 500 years ago, a landscape dominated by human activity, according to a review of the evidence by Charles Clement of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, and his colleagues.
After Europeans showed up, the inhabitants were decimated by disease and superior weaponry, and retreated into the bush, while the jungle reclaimed their fields and plazas. But, thanks to a combination of deforestation and remote sensing, what’s left of their civilisation is now re-emerging.
They reveal an anthropogenically modified Amazonia before the European conquest. “Few if any pristine landscapes remained in 1492,” says Clement. “Many present Amazon forests, while seemingly natural, are domesticated.”
Hat tip: Warren Ellis.
In this advertisement by Honeywell, a spectral presence escapes from the machines. Emails, you say? How do they work! Solution: Magic! Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the hard things you don’t want to deal with, like emails, are passed off to magical processes.
Motifs of individual empowerment-through-magical-computers can still be found in Apple’s sloganeering. Their phrase ‘It just works’ angers me the most. “You don’t need to worry how it works,” Apple tells you, “just that it does.” The implication is that you don’t need to know what you’re agreeing to when you allow this device or software to work around you. You are positioned as the magician’s assistant, or rather, you’re not even that. You’re the nervous audience member dragged on stage that makes the magician look better, or clever, or supernatural. The advertisement for their most recent public campaign, ‘You’re more powerful than you think’, is nothing but a insidious obfuscation technique, making you think that you are doing the magic when in fact you’re a component, and an ingredient, in a much more complex set of darker magical happenings. When you choose to be part of the magic, accepting the terms and conditions of use, are you allowing yourself to be possessed?
Possession, in the magical sense, is the loss of control of your own personal faculties. In the case of algorithmically mediated culture, we can see where these problems of agency, control and intent — where our power is compromised — create the capacity for ghosts to take hold of us.
The late, great Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is a novel set entirely on Mars, but the allegory points directly back to Earth. In a brief sketch called “The Green Morning,” a Martian settler arrives only to be told by a doctor that the planet’s notoriously thin air may force him to return to Earth. Disappointment and his pained lungs nearly shatter this man. But instead of leaving, he has a vision: “He looked down at his hands and turned them over. He would plant trees and grass. That would be his job, to fight against the very thing that might prevent his staying here.” And so the man, on a single motorcycle, becomes the alien planet’s Johnny Appleseed. The trees come, another sign of Bradbury’s legendary optimism. Some sixty years after this story was written, there is no question the air is ours on this planet, as is the fate of the trees.
Backers of desalination hope Carlsbad plant will disarm critics
It was the beginning of making San Diego County what industry veteran Doug Eisberg calls “the Silicon Valley of desalination.” Dozens of companies employ 3,000 workers to provide the delicate, complex membranes needed for the world’s plants that specialize in desalination and water reuse.
…But the desalination process remains a target of environmental groups, which say it kills fish and creates pollution with the brine left behind after the water is purified.
RoboCorp: Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer?
“For Bitcoin, security creates value and, in turn, value creates security. But currency, Buterin continues, is far from the only use for blockchain-based distributed security. What if, he asks, a decentralised system of hosts could guarantee the trustworthiness of other kinds of financial instruments? Such as, say, insurance policies, or rental agreements, or futures contracts?Buterin stumbles, stutters, repeats words and emits strange frog hiccups as he speaks. But his voice pulses with conviction. In his mixture of awkwardness and passion, he recalls a long line of tech wunderkinder — Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin.Finance underpinned by a blockchain network, and linked to fully digital currencies, would be secure against both hacking and dishonesty. Banks, brokers and lawyers — whose main role in many such transactions is to keep everyone honest — could become afterthoughts.”
Inside Bloomberg’s Plan To Spread The Gospel Of Urban Innovation
Ben Hecht, CEO and President of Living Cities, a nonprofit that works with Bloomberg Philanthropies and also runs its own municipal incubator program, compares today’s moment to the early 20th century, when the Rockefeller Foundation basically built the field of public health from scratch through its funding programs.
“What you’re seeing is the beginning of this field. Part of that is people identifying themselves as in the field: ‘I am a municipal innovator,’” he says. “But if everyone has to come up with their own principles, then the entry costs are too high. You want to create something to be a commodity, which means you don’t have to customize it like a fine Italian shoe and figure it out yourself every time.”
En route from London to Tokyo, a pilot’s-eye view of life in the sky.
About 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean. Much of the land that long-haul pilots work above is covered in snow or ice. At any given time, roughly two thirds of the Earth is covered in cloud. For many miles and hours in the sky — sometimes for nearly an entire flight — water, in one state or another, is the only thing we see.
It’s routine from the cockpit to see storms form in real time, and from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow-glass tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas. When, after long hours over desert or sparsely inhabited land a city appears, the water we see near it — lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation — looks holy as blood.
Our image of the Wright Brothers on the windswept Carolina coast is the best reminder of the debt every pilot owes to the sea. Today in the air we still speak a nautical language — of forward and aft; cabins, galleys andbulkheads; manifests, rudders and trim. We count aircraft by hulls and fleets. Our port and starboard wingtips are marked by red and green navigation lights, arranged as upon a ship. Our speed in the blue between two cities is measured in knots. What remains of us is our wake.
Make technological utopia easier with this one weird trick
But it’s kind of inevitable, really: when you ask “how can technology make a better future?” you foreclose (whether deliberately or not) on the possibility of making that better future with anything other than new technology; this is one of the epistemological bear-traps of technological determinism, which Kelly and many other tech-centric futures people have been circling around for decades.
But it’s easily enough stepped out of; all you need to do is take the “technology” specifier out of the question, and/or avoid asking it of people who identify with technology in either a entrepreneurial or quasi-religious manner (no beer for you, Ray Kurzweil). By way of example, here’s my own late submission to Kelly’s call, a 101-word haiku describing a desirable future:
No one goes hungry. No one sleeps outdoors, unless they choose to. No one is conscripted as a child-soldier. No one is maimed by land-mines made on the other side of the world. No one is exploited for the betterment or gain of another. No one is a second class citizen to anyone. Nothing is wasted. Things — whether material or digital — are made with care and thought, and are made to last a long, long time. We appreciate a plurality of systems of value alongside the legacy cash-money system, which we keep going as a honey-trap distraction for the instinctively acquisitive.
If that’s not utopian and desirable, I don’t know what it is. And as implausible, unlikely and peacenik-pie-in-the-sky as you might (very reasonably) choose to call it, it is possible — because it doesn’t require us to make a single damned invention or piece of software we don’t already have. We have everything we need already; it’s just, as Gibson didn’t quite say, not yet evenly distributed. That means my little scenario above is intrinsically more plausible than any future that requires a technological novum to make it work, because [Occam’s Razor]. And if you’re aching to say “but hang on, you’ll never get that to work because getting people to change the way they do things isn’t at all simple”, then congratulations –you’ve internalised the very point I’ve been trying to make all along. Have a cookie.
The Policy Machine
The dangers of letting algorithms make decisions in law enforcement, welfare, and child protection.
In December 2007, Indiana resident Sheila Perdue received a notice in the mail that she must participate in a telephone interview in order to be recertified to receive public assistance. In the past, Perdue, who is deaf and suffers from emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bipolar disorder, would have visited her local caseworker to explain why this was impossible. But the state’s welfare eligibility system had recently been “modernized,” leaving a website and an 800 number as the primary ways to communicate with the Family and Social Services Administration.
Perdue requested and was denied an in-person interview. She gathered her paperwork, traveled to a nearby help center, and requested assistance. Employees at the center referred her to the online system. Uncomfortable with the technology, she asked for help with the online forms and was refused. She filled out the application to the best of her ability. Several weeks later, she learned she was denied recertification. The reason? “Failure to cooperate” in establishing eligibility.
An algorithm is a set of instructions designed to produce an output: a recipe for decision-making, for finding solutions. In computerized form, algorithms are increasingly important to our political lives. According to legal scholar Danielle Keats Citron, automated decision-making systems like predictive policing or remote welfare eligibility no longer simply help humans in government agencies apply procedural rules; instead, they have become primary decision-makers in public policy.
Tomorrowland: How Silicon Valley Shapes Our Future
“The pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed,” Kurzweil writes in his book “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.”
That may sound like a pre-pubescent fantasy, but in Silicon Valley, pretty much everyone believes it in some form or another, even the most sober scientists and the most hard-bitten businesspeople. It is part of the invisible manifesto that everyone in Silicon Valley adheres to: the belief in the limitless possibilities of technology; the belief that we are on a path characterized by an increasing number of breakthroughs that are becoming more frequent and more significant.
The “singularity” gives that belief its necessary structure, its zenith. Leading humanity into a better future is the goal — and tech-optimism becomes a redemption fantasy.
Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century
Can the savings of basic income exceed the costs?
Reported as eradicated from the face of the Earth in 1977, and in possibly one of the greatest understatements of all time, the eradication of smallpox by the U.S. proved to be a “remarkably good economic investment…A total of $32 million was spent by the United States over a 10-year period in the global campaign to eradicate smallpox. The entire $32 million has been recouped every 2 months since 1971 by saving the costs of the smallpox vaccine, administration, medical care, quarantine and other costs.”
What if poverty is like smallpox?
What if the realities of hunger and homelessness aren’t just facts of life, but examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? How much would it cost to eradicate? How much could we save?
We are Terrified
What keeps Yale students from acting on climate change
“Dealing with the reality of climate change comes with the same stages as dealing with a trauma,” says Chelsea Watson ’17 a Fossil Free Yale organizer. “I am terrified by climate change,” Ariana, who has also been involved with Fossil Free Yale, tells me. “That’s my predominant feeling, I think.”
According to Renee Lertzman, a professor at the University of San Francisco, this fear is a large part of what prevents people from taking action to begin with, and it must be dealt with once people do start fighting climate change. Lertzman began interviewing people who weren’t engaged in environmental advocacy while she was doing fieldwork for her Ph.D. She expected them to be apathetic. Instead she found they had a great deal of concern, but weren’t acting.
Her work now focuses on how people deal with the conflicts that come up in relation to climate change. She believes that “it’s important to look at those conflicts and dilemmas through a lens of compassion.”
On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
The Fermi Paradox: loosely put, we live in a monstrously huge cosmos that is rather old. We only evolved relatively recently — our planet is ~4.6GYa old, in a galaxy containing stars up to 10GYa old in a universe around 13.7GYa old. Loosely stated, the Fermin Paradox asks, if life has evolved elsewhere, then where is it? We would expect someone to have come calling by now: a five billion year head start is certainly time enough to explore and/or colonize a galaxy only 100K light years across, even using sluggish chemical rockets.
We don’t see evidence of extraterrestrial life, so, as economist Robin Hanson pointed out, there must be some sort of cosmic filter function (The Great Filter) which stops life, if it develops, from leaving its star system of origin and going walkabout. Hanson described two possibilities for the filter. One is that it lies in our past (pGF): in this scenario, intelligent tool-using life is vanishingly rare because the pGF almost invariably exterminates planetary biospheres before they can develop it. (One example: gamma ray bursts may repeatedly wipe out life. If this case is true, then we can expect to not find evidence of active biospheres on other planets. A few bacteria or archaea living below the Martian surface aren’t a problem, but if our telescopes start showing us lots of earthlike planets with chlorophyll absorption lines in their reflected light spectrum (and oxygen-rich atmospheres) that would be bad news because it would imply that the GF lies in our future (an fGF).
The implication of an fGF is that it doesn’t specifically work against life, it works against interplanetary colonization.
So the Anthropocene will feel natural. I say this not so much because of the controversial empirics-cum-mathematics of the climate-forecasting models as because of a basic insight of modernity that goes back to Rousseau: humanity is the adaptable species. What would have been unimaginable or seemed all but unintelligible 100 years ago, let alone 500 (a sliver of time in the evolutionary life of a species), can become ordinary in a generation. That is how long it took to produce ‘digital natives’, to accustom people to electricity and television, and so on for each revolution in our material and technological world. It takes a great deal of change to break through this kind of adaptability.
This is all the more so because rich-country humanity already lives in a constant technological wrestling match with exogenous shocks, which are going to get more frequent and more intense in the Anthropocene. Large parts of North America regularly experience droughts and heat waves that would devastate a simpler society than today’s US. Because the continent is thoroughly engineered, from the water canals of the West to the irrigation systems of the Great Plains to air conditioning nearly everywhere, these are experienced as inconvenience, as mere ‘news’. The same events, in poorer places, are catastrophes.
Self-Driving Cars Hold Key to Future Highway: Google’s Kurzweil
Self-driving vehicles hold the key to reducing traffic fatalities and will transform the automobile industry, a top Google executive predicted Tuesday. ”People will still buy cars,” Ray Kurzweil said. “But the Uber model with self-driving cars will become very popular. We should share our cars. I think that model will grow when we have autonomous cars.
“Every company has to reinvent itself. Not everything is predictable.” Kurzweil said that until now the transportation industry, including the automobile business, has not been considered part of the digital world.” But we see information of every kind coming into every form of transportation,” he added.
One Mayor’s Downfall Killed the Design Project That Could’ve Changed Everything
Public Interest Design’s Wild Ride into City Hall
The Lab was the brainchild of a world-renowned architect and the pet project of a mayor who wanted social change and believed urban design and planning could be the means to achieving it. Philanthropists were standing by to offer their support. The concept behind the Lab — a cadre of designers embedded in the mayor’s office, with the power to revive public spaces around the city and launch a broad campaign of civic engagement — was unique in North America, and almost unimaginable in conservative San Diego. It seemed to answer the long-held desire of architects, especially, for designers to play a role in the decision-making that shapes cities…
This emphasis on urban design and the built environment was unique. …The regular duties of the “design strategists” on staff would include urban research, visualizations, and the design and execution of public spaces. The design work was not about the superficial beautification of San Diego; the intent was to forge a highly participative process that could improve social equity by transforming physical space.
It’s a Restaurant, It’s a Boutique, It’s an Experiment in Crowd-Funded Real Estate
From the start, the vision was simple in concept, yet exceedingly complex in execution. [T]he Miller brothers invested in the neighborhood by buying the property at 1351 H Street NE and opening it up to the neighborhood directly — after plenty of finagling with the SEC. The Millers asked neighbors what they wanted to see developed there, and, after settling on the more-or-less unfeasible option of a restaurant-slash-retail store, opened the investment to those same neighbors. People bought all of the 3,250 shares offered, many of them first-time investors buying in for as little as $100 per share.
Here’s How Managers Can Be Replaced by Software
“Executives tend to assume that their underlings will bear the main brunt of changes to the future of work, while their own positions are immune. They are incorrect. We have chosen to publicize our work with iCEO to highlight the hard reality: It will not be possible to hide in the C-Suite for much longer. The same cost/benefit analyses performed by shareholders against line workers and office managers will soon be applied to executives and their generous salaries.
iCEO illustrates another fact we need to face now: Corporate organizations are themselves a technology, one that has only existed in its current form for around 200 years, a fragment of human history. The corporate structure was created around the tools we had back in the 18th century to maximize scale while minimizing transaction costs. Now that structure is being disrupted by the advent of technologies which can accomplish many (if not most) of the projects we associate with corporations. With traditional organizations no longer necessary to create many things at scale, they are likely to be challenged by a new generation of alternative technologies for getting things done.”
Sockpuppets, Space-sharing, Working “Below the API,” Reality Realism on Climate and the New Greenpeace
Bruce Sterling on why you shouldn’t care how SIRI feels
[Bruce rants a bit about AI]
Q: Do you believe we should feel empathy for Artificial Intelligence?
Bruce Sterling: Well, we can feel empathy for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, and she doesn’t exist, either. “Artificial Intelligence” doesn’t exist. …But it’s pretty easy to feel empathy. … What if you lifted your iPhone and Siri suddenly said, “I hate you, and I wish you were dead, Rhett Jones.” A truly terrifying prospect, am I right? And yet everybody knows Siri is just a speech interface for Apple Corporation.
Oakland’s 2015 Co-working Space Guide: Finding Your Groove
[The shared workspace concept continues to mutate and evolve. Even just here in the East Bay, there’s some beautiful confusion happening, as this guide shows.]
“The Blueprint is a creative workspace for teams, social enterprises or small businesses to work side by side and support one-another. It’s like a coliving house, but for a workspace. We have flexible work hours, super affordable rates, and a warm welcome into our community of creative skill-sharers, makers, visiting artists, teachers, and life-long learners.”
Letter to the PM outlining how 2°C demands an 80% cut in EU emissions by 2030
[Kevin Anderson on the difference between political realism and reality realism on climate goals.]
“Put simply, the basic arithmetic of: (1) the IPCC’s 2°C carbon budgets; (2) highly optimistic assumptions on deforestation and cement; (3) stringent emissions pathways for industrialising and poorer nations; and (4) the EU’s oft-cited commitment on 2°C; requires the European Council to increase the 2030 target to, at least, an 80% reduction in emissions. … Alternatively, if the Green Paper’s 40% target is adopted, the EU should be honest about why it has chosen to renege on it previous 2°C commitments.”
Building Luxury Condos for Affordability, the Formula for Civic Engagement, Soft Engineering and Miami Facing the Rising Sea.
Expensive New Housing Reduces Displacement
Consider the simplified case of a city with a total of five rentals ranging from cheap to expensive, and five people living in them with corresponding incomes. Along comes a wealthy newcomer who offers more for the most expensive unit, so the landlord raises the rent and the newcomer gets the unit because the current tenant can’t afford to pay that much.
The person who was displaced then offers more for the next cheapest rental, and so that landlord raises the rent, displacing the current tenant, who then bids up the next cheapest rental, and so on. In the end the person left without a place to live is the one with the lowest income of the five original renters.
Now consider how that scenario changes dramatically when there is one simple difference: a newly built expensive rental is available. The wealthy newcomer rents that unit, and that’s it — nothing changes for any of the existing five renters. No rents are raised, and no one is displaced. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the creation of a new expensive rental prevented displacement of the poorest renter.
Today in Seattle, the scenario of the lacking new unit is the fundamental process behind declining affordability and increasing displacement. And that’s why the ever popular sport of bashing “greedy developers” for building “luxury” housing is actually doing more harm than good.
The Three Levers of Civic Engagement
Probability
P is the perceived probability that an action will change the outcome of a civic decision. Or, for example, the likelihood that writing a letter to your Congressional representative will change the outcome of a floor vote.Benefit
B is the benefit the citizen as an individual will receive if the civic decision swings in their favor. As an example, if I have a pre-existing condition, the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act would be a very real and measurable benefit to me. Or, if I had a lot of money invested in the stock market, a change to the tax code that cut capital gains tax would increase my net worth.Duty
The good professors William Riker and Peter Ordeshook referred to D as Civic Duty. But I think it’s something more than that. D represents feelings of goodwill, and the sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. D is the pleasure people get from wearing an “I Voted” sticker and the pride they feel by being good citizen. It is the sum total of enjoyment a person gets from being part of a communities’ civic life.Cost
C is the time, effort and financial cost of taking a civic action.
Rising Sea Levels Are Already Making Miami’s Floods Worse
First: Sea level rise is accelerating — perhaps faster than the IPCC has projected. When McNoldy tracked the average daily high water mark, when flooding events are most likely to occur, he saw it increase over time — but he also saw the rate of that increase go up. The last five years saw an average increase of 1.27 inches of water per year. If that rate holds steady for the next 50 years (and if McNoldy is right, it will only get worse), high tide levels in Miami would go up over five feet.
Second: Predictions about day-to-day tide levels are less accurate than ever, threatening the city’s ability to plan for weather events. Tidal predictions are made through what’s called “astronomical factors” — essentially the moon’s orbit around the earth. But these don’t take into account factors like weather or sea level rise — so as climate change exacerbates sea level rise, tidal predictions will be more and more unreliable. While water levels in May 1996 typically were close to predicted values, McNoldy observed that the same values in May 2014 were consistently higher than predicted. That kind of discrepancy can’t be caused by weather alone.
Third: Besides creating higher risks of flooding, sea level rise is creating an unexpected danger: saltwater intrusion into aquifers used to extract freshwater. Almost 90 percent of south Florida’s drinking water is supplied by porous limestone aquifers. As sea levels rise, the saltwater exerts more pressure on the fresh water in the aquifer, and fresh water is pushed off further from the coast. Already, some cities have shut down wells because of saltwater contamination.
Climate and the Fermi Paradox, Buildings as Infrastructure, Data-Revealed Medicine, Carbon Drawdown with Trees, Smartphone Transit
Is a Climate Disaster Inevitable?
One answer to the Fermi paradox is that nobody makes it through — that climate change is fate, that nothing we do today matters because civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. But our models may show that isn’t the case.
By studying sustainability as a generic astrobiological problem, we can understand if the challenge we face will be like threading a needle or crossing a wide valley. Answering this question demands a far deeper understanding of how planets respond to the kind of stresses energy-intensive species (like ours) place on them.
Cities are the greatest hope for our planet
A recent study conducted by Autopoiesis LLC and Ecotrust and funded by the Bullitt Foundation shows that if we mimic nature, we can also generate significant public benefits. The report, Optimizing Urban Ecosystem Services: The Bullitt Center Case Study, found that over the life of the building, “just six of the [Bullitt Center’s] green features will produce up to $18.5 million in benefits to society” — storing carbon, managing stormwater and treating sewage, for example. Coincidentally, that’s about the same as the total construction cost for the project.
Combining Loscalzo’s molecular networks with Thurner and Barabási’s disease networks would help to create a bridge between correlation and mechanism. If comorbid diseases share overlapping molecular networks, researchers could use the networks to understand the biochemical mechanisms behind them. These two kinds of networks, very different in how they are built, are united only by the idea that data can reveal connections that otherwise would pass unnoticed. But together these networks have the potential to open new doors in the study of disease.
Scientists Seeking to Save World Find Best Technology Is Trees
They considered methods ranging from capturing emissions from factories and power stations to extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air, and adding lime to oceans to increase their absorption of the gas, a study released on Tuesday showed.
None were more promising than planting trees, or baking waste wood to form a type of charcoal that can be added to soil. Relative to other so-called Negative Emissions Technologies, afforestation and biochar are low-cost, have fewer uncertainties and offer other benefits to the environment, the research shows.
The Most Important Transportation Innovation of the Decade Is the Smartphone
Adam Greenfield of the London School of Economics, author of Against the Smart City, agrees that mobility apps have the power to transform the relationship between transportation networks and travelers. “We’re about to undergo a wholesale redefinition of what urban mobility is, and how it is provided,” he says. Greenfield recently approached Transport for London — the organization that oversees London’s tube, commuter rail, buses, taxis, bikeshare, sidewalks, and roads — about developing its own integrated app. The idea is that users could plan and pay for a trip through the city, even if that trip involved several different forms of transportation.
While these talks are in their infancy, Greenfield is undaunted by the head start that apps like Uber and Lyft have enjoyed. “The taxi apps are just sorting algorithms,” he says. “A design team of two or three could replicate these services in a month.” Greenfield isn’t being blithe; his point is that the barriers to entry are minimal — there’s no secret sauce or meaningful proprietary advantage.
Medellin’s Escalators, London’s Foxes, Density as Justice, Data as Radioactive Waste, Burned Universes
Medellin’s amazing turn-around
“Strengthening cities requires greater attention not just to specific spaces, but also to specific groups of people. Young unemployed men with a criminal record are statistically more likely to violate the law than other residents who have not committed crimes. Indeed, only about 0.5% of people generally account for up to 75% of homicidal violence in major cities. But instead of locking up and stigmatising young men, municipal officials should support them. Proven remedies include mediation to interrupt violence between rival gangs, targeted education and recreation projects for at-risk teenagers, and counselling and childcare support for single-parent households.
“The most far-reaching strategy for strengthening fragile cities involves investment in measures to boost social cohesion and mobility. Investments in reliable public transportation, inclusive public spaces, and pro-poor social policies can go a long way toward improving safety,” says Muggah.
“There are many examples of how to drive down crime, but Medellín provides the most convincing case of how to do it best. During the 1990s, it was the murder capital of the world. But a succession of mayors beginning with Sergio Fajardo turned things around by focusing their attention on the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods. They connected the city’s slums to middle-class areas by a network of cable cars, bus transport systems, and first-class infrastructure. By 2011, homicidal violence declined by about 80%, and in 2012, Medellín was named the city of the year.”
Jesse Ausubel: Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities
When nature rebounds, the wild animals return. Traversing through abandoned farmlands in Europe, wolves, lynx, and brown bears are repopulating lands that haven’t seen them for centuries, and they are being welcomed. Ten thousand foxes roam London. Salmon are back in the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine. Whales have recovered and returned even to the waters off New York. Ausubel concluded with a photo showing a humpback whale breaching, right in line with the Empire State Building in the background.
Bay Area renters group advocates for more density to solve housing crisis
“We should really be considering the cumulative impact of not building. Because by not building over and over again, we, one, increase crowding in the units that do exist, and we also force people to spend more money on the units that do exist,” [said Sonja] Trauss, 33 … the founder the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, or SFBARF, an activist group that advocates for maximum density for proposed projects, no matter how expensive the apartments are….
San Francisco’s rents are the highest in the country. According to commercial brokerage DTZ, the average asking rent for a San Francisco market rate apartment was $3,392 at the end of 2014, up 11 percent compared to the prior year and 55 percent higher since 2009.
The tech boom has escalated prices, but the problems go deeper, said Colen. The city’s geography means it is locked in by water, so development space is already limited, and proposals are often downsized. “Google, Twitter and Facebook did not do this to us,” said Colen, who described San Francisco as one of the most conservative cities in the U.S. when it comes to development. “There’s strong, strong resistance to change.”
The Internet with a Human Face
There is a lot of potential for harm around these vast collections of private data. To some extent, the focus on government spying prevents us from thinking harder about the real pitfalls of a permanent record. ….
It gets worse, though. In the eighties, a police operation called Project Hyacinth collected information on thousands of gay and lesbian citizens, as well as people the police suspected of homosexual leanings. These are known as the “pink files”.
Every government since 1989 has agreed that the files should not have been created, and that collecting this material violated basic human rights. Everyone agrees the files need to be destroyed. Poland remains a very homophobic country, so the pink files are incendiary stuff, especially to people in public life. …
These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It’s easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you’ve buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected. Managing this waste requires planning on timescales much longer than we’re typically used to. A typical Internet company goes belly-up after a couple of years. The personal data it has collected will remain sensitive for decades. Consider that the stuff in those “pink files” is peanuts compared to the kind of data now sitting on servers in Mountain View.
90% of the galaxies in the universe have probably been scrubbed clean by gamma ray bursts. Most of the universe is hospitable only to bacteria. Now, that leaves something upwards of ten billion galaxies where that may not be true, which is still an awful lot. But they go further. It’s entirely possible, it seems, that complex life only has a better-than-even chance of forming on the edges of galaxies. The closer to the middle of the Milky Way you are, the more likely it is that you got microwaved before you did anything interesting.
The universe is close to fourteen billion years old. For the first five billion years, the whole universe was a gamma-ray oven. Nobody ever totally subscribes to the “we are the only intelligent life in the universe” theory, because the mathematics are entirely against it. It has long seemed to me, however, that the mathematics also suggest that we are the only intelligent life we will ever meet, because almost all of the universe before us is a blackened field.
Unintended Consequences, Architecture as Product of Code, the Social Cost of Carbon and the End of Gangs
Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In
[Solving complex problems on a single vector often creates unintended consequences]
Nobody in his hut, including his seven children, sleeps under a net at night. Instead, Mr. Ndefi has taken his family’s supply of anti-malaria nets and sewn them together into a gigantic sieve that he uses to drag the bottom of the swamp ponds, sweeping up all sorts of life: baby catfish, banded tilapia, tiny mouthbrooders, orange fish eggs, water bugs and the occasional green frog. …
They arrive by the truckload in poor, waterside communities where people have been trying to scrape by with substandard fishing gear for as long as anyone can remember. All of a sudden, there are light, soft, surprisingly strong nets — for free. Many people said it would be foolish not to use them for fishing. …
But the unsparing mesh, with holes smaller than mosquitoes, traps much more life than traditional fishing nets do. Scientists say that could imperil already stressed fish populations, a critical food source for millions of the world’s poorest people.
A new building form, created by costs, codes and marketability
Increased demand raises prices, and more potential income makes risk more acceptable, and tolerance of risk raises the supply. But the supply of any product must be affordable, or it goes begging on the shelf. Developers can reduce costs of each rental unit by density — like Becker + Becker did by going vertical with 500 units at 360 State. Or you can buy underpriced sites and do cost effective rehabs as Pike International has done on over a hundred sites diffused around Yale.
But there is another way, and these two new projects now under construction are virtually symbols of that option: build medium density projects at relatively low cost on high value/high cost sites — not unlike the other similar projects breaking ground in the next couple of years. …
Just like the 1980s tax code encouraged investors to build thousands of stick-built townhouse condos littering the Connecticut suburban landscape, these five- or six-story, city block defined boxes will have an aesthetic that is not defined by style, but by marketing and this very specific building code defined approach to construction. … The consistencies created by cost control, code compliance and marketability are defining an architectural meme. Their shapes’ folding, bumping, kinetic up/down in/out happens in a very tight range of dimensional variation. The ability to maximize the number of units built within a defined envelope means there are only a few feet in any given direction left to manipulate: so the choice of contrasting materials is employed to enhance the kinetic effect.
Climate change could impact the poor much more than previously thought
The new study by Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford University calibrates the climate ‘damage functions’ in one of these economic models (DICE, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale) using the results from the Dell paper. They grouped the world into rich and poor countries, finding that while the economies of rich countries continue to grow well in a warmer world, the economic growth of poor countries is significantly impaired.
As a result, Moore and Diaz conclude that the economically optimal pathway could be very similar to the most aggressive scenario considered by the IPCC (called RCP2.6). In this scenario, human carbon emissions peak almost immediately and then decline until they reach zero around the year 2070.
Moore and Diaz find that if climate change does affect GDP growth in this way, then the best path for society would limit temperatures to between 1.6 and 2.8°C warming in 2100, with a best estimate of around 1.7°C warming. … The ‘social cost of carbon’ is an estimate of the costs of carbon pollution to society via climate damages. …Moore and Diaz conclude that when accounting for climate impacts on economic growth, the social carbon cost rises to between about $70 and $400…
The LAPD also began to make use of a tool that had previously been used sparingly: the gang injunction, essentially a ban on gang members hanging out together in public. The gang injunction spent much of the 1990s in court before being narrowly ruled constitutional, but law enforcement valued it. Today, Los Angeles alone has at least 44 injunctions against 72 street gangs. Gang members seen on the street together can be jailed on misdemeanor charges. Other towns and counties followed LAPD’s lead.
All this had a major effect: It drove gang members indoors. Drug dealing continued, and so did other forms of crime, including identity theft. Gang members became more adept at using the Internet to promote their gangs and belittle rivals. But boasting and threatening online doesn’t require the commitment or violence of classic L.A. street gang-banging, nor does it blight a neighborhood. “When you don’t have kids hanging out on the street,” says George Tita, the UC Irvine criminologist, “there’s no one to shoot or do the shooting.” …
The market for real estate has been the second unguided force impinging on gangs. Some Southern California gang neighborhoods were once so self-contained that they resembled rural villages. Working-class people lived together, married, had children, gossiped, fought, loved, and went about life. Most men left the streets only for the military or prison. Gangs incubated in this insularity. But rising real estate prices have made properties in even the toughest neighborhoods valuable, and value has created peace. In place of insular barrios, for better or worse, neighborhoods have emerged in which people don’t know each other, and street life is nil. New arrivals — often white hipsters or immigrants from other countries — possess none of the history, or gang connections, of the departing families. … This has created the only-in-L.A. phenomenon of commuter gangs: guys who drive a long way to be with their homies at the corner where the gang began.
The Climate Economics of Urban Change, Probabilistic Snow, Companies that Run Themselves, Florida Under Water and Archival People Simulators
A more data-centered analysis of the kinds of thinking I wrote about in Carbon Zero [link] for those who are keeping up with the debate on cities and climate.
“As noted above, new analysis for this project puts the external costs of sprawl at about US$400 billion per year in the United States alone. Around 45% of those costs are due to the increased cost of providing public services such as water and waste; one-fifth is due to increased capital investment needs for infrastructure such as roads, and the rest is due to the costs of increased congestion, accidents and pollution not borne directly by private individuals. The total costs amount to about 2.6% of US GDP at current prices. If the United States followed an alternative growth pattern without urban sprawl, the savings could cover the country’s entire funding gap in infrastructure investment.
Such cost estimates indicate the potential savings from pursuing smarter growth policies based on more compact, mixed, multi-modal, infill development. This is a lower bound estimate, as it excludes over US$323 billion in higher personal/household transport costs, climate change impacts, the impacts on agricultural productivity and ecosystems, and social costs related to the creation of more divided communities and degradation of urban centres — which can, for example, increase crime. Although the costs of urban sprawl may be lower in absolute value in developing countries, due to lower wages and property values, they are likely to be similar in magnitude as a proportion of the national economy.”
Ask Not, “Will it Snow?”; ask “What’s the Distribution of Your Forecast?
“Communicating merely the forecast (the peak of the probability distribution) is far from giving us the full complexity of these decisions. I wish weather forecasts came as charts, instead of single numbers, showing distributions and other pieces of crucial information.
“Oh, wait, you say, who would understand all that? And here’s my pitch: we should be teaching probability and statistics in K-12 because these are essential to everyday decisions. I’d even say instead of calculus if necessary — while calculus is necessary to understand the full math behind probability distributions, you can get a reasonable knowledge of how they work without calculus. And while few of us are going to be engineers who need calculus to do their job, all of us deal with probabilistic decision making everyday.”
Treading Water: Florida’s bill is coming due, as the costs of climate change add up around the globe
[Costs of climate action seem impossible; costs of climate inaction dwarf them, Florida edition.]
“The whole idea is to do this comprehensive capital plan that would include all kinds of things — desalination plants, the lifting of roads, where to raise land, where to create canals. Part of the future has to be raising some land at the expense of other land.”
Ruvin knows what he’s up against. Procrastination. Disputes over property rights. Long battles over changing zoning and building codes to prohibit building in areas that can’t be protected. And he doesn’t want to talk about the cost of all that reengineering. “I can’t even give you a real number. Maybe $50 billion?” Ruvin muses, though he knows that’s low. He’s focused on how to pay for long-term projects in a place that operates on capturing short-term gains. “How do you take this to the voters for a bond issue when the county commissioners are afraid to increase property taxes a hair to fund libraries?” …
Last year Ruvin invited two executives from Swiss Re, the global reinsurance giant, to brief his task force about Florida’s precarious future. The hard-nosed number crunchers created a predictive model that showed the region could expect annual losses from storm-related events to reach $33 billion by 2030, up from $17 billion in 2008. They also said those losses could be reduced by 40 percent if the region acted soon to protect vulnerable real estate. “These kinds of issues cannot just be left for another 10, 20, or 30 years’ time,” says Mark Way, a sustainability specialist for Swiss Re.
Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality
[Even if the creation of archival people-simulators were as easy as this makes it sound, who, exactly would want them around?]
“While Ursache has grand ambitions for the Eterni.me service (“it could be a virtual library of humanity”) the technology is in still its infancy. He estimates that subscribers will need to interact with their avatars for decades for the simulation to become as accurate as possible. He’s already received many messages from terminally ill patients who want to know when the service will be available — whether they can record themselves in this way before they die. “It’s difficult to reply to them, because the technology may take years to build to a level that’s useable and offers real value,” he says. But Sunshine is optimistic. “I have no doubt that someone will be able to create good simulations of people’s personalities with the ability to converse satisfactorily,” he says. “It could change our relationship with death, providing some noise where there is only silence. It could create truer memories of a person in the place of the vague stories we have today.”
Not Yet Locked in Car Dependence, Mobility on Demand, Bubble Tea Housing, the Second Eradicated Disease and Repressive SpyWare
Developing Cities Hold Big Key To Climate Action
The new study, by five European and American researchers and published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pinpoints staggering potential climate benefits of smart growth, gasoline taxes and other measures that can reduce energy demand in urban centers, which is where a growing majority of the world’s population is becoming concentrated and where most of its energy is used. …They found the greatest opportunities to curb future energy use are in cities in developing countries, many of which have not yet locked in car dependency, the long commutes and the sprawling suburbs of less efficient urban centers. For those cities, good urban and transportation planning strategies were found to be key.
Death of the car: The tech behind Helsinki’s ambitious plan to kill off private vehicles
Helsinki has an ambitious plan for its future. By 2025, the Finnish capital intends to revamp its public transport system to such an extent that private car ownership becomes pointless. The bold initiative is not just about providing more buses, trains, or taxis, but about creating a new transport infrastructure based on cutting-edge technology and a single, affordable payment system.
The theory goes like this: imagine a family that has opted not to own a car. When they want to drop the kids off at school, they simply arrange an on-demand bus service instead. They use ridesharing and buses to get to work, and in the holidays they rent a car to travel to their summer house. When they need to get around Helsinki, they use city bikes, renting a locker to store any heavy bags. If the weather changes while they’re out cycling, a journey planner will alert them and suggest another way of reaching their destination without getting soaked.
Under the plan, all these services will be accessed through a single online platform. People will be able to buy their transport in service packages that work like mobile phone tariffs: either as a complete monthly deal or pay as you go options based on individual usage. Any number of companies can use the platform to offer transport packages, and if users find their travel needs change, they’ll be able to switch packages or moved to a rival with a better deal.
The problem of urban density and housing costs is global. As unit types get smaller however, land costs coupled with developer driven profit margins can merely create a provisional housing type with little social value. By mining the discrepancy between maximum floor area ratios and maximum zoning envelopes, Songpa Micro-Housing provides a new typology that extends the limits of the housing unit to also include semi-public circulation, balconies, and the thickness of walls. Like the ambiguous gel around a tapioca pearl, this ‘Tapioca Space’ becomes a soft intersection between public/private and interior/exterior, creating social fabrics between neighbors.
Fourteen ‘unit blocks’ allow residents to either claim a single space, or in the case where a couple or friends desire to do so, recombine the blocks for larger configurations. This flexibility accommodates changing live and work situations allowing residents to occupy the building longer and therefore more sustainably. Further generating the idea of community, exhibition spaces on the ground floor, basement, and second floors are spatially linked to the units as a shared living room. Although the zoning regulations requires the building to be lifted for parking, this open ground plan is also used to pull pedestrians in from the street and down a set of auditorium-like steps, connecting city and building residents to the exhibition and cafe spaces below.
The building is owned and operated by the innovative artist collective Everyday Mooonday.
In 1986, cases of Guinea worm disease numbered more than 3.5 million worldwide. Now, globally, there are only 126 cases left… The disease was endemic in an estimated 23,735 villages across 21 Asian and African countries like Ghana, India, Pakistan and Yemen in 1991. Now, only 30 villages in four countries — Mali, Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan — harbor the worms. The feat comes from decades of public-health intervention. Once inside a human host, the Guinea larva develops into a long, pale worm within a year. Then, over the course of 30 days, it emerges from the infected person’s skin through painful, swollen welts. “Imagine a worm one meter long coming out of your skin for, on average, 11 weeks. That in itself is a nightmare to me,” Craig Withers, a program director at the Carter Center, said at the event. “It’s sort of like ‘Alien’ in real life.”
One day in 2011, [human rights activist Moosa Abd-Ali Ali] opened the Facebook Messenger app on his iPhone. What he saw was chilling: someone else typing under his name to an activist friend of his in Bahrain. Whoever it was kept posing personal questions prodding for information, and Moosa watched unfold right before eyes. He panicked.
“It was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’” he recalls. He changed his password, alerted his friend, and stopped using Facebook Messenger — but the intrusions kept coming.
In another instance, Moosa noticed that someone posing as him solicited his female Facebook friends for sex — part of an effort, it seemed, to blackmail or perhaps defame him in Bahrain’s conservative media. Facebook was only the beginning. Unbeknownst to him, Moosa’s phone and computer had been infected with a highly sophisticated piece of spyware, built and sold in secret. The implant effectively commandeered his digital existence, collecting everything he did or said online.
Planetary Boundaries, the Cathedral of Computation, Platform Hegemony, SimCity’s Homeless and Obsessive Survival Games
Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists
Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.
Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels — human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertiliser use.
Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.
They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilisation has advanced significantly.
“The algorithmic metaphor is just a special version of the machine metaphor, one specifying a particular kind of machine (the computer) and a particular way of operating it (via a step-by-step procedure for calculation). And when left unseen, we are able to invent a transcendental ideal for the algorithm. The canonical algorithm is not just a model sequence but a concise and efficient one. In its ideological, mythic incarnation, the ideal algorithm is thought to be some flawless little trifle of lithe computer code, processing data into tapestry like a robotic silkworm. A perfect flower, elegant and pristine, simple and singular. A thing you can hold in your palm and caress. A beautiful thing. A divine one.
But just as the machine metaphor gives us a distorted view of automated manufacture as prime mover, so the algorithmic metaphor gives us a distorted, theological view of computational action.“The Google search algorithm” names something with an initial coherence that quickly scurries away once you really look for it. Googling isn’t a matter of invoking a programmatic subroutine — not on its own, anyway. Google is a monstrosity. It’s a confluence of physical, virtual, computational, and non-computational stuffs — electricity, data centers, servers, air conditioners, security guards, financial markets — just like the rubber ducky is a confluence of vinyl plastic, injection molding, the hands and labor of Chinese workers, the diesel fuel of ships and trains and trucks, the steel of shipping containers.
They have a really difficult time with the mental models. It’s fascinating. Most companies compete by adding new features to products. They haven’t been in the business of thinking of how to add new communities or network effects. One of the points I make is that platform business models are like playing 3-D chess.
Is ‘SimCity’ Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?
I have Community College and a University, plenty of police coverage, yet I still have a city with homeless ALL OVER….. so what the fix for this or do I just not worry about it?” asks a player on Simtropolis.
For Bittanti, it’s impossible not to see the connections between the homeless problem in the Bay Area and the way it’s portrayed in SimCity. “That is, can we fix homelessness in SimCity, or because we haven’t fixed homelessness as a problem in real life, therefore we are bound to lose?” Bittanti asked. “Is SimCity a reflection of what’s happening in reality, and therefore is very realistic, or is it a programming issue?
[Banished] is a real-time ‘god game’ in which the player guides a small group of people in building a small village, which with careful guidance can become a small town. The available buildings and technology suggest it is the Middle Ages, and the steep pitched roofs, encircling forest and harsh winters suggest northern Europe. We know that these people have arrived in a clearing with little more than the clothes on their backs and some seeds because they have been ‘banished’ from elsewhere. Other than that, there’s little context or backstory; and there’s no time to ruminate because Winter Is Coming.
All strategy and resource-management games involve crises and shortages, but put a foot wrong in Banished and everyone dies. It’s a brutal lesson in the wretched economics of subsistence farming. The workers are desperately unproductive, their hovels are draughty, their winter coats are thin, and their iron tools wear out. All it takes is the slightest misallocation of labour or materials, and every man, woman and child is doomed: output dips, there are one or two untimely deaths, and all of a sudden there aren’t enough hands to bring in the harvest, and potatoes rot in the fields while the whole village dies in their beds. …
The Steam platform, which helped to drive Banished’s success, has done a great deal to democratise game development and marketing, giving small designers a better chance of competing against industry giants and facilitating viral, word-of-mouth hits. Steam has given PC gamers and developers a better than ever idea of what is really popular among their peers, spawning copycats and crazes. And something interesting has become clear: scarcity sells. To put it more precisely: scavenging sells. Starvation sells. Survival sells.
Nether, Rust, Infestation: Survivor Stories, Miscreated, 7 Days to Die, The Long Dark, The Forest — the past couple of years have seen a spate of survival games, often but not always with a voguish ‘zombie apocalypse’ setting. On the surface, these resemble that perennial favourite, the first-person shooter, in which the player runs around killing zombies, terrorists or other players. But they share a new emphasis on brutal realism and necessity. Ammunition is no longer conveniently scattered along a linear path towards an objective; often, there is no particular objective, as the games are generally what is called ‘open world’, providing an extensive omni-directional living terrain that the player can freely explore. Sometimes, ammunition is the least of your worries because your only weapon is a rock and your character is starving and bleeding to death. This is no cheerful blastalong, but a twilit limp along a grass verge, bleeding from a septic wound, weak from hunger, pursued by assailants against whom you have no realistic defense. Horrible, but utterly compelling.
Utopian UI, the End of Islands, Gibson’s Peripheral, Second Wave Climate Action and Von Neuman Probes
When Victor designs a software interface, he doesn’t do it to deliver functionality — he does it to advance an argument, in much the same way that 20th-century utopian architectural designs were never really intended as functional building plans. Victor’s UI demos are primarily manifestos on the sorry state of computer-assisted thought, framed with the same fire-eyed rhetoric of any Italian Futurist.
A talk entitled “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable” sounds like an interaction-design equivalent of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness; it’s actually a sober and rather technical demonstration of Victor’s various UI schemes for visualizing scientific models and engineering systems. And in the introduction to his “Kill Math” project — actually a quite benign, if broadly ambitious, attempt to reimagine mathematical notation in more intuitive and visual terms — Victor declares that “the power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.”
These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the printing press, we invented a form of knowledge work which meant sitting at a desk, staring at little tiny rectangles and moving your hand a little bit. It used to be those tiny rectangles were papers or books and you’re moving your hand with a pen.
Now we’re staring at computer screens and moving our hands on a keyboard, but it’s basically the same thing. We’re computer users thinking paper thoughts.”
William Gibson On the Apocalypse, America, and The Peripheral’s Ending
Q: We don’t really have any state actors in this future. We have a few people working for the government, but mostly for crime bosses and corporations. Were you thinking about about the future of governments? I thought it was so interesting that the characters are basically able to take over Flynne’s state, whatever it is.
A: Flynne lives in a more fully corrupt, third worlded version of contemporary America. Given that they have literally a magical ability to make money, what could they not do? That was my assumption. If somebody had that ability right now, here, what could they not do? It’s literally magical. A lot of this narrative is rather consciously a fairy tale. Its costumes are highly naturalistic scifi, but the things that motivate the plot are stuff like a fairy godmother, you know? There’s the all-knowing eye — that kind of thing. None of which — deliberately — is ever really plastered over with verbiage designed to convince you it’s possible. I think that kind of verbiage is all bullshit anyway.
In the ‘post-national’ 21st century, borders are no longer as fixed as national jurisdictional law suggests. Australia has, at times, excised itself from its islands to handle the politics of asylum‑seeking. Would-be migrants, seeking refuge in Australia, are held on offshore islands until their status is legitimated or denied. By this means, successive Australian governments have deprived vulnerable people, including children, of basic human rights. For the sake of domestic political convenience, the nation of the plastic stencil sometimes defines itself without the islands where refugee boats land. The fact that people abandon nations and passports because of global pressures, because of the impossibility of being at home where they were born, is part of what is changing the nature of nations in a global world. People are no longer from where they came from. They become citizens of where they wash up, or the world. Island-mindedness — the separation of places from other places — is no longer an option.
In this global world, it is flows and circulation, rather than land parcels, that are important. Just as Google maps and GPS have become widespread, territoriality is changing. Flows are about land-and-sea-and-sky-and-people — a collective consciousness that is hard to represent on a 2D map or a phone app.
The island-minded idea of nature, separated from culture, has also changed. Some say we are at the ‘end of nature’: there is now a human signature on all the global flows: the biophysical system is also cultural, as the new epoch of the Anthropocene is imagined. To rework the poet John Dunne, no island-nation is ‘entire of itself’, nor can any island-nature be other than ‘involved in mankind’. Perhaps the bell now tolls for the last island: the blue marble of planet Earth, an island in the infinity of space.
The greenest governor in the country tells Grist about his big climate plan
We think we are in a very lucky spot in that we’re early enough in this to be important, to help lead the rest of the world, but we’re not the first. So we’re able to learn from other jurisdictions. We’ve looked at what has happened in Europe [with its cap-and-trade system], the excess volatility they had early in the market, and we have mechanisms to deal with that. We’ve looked at the response in market conditions to how you recycle the dollar, through our program to help low-income people. We’ve looked at measures to help energy-intensive industries. We’ve learned from those experiences. We’re really in a good spot to be able to say, you know, somebody else developed the steam engine here, and now we’ve got the second edition that we can use.
[Von Neuman Probes — the logic of reckless extraction, extended to a literally universal scale:]
A Von Neumann probe is a robot designed to reach distant star systems and create factories which will reproduce copies themselves by the thousands. A dead moon rather than a planet makes the ideal destination for Von Neumann probes, since they can easily land and take off from these moons, and also because these moons have no erosion. These probes would live off the land, using naturally occurring deposits of iron, nickel, etc. to create the raw ingredients to build a robot factory. They would create thousands of copies of themselves, which would then scatter and search for other star systems.
Ai Weiwei, Graphine, Disruption and Chinese SF
Ai Weiwei is Living in Our Future
Of course Ai Weiwei’s current life isn’t completely the same as our future lives. He is permanently and actively watched, whereas we will be permanently and passively watched.
This New Yorker story on graphene and nanotechnology hype ought to be required reading for technology reporters and futurists:
Guha, at I.B.M., believes that the field of nanotechnology has been oversold. “Nobody stands to benefit from giving the bad news,” he told me. “The scientist wants to give the good news, the journalist wants to give the good news — there is no feedback control to the system. In order to develop a technology, there is a lot of discipline that needs to go in, a lot of things that need to be done that are perhaps not as sexy.”
Tour concurs, and admits to some complicity. “People put unrealistic time lines on us,” he told me. “We scientists have a tendency to feed that — and I’m guilty of that. A few years ago, we were building molecular electronic devices. The Times called, and the reporter asked, ‘When could these be ready?’ I said, ‘Two years’ — and it was nonsense. I just felt so excited about it.”
The impulse to overlook obvious difficulties to commercial development is endemic to scientific research. Geim’s paper, after all, mentioned the band-gap problem. “People knew that graphene is a gapless semiconductor,” Amirhasan Nourbakhsh, an M.I.T. scientist specializing in graphene, told me. “But graphene was showing extremely high mobility — and mobility in semiconductor technology is very important. People just closed their eyes.”
According to Friedel, the historian, scientists rely on the stubborn conviction that an obvious obstacle can be overcome. “There is a degree of suspension of disbelief that a lot of good research has to engage in,” he said. “Part of the art — and it is art — comes from knowing just when it makes sense to entertain that suspension of disbelief, at least momentarily, and when it’s just sheer fantasy.”
Among the Disrupted
All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject…
“Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?” Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. … The decision to prefer the requirements of commerce to the requirements of culture cannot be exonerated by the thrills of the digital revolution. … The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.”
Chinese SciFi is really cool: Ether
We exchange positions. She holds my left hand in her right and leads me forward until I can dimly feel the body heat of the person in front of me. I kneel, feel someone’s shoulder come into contact with my hand, and pat it. The person immediately moves to the right to leave me a spot. I sit down with the woman hand in hand, and the person finds my right hand and takes it.
The hand is a man’s, hard and knobby and powerfully muscled, but his finger is astonishingly nimble. My palm is instantly covered with rapid writing. He’s so fast that I can’t even identify every letter. I focus on capturing the keywords and abbreviations, and guessing the meaning of the sentence from there. Before my brain has time to take in each message, the next sentence assaults me — my skin evidently hasn’t become sufficiently sensitive for the flood of finger-talking information. As I frantically decipher the words, I pass on what I can to her on the left. “Opposition party . . . scandal . . . resignation crisis . . . secret police . . . pursuit . . . ” I can only retransmit some o the keywords in the message, but I’m hooked. No one brings up politics in my online groups anymore. I want to add my own viewpoint for her, but the next message has arrived already. “Spaceplane wreck . . . Jamaica. Scandal. Fuel leak. NASA’s lost government support? Russian attack.” The first part is the topic, and after it are everyone’s opinions. I think I’m getting used to this method of receiving information. She’s right, I’m not a newbie. But the fingers on my left hand can’t quickly and clearly transmit information no matter how hard I try. After a few attempts, I write dejectedly, “Sorry.”
Her palm is cool and smooth, like the fresh new blackboard in my elementary school classroom. In response, she extends a finger and stealthily writes three words on my left hand: “I forgive you.”
I can feel the corners of my mouth lift. “You just told me this is against the rules,” I write.
“You’re getting better.” She breaks the rules again and adds a smiley face.
