The Myth Of AI. A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

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. ...

That mythology, in turn, has spurred a reactionary, perpetual spasm from people who are horrified by what they hear. You'll have a figure say, "The computers will take over the Earth, but that's a good thing, because people had their chance and now we should give it to the machines." Then you'll have other people say, "Oh, that's horrible, we must stop these computers." Most recently, some of the most beloved and respected figures in the tech and science world, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have taken that position of: "Oh my God, these things are an existential threat. They must be stopped."

In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what was perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity. ... That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me, where you have (natural language) translators and everybody else who contributes to the corpora that allows the data schemes to operate, contributing to the fortunes of whoever runs the computers. You're saying, "Well, but they're helping the AI, it's not us, they're helping the AI." It reminds me of somebody saying, "Oh, build these pyramids, it's in the service of this deity," and, on the ground, it's in the service of an elite. It's an economic effect of the new idea. The new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

[39:47]

JARON LANIER is a Computer Scientist; Musician; Author of Who Owns the Future? 

Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page

INTRODUCTION 

by John Brockman

This past weekend, during a trip to San Francisco, Jaron Lanier stopped by to talk to me for an Edge feature. He had something on his mind: news reports about comments by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, two of the most highly respected and distinguished members of the science and technology communiity, on the dangers of AI. ("Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and fearing the machine" by Alan Wastler, CNBC 6.21.14). He then talked, uninterrupted, for an hour.

As Lanier was about to depart, John Markoff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning technology correspondent for THE NEW YORK TIMES, arrived. Informed of the topic of the previous hour's conversation, he said, "I have a piece in the paper next week. Read it." A few days later, his article, "Fearing Bombs That Can Pick Whom to Kill" (11.12.14), appeared on the front page. It's one of a continuing series of articles by Markoff pointing to the darker side of the digital revolution.

This is hardly new territory. Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees, the former Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, addressed similar topics in his 2004 book, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning, as did computer scientist, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in his highly influential 2000 article in Wired, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species".

But these topics are back on the table again, and informing the conversation in part is Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the recently published book by Nick Bostrom, founding director of Oxford University’s Institute for the Future of Humanity. In his book, Bostrom asks questions such as "what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us?"

I am encouraging, and hope to publish, a Reality Club conversation, with comments (up to 500 words) on, but not limited to, Lanier's piece. This is a very broad topic that involves many different scientific fields and I am sure the Edgies will have lots of interesting things to say.

—JB

Related on Edge:

Jaron Lanier: 

• "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" (2006) ;
• "One Half A Manifesto" (2000)

Kevin Kelly: 

• "The Technium" (2014)

George Dyson: 

• "Turing's Cathedral" (2004)

THE MYTH OF AI (Transcript)

A lot of us were appalled a few years ago when the American Supreme Court decided, out of the blue, to decide a question it hadn't been asked to decide, and declare that corporations are people. That's a cover for making it easier for big money to have an influence in politics. But there's another angle to it, which I don't think has been considered as much: the tech companies, which are becoming the most profitable, the fastest rising, the richest companies, with the most cash on hand, are essentially people for a different reason than that. They might be people because the Supreme Court said so, but they're essentially algorithms.

Everybody Relax: An MIT Economist Explains Why Robots Won't Steal Our Jobs

Living together in harmony. Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images

If you’ve ever found yourself fretting about the possibility that software and robotics are on the verge of thieving away all our jobs, renowned MIT labor economist David Autor is out with a new paper that might ease your nerves. Presented Friday at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s big annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the paper argues that humanity still has two big points in its favor: People have "common sense,” and they’re "flexible."

Neil Irwin already has a lovely writeup of the paper at the New York Times, but let’s run down the basics. There’s no question machines are getting smarter, and quickly acquiring the ability to perform work that once seemed uniquely human. Think self-driving cars that might one day threaten cabbies, or computer programs that can handle the basics of legal research.

But artificial intelligence is still just that: artificial. We haven’t untangled all the mysteries of human judgment, and programmers definitely can’t translate the way we think entirely into code. Instead, scientists at the forefront of AI have found workarounds like machine-learning algorithms. As Autor points out, a computer might not have any abstract concept of a chair, but show it enough Ikea catalogs, and it can eventually suss out the physical properties statistically associated with a seat. Fortunately for you and me, this approach still has its limits.

For example, both a toilet and a traffic cone look somewhat like a chair, but a bit of reasoning about their shapes vis-à-vis the human anatomy suggests that a traffic cone is unlikely to make a comfortable seat. Drawing this inference, however, requires reasoning about what an object is “for” not simply what it looks like. Contemporary object recognition programs do not, for the most part, take this reasoning-based approach to identifying objects, likely because the task of developing and generalizing the approach to a large set of objects would be extremely challenging.

That’s what Autor means when he says machines lack for common sense. They don’t think. They just do math.

And that leaves lots of room for human workers in the future.

Technology has already whittled away at middle class jobs, from factory workers replaced by robotic arms to secretaries made redundant by Outlook, over the past few decades. But Autor argues that plenty of today's middle-skill occupations, such as construction trades and medical technicians, will stick around, because “many of the tasks currently bundled into these jobs cannot readily be unbundled … without a substantial drop in quality.”

These aren’t jobs that require performing a single task over and over again, but instead demand that employees handle some technical work while dealing with other human beings and improvising their way through unexpected problems. Machine learning algorithms can’t handle all of that. Human beings, Swiss-army knives that we are, can. We’re flexible.

Just like the dystopian arguments that machines are about to replace a vast swath of the workforce, Autor’s paper is very much speculative. It’s worth highlighting, though, because it cuts through the silly sense of inevitability that sometimes clouds this subject. Predictions about the future of technology and the economy are made to be dashed. And while Noah Smith makes a good point that we might want to be prepared for mass, technology-driven unemployment even if there’s just a slim chance of it happening, there’s also no reason to take it for granted.

Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent.

ORIGINAL: Slate

By Jordan Weissmann

The disruptive potential of solar power

As costs fall, the importance of solar power to senior executives is rising.
The economics of solar power are improving. It is a far more cost-competitive power source today than it was in the mid-2000s, when installations and manufacturing were taking off, subsidies were generous, and investors were piling in. Consumption continued rising even as the MAC Global Solar Energy Index fell by 50 percent between 2011 and the end of 2013, a period when dozens of solar companies went bankrupt, shut down, or changed hands at fire-sale prices.

Image Original: MAC Global Solar Energy Index

The bottom line: the financial crisis, cheap natural gas, subsidy cuts by cash-strapped governments, and a flood of imports from Chinese solar-panel manufacturers have profoundly challenged the industry’s short-term performance. But they haven’t undermined its potential; indeed, global installations have continued to rise—by over 50 percent a year, on average, since 2006. The industry is poised to assume a bigger role in global energy markets; as it evolves, its impact on businesses and consumers will be significant and widespread. Utilities will probably be the first, but far from the only, major sector to feel solar’s disruptive potential.

Economic fundamentals 
Sharply declining costs are the key to this potential. The price US residential consumers pay to install rooftop solar PV (photovoltaic) systems has plummeted from nearly $7 per watt peak of best-in-class system capacity in 2008 to $4 or less in 2013.1 Most of this decline has been the result of steep reductions in upstream (or “hard”) costs, chiefly equipment. Module costs, for example, fell by nearly 30 percent a year between 2008 and 2013, while cumulative installations soared from 1.7 gigawatts in 2009 to an estimated 11 gigawatts by the end of 2013, according to GTM Research.

While module costs should continue to fall, even bigger opportunities lurk in the downstream (or “soft”) costs associated with installation and service. Financing, customer acquisition, regulatory incentives, and approvals collectively represent about half the expense of installing residential systems in the United States. Our research suggests that as they become cheaper, the overall costs to consumers are poised to fall to $2.30 by 2015 and to $1.60 by 2020.

These cost reductions will put solar within striking distance, in economic terms, of new construction for traditional power-generation technologies, such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. That’s true not just for residential and commercial segments, where it is already cost competitive in many (though not all) geographies, but also, eventually, for industrial and wholesale markets. Exhibit 1 highlights the progress solar already has made toward “grid parity” in the residential segment and the remaining market opportunities as it comes further down the curve. China is investing serious money in renewables. Japan’s government is seeking to replace a significant portion of its nuclear capacity with solar in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident. And in the United States and Europe, solar adoption rates have more than quadrupled since 2009.

Exhibit 1
A sharp decline in installation costs for solar photovoltaic systems has boosted the competitiveness of solar power.

While these economic powerhouses represent the biggest prizes, they aren’t the only stories. Sun-drenched Saudi Arabia, for example, now considers solar sufficiently attractive to install substantial capacity by 2032,2 with an eye toward creating local jobs. And in Africa and India, where electric grids are patchy and unreliable, distributed generation is increasingly replacing diesel and electrifying areas previously without power. Economic fundamentals (and in some cases, such as Saudi Arabia, the desire to create local jobs) are creating a brighter future for solar.

Business consumption and investment
Solar’s changing economics are already influencing business consumption and investment. In consumption, a number of companies with large physical footprints and high power costs are installing commercial-scale rooftop solar systems, often at less than the current price of buying power from a utility. For example, Wal-Mart Stores has stated that it will switch to 100 percent renewable power by 2020, up from around 20 percent today. Mining and defense companies are looking to solar in remote and demanding environments. In the hospitality sector, Starwood Hotels and Resorts has partnered with NRG Solar to begin installing solar at its hotels. Verizon is spending $100 million on solar and fuel-cell technology to power its facilities and cell-network infrastructure. Why are companies doing such things? To

• diversify their energy supply, s
• ave money, and 
• appeal to consumers. 

These steps are preliminary, but if they work, solar initiatives could scale up fast.

As for investment, solar’s long-term contracts and relative insulation from fuel-price fluctuations are proving increasingly attractive. The cost of capital also is falling. Institutional investors, insurance companies, and major banks are becoming more comfortable with the risks (such as weather uncertainty and the reliability of components) associated with long-term ownership of solar assets. Accordingly, investors are more and more willing to underwrite long-term debt positions for solar, often at costs of capital lower than those of traditional project finance.

Major players also are creating advanced financial products to meet solar’s investment profile. The best example of this to date is NRG Yield, and we expect other companies to unveil similar securities that pool renewable operating assets into packages for investors. Google has been an active tax-equity investor in renewable projects, deploying more than $1 billion since 2010. It also will be interesting to track the emergence of solar projects financed online via crowdsourcing (the best example is Solar Mosaic, which brings investors and solar-energy projects together). This approach could widen the pool of investors while reducing the cost of capital for smaller installations, in particular.

Disruptive potential
The utility sector represents a fascinating example of the potential for significant disruption as costs fall, even as solar’s scale remains relatively small. Although solar accounts for only less than half a percent of US electricity generation, the business model for utilities depends not so much on the current generation base as on installations of new capacity. Solar could seriously threaten the latter because its growth undermines the utilities’ ability to count on capturing all new demand, which historically has fueled a large share of annual revenue growth. (Price increases have accounted for the rest.)

Depending on the market, new solar installations could now account for up to half of new consumption (in the first ten months of 2013, more than 20 percent of new US installed capacity was solar). By altering the demand side of the equation, solar directly affects the amount of new capital that utilities can deploy at their predetermined return on equity. In effect, though solar will continue to generate a small share of the overall US energy supply, it could well have an outsize effect on the economics of utilities—and therefore on the industry’s structure and future (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2

Although solar power will continue to account for a small share of the overall US energy supply, it could well have an outsize effect on the economics of utilities.

That’s already happening in Europe. Over the last several years, the demand for power has fallen while the supply of renewables (including solar) has risen, driven down power prices, and depressed the penetration of conventional power sources. US utilities can learn many lessons from their European counterparts, which for the most part stood by while smaller, more nimble players led the way. Each US utility will have to manage the risks of solar differently. All of them, however, will have to do something.

Broader management implications
As solar becomes more economic, it will create new battlegrounds for business and new opportunities for consumers. When a solar panel goes up on a homeowner’s roof, the installer instantly develops a potentially sticky relationship with that customer. Since the solar installation often puts money in the homeowner’s pocket from day one, it is a relationship that can generate goodwill. But, most important, since solar panels are long-lived assets, often with power-purchase agreements lasting 15 or 20 years, the relationship also should be enduring.

That combination may make solar installers natural focal points for the provision of many products and services, from security systems to mortgages to data storage, thermostats, smoke detectors, energy-information services, and other in-home products. As a result, companies in a wide range of industries may benefit from innovative partnerships built on the deep customer relationships that solar players are likely to own. Tesla Motors already has a relationship with SolarCity, for example, to develop battery storage coupled with solar. It is easy to imagine future relationships between many other complementary players. These possibilities suggest a broader point: the solar story is no longer just about technology and regulation. Rather, business-model innovation and strong management practices will play an increasingly important role in the sector’s evolution and in the way it engages with a range of players from other industries. Segmenting customers, refining pricing strategies, driving down costs, and optimizing channel relationships all will figure prominently in the solar-energy ecosystem, as they do elsewhere.

As solar becomes integrated with energy-efficiency solutions, data analytics, and other technologies (such as storage), it will become an increasingly important element in the next generation of resource-related services and of the world’s coming resource revolution. In the not too distant future, a growing number of industries will have to take note of the promise, and sometimes the threat, of solar to business models based on traditional energy economics. But, in the meantime, the battle for the customer is taking place today, with long-term ramifications for existing industry structures.

About the authors
David Frankel is an associate principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, where Dickon Pinner is a principal; Ken Ostrowski is a director in the Atlanta office.

The authors would like to thank Stefan Heck, Sean Kane, and Farah Mandich for their contributions to this article.

ORIGINAL: McKinsey

by David Frankel, Kenneth Ostrowski, and Dickon Pinner 

April 2014 |

Study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? (Updated)

NOTE: NASA Clarifies Its Role in Civilization-Collapse Study
NASA is distancing itself from a new study that investigates how unsustainable resource exploitation and rising income inequality could potentially lead to the collapse of human civilization as we know it.
NASA officials released this statement on the study today (March 20): "A soon-to-be published research paper, 'Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies' by University of Maryland researchers Safa Motesharrei and Eugenia Kalnay, and University of Minnesota's Jorge Rivas, was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions."

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely,  

• Population, 
• Climate, 
• Water, 
• Agriculture, and  
• Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features:

• "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and 
• "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" 

These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:


".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.

The two key solutions are to

• reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and 
• to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

This Is What New York Would Look Like If The Whole City Was A Giant Urban Farm

The Big Apple would be a lot greener if it needed to grow its own food.

For the past six years, the urban research nonprofit Terreform has carefully considered exactly what New York City would look like if everything New Yorkers ate was grown inside city limits.

“At some level, it’s absurd,” says Michael Sorkin, who leads Terreform.

“We discovered that with intense use of vertical agriculture and a change in diet, we could in fact physically provide the facilities to grow 2500 decent calories for every resident in New York."

"But the energy estimates were so enormous we estimated that 25 nuclear power plants would be required.”

 

Still, even if cities don’t necessarily become giant farms, the research can help point urban areas toward more sustainable choices.

 

The researchers also looked at options for growing all food within 100 miles of the city, or growing everything within the state.

“We looked at 100% autonomy-- what effort that would take, what forms, what living arrangements-- and we then look for some more reasonable response,” Sorkin says.

The research is part of a larger project called New York City (Steady) State, which will eventually detail how the city can be entirely self-sufficient, from energy to waste.

It’s intended as a counterpoint to things like ecological footprints, which generically measure environmental impact.

Here, the researchers are looking at specific and direct impacts in a confined area.

"It’s a matter of taking responsibility for one’s effects on the planet," Sorkin says.

"New York is a good place to start because New Yorkers, as Americans, are enormous consumers."

The design includes everything from a skyscraper devoted to meat production (though Sorkin notes that it would be a lot easier, sustainability-wise, if everyone in the city became vegan), to rooftop "neighborhood food hubs" and streets that are turned into gardens.

"We’re looking at all sorts of resources that we think are misused in New York, like streets," he explains.

 

"This is the largest area of space in the public realm. Imagine if we took half of the street out of the automobile realm and put it in the pedestrian realm: There could be farms, there could be daycare centers, there could be all sorts of public amenities."

They found a few limits for food production; coffee, for example, is hard to grow in a vertical farm. Even in that case, they tried to find a local connection.

After learning that Haiti grows enough coffee to supply half of New York's needs, they've proposed an agreement between the two locations.

Haitians could be given education at schools like Columbia in exchange for selling New Yorkers coffee.

 

After Terreform completes research on other aspects of self-sufficiency, like energy, it will be putting together a resource for cities to use in planning.

"We're compiling an encyclopedia of the technologies and morphologies that could be used for cities around the world that are interested in moving in the direction of autonomy," Sorkin says.

And they continue to push the boundaries of what self-sufficiency can mean.

"We're always asking a question about the nature of the membrane around the city," Sorkin says.

"What would it be permeable to, what protections would have to be given to local production. It's an armature for speculation."

The Big Apple would be a lot greener if it needed to grow its own food.

The New York City (Steady) State is considering what it would mean if the city's 8 million residents were entirely self-sufficient, from the food they eat to the fuel they burn.
 
For the past six years, the urban research nonprofit Terreform has carefully considered exactly what New York City would look like if everything New Yorkers ate was grown inside city limits.

“At some level, it’s absurd,” says Michael Sorkin, who leads Terreform. “We discovered that with intense use of vertical agriculture and a change in diet, we could in fact physically provide the facilities to grow 2,500 decent calories for every resident in New York. But the energy estimates were so enormous we estimated that 25 nuclear power plants would be required.”

Amsterdam Ave.

Still, even if cities don’t necessarily become giant farms, the research can help point urban areas toward more sustainable choices. The researchers also looked at options for growing all food within 100 miles of the city, or growing everything within the state. “We looked at 100% autonomy--what effort that would take, what forms, what living arrangements--and we then look for some more reasonable response,” Sorkin says.

The research is part of a larger project called New York City (Steady) State, which will eventually detail how the city can be entirely self-sufficient, from energy to waste. It’s intended as a counterpoint to things like ecological footprints, which generically measure environmental impact.

Here, the researchers are looking at specific and direct impacts in a confined area.

"It’s a matter of taking responsibility for one’s effects on the planet," Sorkin says. "New York is a good place to start because New Yorkers, as Americans, are enormous consumers."

Why look at consumption on the level of the city? "Nation-states seem to be incompetent, and multi-nationals seem to be badly motivated," he says. "As an urbanist, I wanted to know what a city could actually accomplish if it decided to truly take responsibility."

Sunnyside, Queens site

The design includes everything from a skyscraper devoted to meat production (though Sorkin notes that it would be a lot easier, sustainability-wise, if everyone in the city became vegan), to rooftop "neighborhood food hubs" and streets that are turned into gardens.

"We’re looking at all sorts of resources that we think are misused in New York, like streets," he explains. "This is the largest area of space in the public realm. Imagine if we took half of the street out of the automobile realm and put it in the pedestrian realm: There could be farms, there could be daycare centers, there could be all sorts of public amenities."

They found a few limits for food production; coffee, for example, is hard to grow in a vertical farm. Even in that case, they tried to find a local connection. After learning that Haiti grows enough coffee to supply half of New York's needs, they've proposed an agreement between the two locations: Haitians could be given education at schools like Columbia in exchange for selling New Yorkers coffee. 

After Terreform completes research on other aspects of self-sufficiency, like energy, it will be putting together a resource for cities to use in planning. "We're compiling an encyclopedia of the technologies and morphologies that could be used for cities around the world that are interested in moving in the direction of autonomy," Sorkin says.

And they continue to push the boundaries of what self-sufficiency can mean. "We're always asking a question about the nature of the membrane around the city," Sorkin says. "What would it be permeable to, what protections would have to be given to local production. It's an armature for speculation."

ORIGINAL: Fast Company

Economic Elite Announce Plan to Replace Human Labor with Machines

image source Nicholas West Activist Post

Speaking at the recent Davos economic conference - widely considered to be the elite economic forum to discuss trends and political strategy - an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Jeremy Howard, had some stunning announcements that indicate a major shift in employment is set to occur very soon.

As Howard states in the video below, we have hit a critical threshold where machine intelligence is performing better than even the leading experts in the fields of medicine, science, and banking among others. This has vast ramifications, as this crossover coincides also with the replacement of skilled and non-skilled human labor with robots. Between the two events, people from all economic classes are being threatened with replacement in an unprecedented way. It is being called technological unemployment - a type of permanent unemployment that greatly exacerbates our current recession/depression, because the lost jobs most likely will never return.

Howard asserts that we are about to encounter conditions akin to those that occurred after the Industrial Revolution replaced manufacturing and agricultural workers to a vast degree. That event, in fact, gave rise to the term technological unemployment. Much maligned economist, John Maynard Keynes, was the first to issue dire predictions of a type of extinction level event for unemployment, which we now clearly know never fully took place. However, the new type of automation poses a far greater threat, according to many researchers such as Jeremy Howard. The main reason is simple: this time it is all-encompassing; in other words, everyone can be replaced ... permanently.

This has led to predictions such as those made by Professor of Computer Science, Moshe Vardi, when he stated that all human work will be fully outsourced to robots and robotic machine intelligence by 2045. But we need to keep in mind that this is not some sort of overnight switch that gets thrown; it is happening right now, as technology is already killing middle class jobs.

In the video below, Jeremy Howard gives very precise, concrete examples that show just how far machine intelligence has advanced, and the threat that it poses for human productivity and employment.

Particularly interesting is his reference to a map showing which countries are service-based economies, juxtaposed with the fact that America has become 65% based on information technology and processing. Both sets are the jobs slated for direct replacement by machine systems that are in some cases already more efficient, lower cost and more accurate than any human. And, unlike humans, machine learning is exponentially increasing its "intelligence" on a yearly basis. This situation creates a scenario as bad as or potentially much worse than the Industrial Revolution, when after the shift 80% of workers were worse off socio-economically.

Howard's final graphic is a stunning one that shows a 15-year flat-line, and now downward slide of human value vs. overall productivity. This can only mean one thing: we are already being outsourced, and the pace is accelerating.

Jeremy Howard at Davos: Jobs For The Machine. One of the "Thinking Ahead With The Young Global Leaders" sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2014.

Dire predictions aside, there are ways to position oneself for the coming transformation without merging with machines, as Transhumanists suggest, or turning over the running of society to a centralized hive system of political and economic management as Zeitgeist proponents endorse.

For a look at the areas where one can still thrive, please view this essential documentary. It's long, but the path for the unprepared will be far longer.

Will Work For Free | OFFICIAL RELEASE | 2013 .

Will Work For Free is a documentary by Sam Vallely on the subject of technological unemployment.
this work is protected under fair use and will always be free.


ORIGINAL: Activist Post

February 8, 2014

Download the film with fixed audio:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/imd6s8llqlg...

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/willworkforfree

Muse - Madness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0Sg...

GEA Farm Technologies MIone robotic milking system for dairy cows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGSc5...

EGNOS for precision farming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r365Q...

Lee Cronin: Print your own medicine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAEqv...

Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60s...

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAP...

Ultra-Ever Dry - Superhydrophobic coating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM8O...

Solar Roadways: The Prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep4L1...

Geothermal Heating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ajqi...

For information on RBE(Resource-Based Economy):
http://www.thevenusproject.com/

Sign up to the TZM Mailing List:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/
 Source:www.33rdsquare.com/2014/02/jobs-for-machines.html
Related Article by Eric Blair:Self-Driven Vehicles to Eliminate Countless Jobs

Key books on the subject:Robocalypse
Race Against the Machine
The Second Machine Age

The Best Shots Fired in the Oxford Comma Wars

Image credit: Thinkstock

The Oxford comma, so-called because the Oxford University Press style guidelines require it, is the comma before the conjunction at the end of a list. If your preferred style is to omit the second comma in "red, white, and blue," you are aligned with the anti-Oxford comma faction. The pro-Oxford comma faction is more vocal and numerous in the US, while in the UK, anti-Oxford comma reigns. (Oxford University is an outsider, style-wise, in its own land.) In the US, book and magazine publishers are generally pro, while newspapers are anti, but both styles can be found in both media.

The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor. Here are some quotes that have served as shots exchanged in the Oxford comma wars.

Pro: "She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president."

This example from the Chicago Manual of Style shows how the comma is necessary for clarity. Without it, she is taking a picture of two people, her mother and father, who are the president and vice president. With it, she is taking a picture of four people.

Con: "Those at the ceremony were the commodore, the fleet captain, the donor of the cup, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones."

This example from the 1934 style book of the New York Herald Tribune shows how a comma before "and" can result in a lack of clarity. With the comma, it reads as if Mr. Smith was the donor of the cup, which he was not.

Pro: "Zinovieff shot over five hundred of the bourgeoisie at a stroke—nobles, professors, officers, journalists, men and women."

George Ives, the author of a 1921 guide to the usage style of the Atlantic Monthly Press, gives this example to show how making the comma before "and" standard practice is more economical. This way, the reader will know for sure that if it's missing, there's a good reason. Here the reading is that there were both men and women among the nobles, professors, officers, and journalists. Without the expectation of the Oxford comma, the reader has to work harder to figure out that men and women aren't two additional groups on the list.

Con: "There are certain places where for the sake of clarity and good form the presence of a comma is obligatory, but on the other hand a too liberal use of this form of punctuation tends to slow up the pace of the reading matter and to create confusion and hesitancy in the mind of the reader."

The 1937 New York Times style guide put economy on the side of the no comma rule. Use when necessary—otherwise, it's just clutter to slow you down. 

Pro: "...use the comma between all members of a series, including the last two, on the commonsense ground that to do so will preclude ambiguities and annoyances at negligible cost."

Wilson Follett, in his 1966 Modern American Usage, advocates for the comma on the grounds that it can't really hurt.

Con: "All those commas make the flag seem rained on. They give it a furled look. Leave them out, and Old Glory is flung to the breeze, as it should be."

This complaint was addressed to Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker, by James Thurber, who preferred "the red white and blue" to "the red, white, and blue." Ross, a notorious defender of the serial comma, was impressed by Thurber's argument and responded, "write a piece about it, and I'll punctuate the flag any way you want it—in that one piece."

Pro: "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God"

A probably apocryphal book dedication, this example has been a favorite of pro-Oxford comma language blogs for a while. Without the comma before "and," you get a rather intriguing set of parents.

Con: "The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-last member of a series, but otherwise are not too precise to offend a red-blooded American."

H.L. Mencken, who did not use the serial comma himself, implies, in this quote tucked into a supplement to The American Language, that there is something prissy, pedantic, and altogether un-American about the extra comma.

?: "By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

Languagehat dug this gem out of a comment thread on the serial comma. It's from a TV listing in The Times. It supports the use of the Oxford comma, but only because it keeps Mandela from being a dildo collector. However, even the Oxford comma can't keep him from being an 800-year-old demigod. There's only so much a comma can do.

ORIGINAL: Mental Floss
Arika Okrent

Biology's Coefficient

 

JOEL E. COHEN. Laboratory of PopulationsRockefeller University & Columbia University

Joel Cohen uses the tools of mathematics to deconstruct questions of life.

New York, New York© THE ROCKEFELLAR UNIVERSITY

In 1992, Joel Cohen received a phone call from a journalist at Discover magazine. The journalist asked Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller University with doctorates in applied mathematics and public health, “How many people can the Earth hold?” Cohen replied honestly: “I said to him, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out for you.’ I said to myself, ‘This is your business. You’re supposed to know! What’s the matter with you?’”

Cohen spent the next six weeks reading studies that estimated Earth’s human carrying capacity based on a variety of data, from water and land use to food production to mineral availability to energy. “The more I dug, the more fascinated I became that everybody had an answer, but none of the answers agreed,” says Cohen. “They were all based on different assumptions. . . . The substance just was not there.”

Cohen became so irritated with the answers available that he spent the next four and a half years compiling more than 60 studies and developing mathematical models of the planet’s human carrying capacity. The book and Science paper he ultimately published on the topic concluded that Earth’s human carrying capacity is dynamic, uncertain, and shaped by the interactions of populations, economics, the environment, and cultures. The ecological notion of carrying capacity, while excellent for describing antelope populations on the plains, is not a useful tool for thinking about the challenges facing humans.

“Mathematical thought is the railroad over which we carry the freight of scientific discoveries. And I’ve wanted to help lay a few additional tracks.”

El Lado Oscuro Del Amazonas (The Dark Side Of The Amazon)

ORIGINAL: Jonathan Gaitán

De la vida real. Una pareja descubre la verdad de la selva del Ecuador
Real life story. A couple finds out the truth about ecuadorian jungle.

How Would Nature Create A ‘Generous City’?

ORIGINAL: Triple Pundit
By Tamsin Woolley-Barker, Ph.D
By 3p Contributor | July 9th, 2013

Project Haiti Aerial – Credit – HOK by HOK Network, on Flickr

At the end of June, over 350 bio-inspired teachers, designers, architects, biologists, industrialists, and policy-makers gathered at the University of Massachusetts in Boston to ask, “How can humans create conditions conducive to Life?” Not just sustainable economies, cities, and production systems, but a regenerative way of life that creates biodiversity instead of destroying it.

At the 7th Annual Biomimicry Education Summit, and the first ever Biomimicry 3.8 Global Conference, a heady mix of dreamers and doers were trying to build our future the way nature would do it.

On the conference’s second day, a panel of notable architects and city planners asked “How would nature design buildings and cities that fulfill the ecosystem services of the original habitats they replaced?” This is the promise of “Generous Cities,” places where our buildings actually regenerate and improve our environment, much like other richly productive ecosystems we find in nature. Complex living systems like coral reefs and rain forests have been around for millions of years, shaped by natural selection into collaborative webs that are much more than the sum of their parts. Thomas Knittel of HOK and Chris Garvin of Terrapin Bright Green spoke of the need to engineer analogous ecosystems in our urban cores.

In New York, this vision is actually beginning to guide urban planning and architecture, thanks to the Wildlife Conservation Society’s ambitious Mannahatta Project, which reconstructed Manhattan’s environment at the time of European arrival. We now know that the biodiversity per acre on the island once rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains, with over 55 ecological communities, including forests, meadows, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches, springs, ponds, and streams, and a rich and abundant community of wildlife.

Knittel spoke of his early training as an architect. Building designers, he said, are taught to get water “off the building, away from it, and keep away.” Everything outside a five foot radius “is a civil engineer’s problem.” Instead, he suggested we look at the way nature manages resources. Nature’s way with water, for instance, is to “slow it, sink it, store it.” In the Amazon rain forest, clouds form in the dry season, despite the shallow soils and lack of rain. Scientists have long asked, “Where does the water come from?” It turns out that some keystone tree species sink and store water in deep taproots. When conditions are dry, the water draws up passively, through transpiration, to the benefit of all species in the ecosystem. Knittel asked whether someday we could “design a building that creates a raincloud?”

Similarly, can our cities become carbon sinks, absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide the way coral reefs do? Can they run on energy from the sun, wind, water, and heat of the earth, like rain forests and deep-water thermal vent communities? Can our buildings provide food and habitat for ourselves and other species (and not just cockroaches, pigeons, and rats)?

It’s an inspirational vision, and one whose time has come. The Bank of America building, for instance, emits air three times cleaner than the air it brings in. The newly planned Google building, also in NYC, will tap an underground stream for its water needs, while producing a surplus of energy to be fed into the city electricity grid. Green roofs will absorb water and carbon dioxide, while cooling the air.

Thad Pawlowski, an urban designer at New York City Department of City Planning Urban Design Division, then described New York City’s urgent search for ways to rebuild for resilience in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. New flood maps show that the city is dramatically more vulnerable than previously thought, and city planners know that flooding can and will get much worse. Suggestions have mostly been along the lines of “build walls to keep water out.” But nature doesn’t generally rely on such energetically and materially expensive solutions. How would nature rebuild?

Hurricane Sandy damaged Cape May National Wildlife Refuge (NJ) by U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Northeast Region, on Flickr

Janine Benyus, Biomimicry 3.8 co-founder and author of the book Biomimicry, which launched the movement and gave it a name, took the mic and spoke with eloquence. “If you want to know how to rebuild,” she said, “Go to the shoreline. Ask what survived there, and why. Look for the survivors and replicate their strategies.” She painted a compelling image of humble grasses rebuilding dunes, and oyster beds acting as reefs, sheltering the land from impact.