"This fascinating & cogent cultural study is as far from a chatty, glossy puff piece as you can imagine -- but it's no mean-spirited character assassination, either. It examines Oprah as cultural phenomenon, and the ways in which she both influences contemporary culture & embodies it. Well-researched & thoroughly attributed, it's an exemplar of research & analysis, with some unsettling but irrefutable conclusions.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Review of the Book "The Age of Oprah"
Sometimes I find insightful reviewers more interesting than the subject of the review. This Amazon review is exactly that and I feel it's important enough to share.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Are We There Yet?
How To Be A Rich Barbarian
When we think of the term “barbarian,” we imagine wild-eyed savages who live on instinct, versus those who have mastered their instincts (relatively speaking) and have learned how to live in civilization. But that is only a partial definition. In Dark Age Ahead, her final book (and not, it must be said, as good as it might have been; I can’t recommend it to you), the urban theorist Jane Jacobs defined barbarism as a state of ignorance. We become barbarians when we lose a sense of history, and come only to believe in the Everlasting Now. She believed that we were entering a new Dark Age, in part because we had given ourselves over to instinct, and in part because we were forgetting who we are. She writes about the condition of sliding into barbarism from civilization as a process of forgetting:
During a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent and profound. The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness, almost as decisively as if it had not existed.
A key part of the process, Jacobs argued, is coming to see education wholly in instrumental terms — that is, in terms of how useful it can be to one. Useful in what way? In creating material affluence. She decries how education has become a matter of credentialism. Like I said, this is not a very good book, only because it’s a mess. But it does have good insights.
Anyway, I thought of Jacobs when I read this blog entry about education, by Howard Ahmanson. The key lines:
The philosophy behind ‘good’ school districts is the same humanistic, Deweyan philosophy that underlies bad ones. For the vast majority of suburbanites, whose primary values, as Francis Schaeffer pointed out more than 40 years ago [and it hasn’t changed] “personal peace and affluence” are primary, trumping free expression on the one hand and character on the other, excellence in schools is defined in terms of the ability to empower children economically, and ‘character’ is defined as those qualities that will help children succeed economically.
… Here’s another good one from the Daily Beast, entitled “Do Good Parents Send Their Kid to Public School?” In the comment thread, it is made clear that in a technical society it seems to be a lot more important to know STEM [which I think means Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] for one’s future than it is to know when the Civil War was. I don’t like that myself, but it adds to my suspicion that the real reason ‘Western Civ has got to go’ is not white male guilt, but that it is perceived as having no cash value.
That’s an important point. Many middle-class or wealthy people don’t consider themselves barbarians at all. But if they see the passing on of wisdom and knowledge of higher culture not as the heart of education, but rather as a useless appendage, then they are barbarians, no matter how nice their lawn looks.
An example: this year, when our local school district had to cut staff because of a budget shortfall, they gutted the arts faculty. It wasn’t because the school administration are bad people; it was because the state tests for a narrow band of knowledge — mostly in math and biology — and thereby declares that the arts are ancillary to what it means to be educated. Local school districts’ hands are tied. Look, for example, at how the state evaluates 8th graders in US history: there’s nothing there about the ideas behind the founding of America, our constitutional order, or anything like it. Look at its standards for evaluating high school English: it’s entirely about technical skills. According to the state of Louisiana, the highest achievers in its English evaluation will be able to:
1. develop essays that integrate well-chosen evidence to support the central idea;
2. produce essays that contain varied and fluent sentences;
3. revise sentences for correct use of subjunctive mood;
4. determine the main idea when it is implicit in a complex text;
5. develop conclusions based on information synthesized from the text;
6. analyze an author’s use of complex literary elements in a text;
7. evaluate arguments in a complex text;
8. demonstrate an understanding of persuasive techniques;
9. evaluate claims in information resources using evidence; and
10. synthesize information from multiple information resources.
Important skills, for sure! But this is not knowledge; this is the mastery of technique. The state does not test for whether or not a student knows anything about the content of the tradition of English literature. The content does not matter to the evaluators; technique is all that matters. Students could learn how to succeed on this test if they were fed a diet of literary junk food, as long as they grasped how to manipulate the symbols.
You can graduate from a public high school in Louisiana having read nothing significant in our culture’s literary tradition, knowing nothing about our musical tradition, or visual arts tradition, being completely ignorant of basic Western philosophical concepts, and so forth — and the state of Louisiana will consider you to be educated, as long as you can show mastery of math, biology, and the techniques of historical analysis (as well as basic historical facts) and the techniques of understanding textual interpretation.
This is a sophisticated kind of barbarism, if you ask me.
UPDATE: A reader e-mails:
This was exactly my complaint about Harry Potter: the wizarding educational system (and the wizarding world more generally) was completely lacking in anything but the empty manipulation of symbols and words. No literature, no art, no philosophy, no history, no civics. Why was anyone surprised Hogwarts turned out so many death eaters?
Posted in Education. Tagged barbarism, education,Howard Ahmanson, Jane Jacobs.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
War Nerds Guide to the Roots of Syria's Conflicts
4:50 p.m. August 30, 2013
Little Kerry and the Three Bad Options
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I don’t pretend to know what Obama’s people are going to do about Syria in the next few days. I doubt they know themselves. And to be truthful, I just can’t push my nose low enough to read the stinking entrails of Washington D.C.
It’s funny; I can read communiques from the most disgusting irregular groups in the world—say, Lashkar e Jhangvi, the worst of the worst—but I can’t watch John Kerry give speeches or listen to Obama stumble through another peanut-cluster of patriotic clichés explaining why we’re going to do something stupid, with the exciting twist that the guy shoved out in front of the cameras this time is black. That little plot twist stopped being fun sometime in Season Two. Obama has gone from disappointing to just plain depressing, a Wall Street technocrat way out of his depth when trying to think about anyplace not on the campaign trail, the one place he’s at home.
One way or another, the US is going to do something stupid in Syria—even if it does nothing. The three options the US has are:
- Attack the Alawites’ forces decisively, with the goal of seriously weakening Assad’s ability to make war;
- Stage a pure FX attack, with lots of noise and explosions but no effect on the Alawites’ military power;
- Do nothing.
It’s obvious that #3, “Do nothing,” is the right option, like it has been all along. It’s starting to look like even Obama’s mentally-confused team of Imperialist do-gooders realizes that. But if they had the guts to do nothing, after making all this belligerent noise about red lines, they’d look stupid. They’d be laughed at. Worst of all, from a DC insider’s view, the people who really count, the Saudis and the Israelis, would be un-pleased.
That’s the big twosome in DC lobbies, Saudi and Israel. They’re bitter enemies, you hear. Yeah, such bitter enemies that they keep ending up on the same side. They both hate and fear Hezbollah. They both want the US to take out Iran for them. And now they’d both be delighted if we wiped out the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). The Alawite fighting force. That’s a strange way of being bitter enemies. You might almost suspect that these two are the kind of bitter enemies who like to have a drink or two—tea, naturally, because on some issues the Saudis don’t compromise—after making a big show of yelling at each other.
It would take an administration much braver than this one to oppose Saudi and Israel combined. So you probably don’t have to worry about the US doing nothing. Which means the US is stuck with options #1 and #2: a powerful blow to the SAA, or a “limited” attack, meaning a few chemical-weapons units wiped out as some sort of cosmic justice, with no real effect on the Alawites’ military capability.
Of the two, the less bad is Option #2, the limited strike. It might satisfy the Saudis and the Israelis, and salvage whatever credibility the administration thinks it still has in the Middle East. Best of all, it would allow them to run away from Syria as fast as possible, which is still the best thing they could do. The SAA is weaker every day, and there are reports of mass defections again. Hezbollah seems less inclined to prop up the Alawites than it was a few months ago, and the Iranians are signaling that they could live without Assad. This is a dying regime, and you don’t want to be the one to send it into extinction.
Why not, you ask? Isn’t Assad a bad guy? Isn’t his regime evil? I don’t really understand those questions as well as everybody else seems to. The Alawites have reason to expect the worst, to stick together, and to fear Sunni domination. Those fears go way back to Ottoman rule.
Under the Ottomans, Alawites were kaffir, “heretics.” That meant, basically, “fair game.” At the moment, there’s a lot of nonsense going around about how sweet and tolerant the Ottoman Empire was from people who read Said’s Orientalism, or at least got the gist from the back cover, and went from the old European cliché “Ottomans—evil” to a new one, “Ottomans—good.” It makes me tired, this binary crap. If you can’t handle anything more modulated than that, stick to tweeting “Miley Cyrus: Saint or Sinner?”
Yeah, the Ottomans were occasionally considerate of minorities who had powerful connections abroad, like Western Christians (not Armenian, of course) or who performed useful state functions, like some Jews (not all)—but groups like the Alawites, without powerful foreign connections, huddled in the coastal hills hoping not to be noticed, were prey in the Ottoman view. The Alawites only survived by sticking together, fighting the Sunni when attacked, and above all, hoping not to be noticed. If the local authorities were kindly, they’d just be taxed to death for their heresy. If the Pashas were in a bad mood, troops would descend on Alawite villages and carry off all likely-looking women and children to be sold as slaves.
Like a lot of weak tribes, the Alawites were in a better position to benefit from a new set of masters than the formerly strong tribe, the Sunni. The French came in 1920 and saw the usefulness of a tightly-organized, warlike group like the Alawites. The fact that these coastal minority people were despised by the Sunni majority just made them less likely to conspire with the Sunni against the French, more loyal to their new masters.
The Alawites, ruled for the first time in their history by people who didn’t despise them, took to modern military service eagerly, like hundreds of other minority tribes all over the French and British empires. The Army was their way out of those miserable paranoid villages in the hills. They outperformed other groups and filled the officer corps by the time Syria got its independence from France in 1946.
The post-war years were full of wild experiments in the Arab world. The only constant was that military coups were the rule. Leaders came from the army—Nasser, Ghadafi, Saddam. So when an officer with coup-making skills happened to come from a tightly-knit community, he was almost sure to end up in charge. Saddam had his Tikrit clan in Iraq; Ghadafi had his academy buddies in Libya; Hafez Assad had his Alawite kin in Syria. The Alawites were perfectly placed to take advantage of this coup-centered polity. T. E. Lawrence said about them, “One Nusairi [Alawite] would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever.” With Alawite officers filling the armed services in Syria, it was inevitable that an Alawite would come to power, as Hafez Assad did in 1970. From that point, they did what they had to do to remain in power. When killing was necessary, they killed. And in Syria, it was necessary fairly often. But I don’t know of any records showing that the Alawites were particularly cruel by the standards of the time and place. In fact, from the start of their rule in Syria, the Alawites have tried, via Ba’ath Party secularism and a long-term attempt to make Alawite ritual and doctrine closer to Sunni norms, to integrate with their neighbors.
I don’t see simple evil in that story. Good luck, historically, turning suddenly into precarious luck, then, maybe, very bad luck. That’s all I get from that, or from most tribes’ stories. No good, and very little you’d call “evil,” though a lot of suffering and blood.
Maybe I’m missing something. But what I think a lot of people like John Kerry are missing is what drove the Alawites’ grimmer measures: the simple fear of extinction. It’s a risk to go, as they did, from total obscurity to power in a place as fierce as Syria. Because when you fall, it won’t be to go back to Texas to paint puppies like Dubya. You and your whole tribe can reasonably expect massacres, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, the works. When the Sunni revolted against Alawite domination in Hama in 1982, one of the slogans of the Syrian Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood was “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard.” The SAA dealt with the revolt by blasting rebellious neighborhoods with artillery, killing thousands.
So, maybe the Alawites deserve this. They’ve been massacring Sunni right along. But since the SAA still has most of the heavy weaponry and aircraft, the Alawites have been doing their massacres in a way that the Western public can hardly recognize as massacres—by aircraft, by missile, by artillery. We’ve been trained ever since that allegedly glorious World War II to see massacres like that as just one of those things, an unfortunate fact.
The people whose families were in the apartment blocks leveled by the SCUDs fired by the SAA don’t see it that way. They will want revenge, and they may even be entitled to it by whatever notion of justice strikes your fancy. But I seriously, seriously doubt that you will want to see those retaliatory massacres, no matter how justified you think they are.
Because those massacres will be carried out old-style, up close, house by house. In other words, they’ll be the kind of massacre the Western public does not like.
No one will be in the right, or wrong, or whatever—those words don’t work here. I’m just suggesting you may not want your cruise missiles and fighter-bombers to do the softening-up for what will happen.
You’ve had plenty of warning. One of the best Syrian Twitter accounts is from a guy calling himself@samersniper, a Sunni who’s been tweeting for months about seeing friends and family die at the hands of the Alawites. Now that he sees the regime weakening, he’s taken up a different topic: Revenge.
I like the way he introduced it by talking about American movies. This is something people who’ve stayed at home all their lives don’t get. Those movies imply rules, and those rules can be learned by people outside the domestic audience. Here’s the lesson Samer got from one, in this tweet from July 12 2013:
@samersniper 28 Jun
American movie: Member of a gang kills the movie star's wife. So he gets revenge by killing the gang's ~300 member. Every1 supports the star
He’s got us there. You don’t even need to know which movie it was. I’ve seen a million of them since I was a kid with the same plot. I remember Arnie killing an entire army once, back when he was young, because they kidnapped his daughter.
Samer went from the general principle—the legitimacy of revenge when you’ve been through what he and other Syrian Sunni have—to the case at hand in this tweet from early August 2013:
@samersniper 8 Aug
Ur so-called humanity belittles the awfulness of our suffering. A kind of revenge is a must, 2 preserve self esteem &restore usurped dignity
You could argue there’s a little Frantz Fanon in there, but it makes more sense to say there’s a lot of Schwartzenegger and even more just plain humanity. We’re expecting the Syrian Sunni to endure months of high-tech massacres at the hands of the Alawites without resorting to point-blank counter-massacres when they reconquer the Alawite homeland along the coast. And Samer is absolutely right about that hope: “Ur so-called humanity belittles the awfulness of our suffering.”
John Kerry could never hope to understand that, not if he had a hundred more lifetimes of sailing and late lunches and conferences. But it’s not hard to understand, if you accept that the men who are going to walk into the Alawite villages are as human as an action-movie hero.
The trouble is that if you grant them that humanity, they’re going to do bad things, that will be recorded—because this whole war is going into the permanent record, via cellphone cams.
Most people vaguely remember the Sabra/Shatila Massacre of 1982, but that was just one in a long, long series of massacres along the same coastal hills of the Levant a few miles south of the Alawite homeland. The one that still makes me wince was the Ehden Massacre of 1978. The Ehden Massacre was part of the long, bloody lead-up to Sabra/Shatila, because it started when the warlord of Ehden broke with Bashir Gemayel over whether to side with Israel or Syria, after becoming friends with Hafez Assad.
So there’s a link to the Assad regime--but to be honest, the reason I think of Ehden when trying to remind people what can happen in those coastal hills is that it’s just so fucking godawful, even by the standards of the Lebanese Civil War. Things can get very, very bad there, very quickly.
The Ehden Massacre wasn’t even sectarian. All parties involved were Maronite Christians, the dominant sect in Lebanon before the Civil War. Ehden was one of the hill villages they put on Lebanese tourist brochures, back when Lebanon was a big tourist destination. There was snow in the winter, a big treat for rich Gulf tourists, and quaint local churches. It was also the stronghold of a Maronite warlord named Tony Frangieh. The Frangiehs were big players in the complicated Maronite alliances back then. You don’t hear much about them now. That’s because of what happened on June 13, 1978.
Tony Frangieh’s decision to side with Syria rather than Israel annoyed Gemayel, and led to firefights among the Maronite gangs. Gemayel finally decided to wipe out the problem. He attacked Frangieh’s fortified house with hundreds of militia, who overran the place killing two dozen guards. Then the fun began. They tied up Tony and his wife Vera, then dragged their toddler daughter, Jihane, in front of them and killed her while her parents watched. Then it was Vera’s turn. Finally they put Tony out of his misery.
Frangieh was not a good guy. Gemayel was a bad guy, probably, but a bad guy in a bad neighborhood is just called fitting in. What happened to the Frangieh’s family has been happening in those hills for a long time, and it’s going to happen again in a few months, with Sunni/Jihadi militias leading the charge. Nothing can stop that, and who knows? Maybe it’s even justice or something like it.
I just doubt that you want your air force to be what opens the door to it.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Grand Strategy?
I found this great analysis of the ongoing play by the West in general and the US, specifically to subjugate and exploit the many countries that we've gone to war against. It was just a response in a comment on BusinessInsider.com to a challenge by some random guy, but it was, in my opinion, brilliant. Here it is:
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-strategy-in-syria-2013-9#ixzz2e1gSRutz
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-strategy-in-syria-2013-9#ixzz2e1gSRutz
Saturday, May 25, 2013
M.I.T. Scholar's 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/science/mit-scholars-1949-essay-on-machine-age-is-found.html
In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots
By JOHN MARKOFF
It was a vision that never saw the light of day.
The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the
stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined
that they would one day become central to civilization, with
consequences both liberating and potentially dire.
One of those visionaries was Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American
mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1948
he had published "Cybernetics," a landmark theoretical work that
both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics
and automation. Two years later, he wrote "The Human Use of Human
Beings," a popularization of those ideas and an exploration of the
potential of automation and the risks of dehumanization by machines.
In 1949, The New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views
about "what the ultimate machine age is likely to be," in the words
of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel.
Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the
legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to
rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of
fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared.
In August, according to Wiener's papers, which are on file at the
M.I.T. Libraries, The Times asked him to resend the first draft of
the article so it could be combined with the second draft. (It is
not clear why the editors failed to keep a copy of the first draft.)
"Could you send the first draft to me, and we'll see whether we can
combine the two into one story?" wrote an editor in the paper's
Sunday department, then separate from the daily paper. "I may be
mistaken, but I think you lost some of your best material."
But by then Wiener was traveling in Mexico, and he responded:
"I had assumed that the first version of my article was finished
business. To get hold of the paper in my office at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology would involve considerable
cross-correspondence and annoyance to several people.
"I therefore do not consider it a practical thing to do. Under the
circumstances I think that it is best for me to abandon this
undertaking."
The following week the Times editor returned the second draft to
Wiener, and it eventually made its way to the libraries' Archives
and Special Collections. It languished there until December 2012,
when it was discovered by Anders Fernstedt, an independent scholar
who is researching the work of Karl Popper, the 20th-century
philosopher.
Almost 64 years after Wiener wrote it, his essay is still remarkably
topical, raising questions about the impact of smart machines on
society and of automation on human labor. In the spirit of
rectifying an old omission, here are excerpts from "The Machine
Age," courtesy of the M.I.T. Libraries (all rights reserved).
Consider the Abacus
By this time the public is well aware that a new age of machines is
upon us based on the computing machine, and not on the power
machine. The tendency of these new machines is to replace human
judgment on all levels but a fairly high one, rather than to replace
human energy and power by machine energy and power. It is already
clear that this new replacement will have a profound influence upon
our lives, but it is not clear to the man of the street what this
influence will be....
To understand what a computing machine is, let us compare a paper
scheme of mathematical computation, a Chinese ... abacus and a
Marchand or Fridén decimal computing machine for office use, and an
electronic computing machine. Of these, the abacus is actually the
oldest, but is not too familiar to the average man in the modern
West.
Let us then begin with an ordinary paper schedule of computations.
In this, we depend on certain memorized combinations of numbers and
rules of procedure to enable us to carry out our actual operations
on our numbers. The multiplication table and the rules of elementary
arithmetic represent something which needs human intervention to be
carried out on paper, but this human intervention follows certain
inhumanly rigid and memorized laws.
In the abacus we carry out a human intervention of exactly the same
sort as in combining numbers on paper, but in this case the numbers
are represented by the positions of balls along a wire rather than
by pen or pencil marks. The notation is just as arbitrary as in an
ordinary pen or pencil computation, but the operations have a more
mechanical appearance, in that they consist of the bodily motion of
certain pieces of matter. Nevertheless, there is not the slightest
logical difference between the abacus and the ordinary paper
computation.
In the third stage, that of the desk computing machine, the same
operations which occur in the abacus are made according to rules
which are not memorized in all their details, but which are
entrusted to the instrument, and carried out by its intervention.
There is no replacement of true thought by the machine, since the
level of thought of the elementary processes as we carry them out on
paper is that of routine. The desk computing machine is neither more
nor less than a mechanized abacus, in which our memory is replaced
by certain internal interlockings of the machine.
Finally, the high-speed electronic computing machine differs from
the desk machine only in the speed of its operations and the much
higher complications of its interlockings. Thus an operation which
previously took hours may be reduced to a matter of seconds.
Mass-Produced Laborers
We have so far spoken of the computing machine as an analogue to the
human nervous system rather than to the whole of the human organism.
Machines much more closely analogous to the human organism are well
understood, and are now on the verge of being built. They will
control entire industrial processes and will even make possible the
factory substantially without employees.
In these the ultra-rapid digital computing machines will be
supplemented by pieces of apparatus which take the readings of
gauges, of thermometers, or photo-electric cells, and translate them
into the digital input of computing machines. The new assemblages
will also contain effectors, by which the numerical output of the
central machine will be converted into the rotation of shafts, or
the admission of chemicals into a tank, or the heating of a boiler,
or some other process of the kind.
Furthermore, the actual performance of these effector organs as well
as their desired performance will be read by suitable gauges and
taken back into the machine as part of the information on which it
works.
The general outline of the processes to be carried out will be
determined by what computation engineers call taping, which will
state and determine the sequence of the processes to be performed.
The possibility of learning may be built in by allowing the taping
to be re-established in a new way by the performance of the machine
and the external impulses coming into it, rather than having it
determined by a closed and rigid setup, to be imposed on the
apparatus from the beginning.
The limitations of such a machine are simply those of an
understanding of the objects to be attained, and of the
potentialities of each stage of the processes by which they are to
be attained, and of our power to make logically determinate
combinations of those processes to achieve our ends. Roughly
speaking, if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we
can do it by machine.
What the economic limitations will be--namely, how we may
determine whether it is desirable to use the machine rather than
human effectors--is something which we cannot state unambiguously
until we have more experience. It is, however, quite clear that
apart from the taping, which is the job for an intelligent man
rather than for a deft man, the apparatus which we shall depend upon
in the future machine age is largely repetitive, and will be capable
of being manufactured by the methods of mass production.
The Genie and the Bottle
These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present
basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine
factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any
price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the
valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is
based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated
cruelty.
We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable
ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even
the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in
which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for
the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent.
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we
ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between
man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of
the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.
There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the
past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will,
we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more
likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently. [W. W.
Jacobs's] terrible story of the "Monkey's Paw" is a modern example
of this--the father wishes for money and gets it as a compensation
for the death of his son in a factory accident, then wishes for the
return of his son. The son comes back as a ghost, and the father
wishes him gone. This is the outcome of his three wishes.
Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn
and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact
that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of
possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not
willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect
them to be well disposed to us.
In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will
also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are
opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with
the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die._______________________________________________
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Friday, May 17, 2013
Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045
MOSHE VARDI: ROBOTS COULD PUT HUMANS OUT OF WORK BY 2045
Robots began replacing human brawn long ago—now they’re poised to replace
human brains. Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University,
thinks that by 2045 artificially intelligent machines may be capable of “if
not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction
of the work that humans can do.”
So, he asks, what then will humans do?
In recent writings, Vardi traces the evolution of the idea that artificial
intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence, from Turing to Kurzweil,
and considers the recent rate of progress. Although early predictions proved
too aggressive, in the space of 15 years we’ve gone from Deep Blue beating
Kasparov at chess to self-driving cars and Watson beating Jeopardy champs Ken
Jennings and Brad Rutter.
Extrapolating into the future, Vardi thinks it’s reasonable to believe
intelligent machines may one day replace human workers almost entirely and in
the process put millions out of work permanently.
Once rejected out of hand as neo-Luddism, technological unemployment is
attracting commentary from an increasingly vocal sect of economists.
Highlighted in a recent NYT article and “60 Minutes” segment, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT also discuss the impact of automation
on employment in their book, Race Against the Machine.
The idea is we may be approaching a kind of economic singularity, after which
the labor market as we know it will cease to exist.
The theory is tempting for its simplicity but hard to prove. In my opinion,
though you can list anecdotes and interpret select statistics showing the
negative effects of automation—the qualitative historical record, that the
labor market will evolve and adapt, remains the weightier body of evidence.
Relying on modern statistics to prove something fundamental has changed is
troublesome because you can’t do rigorous, apples-to-apples comparisons with
most of the technological revolutions of the past centuries. The data get
dodgier and the statistical methodologies change the farther back you go.
Are machines really replacing humans faster now than say in the early 19th or
20th centuries? And are workers really falling behind at a greater rate? We
can’t say with certainty.
However, we can say that accelerating technology over the last few centuries
has consistently erased some jobs only to replace them with other jobs. In
the short and medium term, these transition periods have caused discomfort
and vicious battles in the political arena. But the long-term outcome has
been largely positive—that is, improving living standards thanks to cheaper,
better goods and services.
By dismissing qualitative historical evidence as newly irrelevant, you’re
left with a quantitative vacuum into which you can inject any number of
competing theories, fascinating but as yet impossible to prove or disprove.
As you may have gathered, I fall into the boring mainstream on the subject.
To me, the technological unemployment thesis is too dire and what humans will
do too hard to imagine. But just because we can’t imagine something, doesn’t
mean it won’t exist.
While microchips are just now beginning to replace human brains, machines
have been replacing human brawn for years. And yet workers are still paid to
perform many physical jobs that were automated long ago and a number of new
ones to boot. Why is that?
Assembly line products are cheaper, but folks still place a premium on and
desire “handmade” items. Some people feel good about supporting an artisan;
others believe the products are better quality; many value something’s
distinctiveness, looking down their nose at assembly line monotony. None of
these reasons are perfectly rational, but the economy is seldom rational on
the level of the individual.
Further, physical activities that used to be classified as leisure activities
now command an income. In the past, sports were at most an amateur activity
for those who could afford the time to play them. However, in the 19th and
20th centuries, as countries industrialized, a giant new market in athletics
popped into existence.
I imagine a futurist at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution finding
the idea preposterous. But today’s best pro athletes collect paychecks that
would make an investment banker blush. And it’s not just the top athletes
getting paid. There are lower tiers for the less skilled too—utility players,
backups, smaller market pro leagues, or feeder leagues all pay modest but
livable incomes.
Why shouldn’t the same hold true for activities of the mind?
Perhaps in the future, while some of us work hard to build and program
super-intelligent machines, others will work hard to entertain, theorize,
philosophize, and make uniquely human creative works, maybe even pair with
machines to accomplish these things. These may seem like niche careers for
the few and talented. But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, jobs
of the mind in general were niche careers.
Now, as some jobs of the mind are automated, more people are doing creative
work of some kind. In the past, not many writers earned a living just
writing. But the Internet’s open infrastructure and voracious appetite for
content allows writers of all different levels of skill to earn income. The
same holds true for publishing—50 Shades of Grey isn’t exactly literature,
but it’s sold millions—and music, film, design, you name it.
How will the economy make the transition? The same way it has for the last
several hundred years—with a few (or more than a few) bumps. But maybe these
job-stealing exponential technologies are also empowering humans with
exponential adaptation.
Online courses from Coursera and edX and Udacity make education more
specialized, shorter in duration, and either cheap or free. This model may
allow for faster more affordable acquisition of new skills and smoother
economic adaptation. The belief many people are only capable of unskilled
labor is elitist to the extreme. The problem of acquiring new skills is
largely one of access not intelligence.
There are those who think our great grandchildren simply won’t work. But I
can’t imagine such a future. The developed world could have rested on its
laurels years ago, having automated the means of production for essentials
like food or clothing or cars or televisions (the essentials change as they
get cheaper).
But we’re working harder than ever. Why? Work lends meaning to life and
leisure. When one kind of work goes away, we tend to create something
productive to replace it. And life is richer when we get to trade the fruit
of our labors for the vegetables or lines of code or smartphones of other
people’s labors.
Vardi says, “The world in 50 years…either will be a utopia or a dystopia.”
But history is littered with dystopic and utopian visions, even as the world
has consistently muddled along the middle path.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Boston Bombing
There has been more that enough talk about today's events at the Boston Marathon with the last accounts being that two bombs exploded and a third found intact. The first thing the authorities have done if find the nearest Arab and arrest him for questioning.
I have a hunch that this has nothing to do with disgruntled Arabs and everything to do with disgruntled Northeaster White Guys. The last time something like this happened was when the Federal Bldg in Oklahoma City was demolished and, sure enough, the first order of business was to find the nearest Arab, as hard as that was in the center of Midwest United States.
We all know how that turned out. Two angry white men arrested, one executed and the other put in jail for life. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that where there is smoke, there is fire. The two caught militants were the tip of the iceberg and the Feds were not about to stick their heads under the water the see the rest of the berg.
Boston is and has been for a long time a hotbed of Irish and Italian racial tension against other ethnicity's. The current high unemployment in that city along with the animosity to the current president and all of the other social, political and economic pressure in that place leads right to the conclusion that this is nothing more than simmering animosities and an impulse to lash out.
Once again though, I fully expect that some dullard who's not paying attention will be arrested, arm twisted to plead out and sentenced before any real questions are asked. He'll probably be some non white ethnic who can and will be scapegoated and further aggravate the already sore underbelly of the northeastern whites.
And so it is in the good ole US of A.
I have a hunch that this has nothing to do with disgruntled Arabs and everything to do with disgruntled Northeaster White Guys. The last time something like this happened was when the Federal Bldg in Oklahoma City was demolished and, sure enough, the first order of business was to find the nearest Arab, as hard as that was in the center of Midwest United States.
We all know how that turned out. Two angry white men arrested, one executed and the other put in jail for life. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that where there is smoke, there is fire. The two caught militants were the tip of the iceberg and the Feds were not about to stick their heads under the water the see the rest of the berg.
Boston is and has been for a long time a hotbed of Irish and Italian racial tension against other ethnicity's. The current high unemployment in that city along with the animosity to the current president and all of the other social, political and economic pressure in that place leads right to the conclusion that this is nothing more than simmering animosities and an impulse to lash out.
Once again though, I fully expect that some dullard who's not paying attention will be arrested, arm twisted to plead out and sentenced before any real questions are asked. He'll probably be some non white ethnic who can and will be scapegoated and further aggravate the already sore underbelly of the northeastern whites.
And so it is in the good ole US of A.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Lee Attwater and Republican Race Strategy
Sometimes I get into conversations about the politics of race in America and find it difficult to explain the basis of the nastiness the problem and how we all got to this in the first place. Lee Attwater was a pioneer in how to throw racial rocks and hide his hand, so the speak. I think that its a great idea to let him explain in a few words what his strategy was and how easy it was and is to get large swaths of people to buy into his little plan. The Nation Magazine found and published this little nugget but I'll just let him speak for himself.
Lee Attwater and the Republican Race Strategy
As you can see, Karl Rove may have spiffed it up a little before he rolled it out for GW Bush, but its still the same old model.
Lee Attwater and the Republican Race Strategy
As you can see, Karl Rove may have spiffed it up a little before he rolled it out for GW Bush, but its still the same old model.
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One of the assets is labor so if you wish to search you will find that the Vietnamese are now busy sewing running shoes and other types of recreational gear. In this way we have conscripted them into the subordinated labor force, literally, for pennies. Also there are large ( gigantic) deposits of bauxite underlying the Central Highlands. Once burned over and subjected to decades of war the ability of the residual country to represent itself effectively is reduced to zero. US trainers are already active in Vietnam and the old US base at Cam Ranh Bay may be refurbished for the USN.
Prior to Khadaffy the largest US AFB outside the USA was Wheelus AFB in Libya and now we have that asset back as a future operational base for AFRICOM which has been embarrassed to remain based in Europe as no african country would cooperate. Further Libya can be used as a springboard for more war in the ME and Africa with seized Libyan weapons used to arm the recruits available for pennies a mercenary troops driven from a broken economy.
Libya also has extensive natural resources of oil and gas now delivered to our markets on our terms.
You saw Cyprus broken financially recently and now it can serve as a hub for the oil and gas industry where it sits about 100 miles off Syria. Also they are compelled to have their country used as a base of air attack against other countries in the region. Syria itself shares a coastline with Lebanon, Israel, Gaza and Egypt and enormous energy lies in this area. 100s of years of supply for Europe NOT under Russian control. An independent Syria acting in cooperation with Russia MIGHT impede these plans so we burn the country over, prostrate the population, break the economy, destroy the leadership, provoke a flood of refugees. Auction the remaining assets at a fraction of the value. You understand that since the Soviet Era Afghanistan contains trillions of dollars in minerals in proven deposits first proven by Soviet geological surveys. If continuous war can destroy the population leaving them bloody and exhausted all that wealth can move to global markets for the lowest possible price.
Iraq has been virtually ruined and the conflagration ignited by the US invasion still burns with a fierce flame. The process is not over and will continue until the whole people are beaten, bloody and barely sane. There are no guarantees but note that it took 20-25 years after the "defeat" of the US in Vietnam for the people there to understand that freedom meant sewing sneakers for pennies. Clear?