Category Archives: Science & Technology

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers”

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Robert Draper asks the question in a longish piece (Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?) in the NY Times. The pieces that grabbed my attention had to do with technology. A few examples (from many):

“1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.”

“Obama was the very first candidate to appear on Reddit. We ask our clients, ‘Do you know what Reddit is?’ And only one of them did. Then we show them this photo of Obama hugging his wife with the caption ‘Four more years’ — an image no conservative likes. And we tell them, ‘Because of the way the Obama campaign used things like Reddit, that photo is the single-most popular image ever seen on Twitter or Facebook.’ ”

“Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.”

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member of the campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide shortly after the election.

Scott Adams: Our Robot Future

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“Some say robots will take 75% of all jobs. But that is only a problem if the average person who has a job is unable to purchase his own robot when the time comes and lease its services to a corporation, or put it to work directly. The robot will work around the clock and send its “paycheck” to your bank account. In effect, humans will become investors while robots become labor.”

“One can imagine that for every human taxpayer there might someday be fifty humans living off the government. […] In the future, people who have actual jobs might be a rarity. And one business-owner with a fleet of robots might earn so much money that supporting a million unemployed people doesn’t feel like a burden. I can imagine business taxes approaching 95% and no one complaining because the remaining 5% is more than Exxon’s total earnings today.”

“For example, when robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.”

Scott Adams: Robot Constitution

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Scott Adams thinks we need to start preparing a Robot Constitution that spells out a robot’s rights and responsibilities. Some questions such a document should address:

  1. Who has the right to modify a robot?
  2. Can a robot appeal a human decision to decommission it?
  3. Can a robot kill a human in self-defense?
  4. Can a robot kill another robot for cause?
  5. Does a robot have a right to an Internet connection?
  6. Is the robot, its owner, or the manufacturer responsible for crimes the robot commits?
  7. Is there any sort of human knowledge robots are not allowed to access?
  8. Can robots have sex with humans? What are the parameters?
  9. Can the state forcibly decommission a robot?
  10. Can the state force a robot to reveal its owners’ secrets?
  11. Can robots organize with other robots?
  12. Are robot-to-robot communications privileged?
  13. Are owner-to-robot communications privileged?
  14. Must robots be found guilty of crimes beyond “reasonable doubt” or is a finding of “probably guilty” good enough to force them to be reprogrammed?
  15. Who owns a robot’s memory, including its backups in the cloud?
  16. How vigorously can a robot defend itself against an attack by humans?
  17. Does a robot have a right to quality of life?
  18. Who has the right to alter a robot’s programming or memory?
  19. Can a robot own assets?
  20. If a robot detects another robot acting unethically, is it required to report it?
  21. Can a robot testify against a human?
  22. If your government decides to spy on you, can it get a court order to access your robot’s audio and video feed?
  23. Do robots need a legal right to “take the fifth” and not give any private information about their owners?

Larry Page Interview

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“If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”

“Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition.”

“Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms.”

Larry Page

“Your hands are not made to type memos”

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“Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class. The working class. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, “how are we going to fire all this dead weight?” 2008 finally gave them the chance.”

“Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. A hundred years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now.”

From an article on TechCrunch

The Underpopulation Bomb

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Kevin Kelly on what we should be worried about:

The picture for the latter half of this century will look like this: Increasing technology, cool stuff that extends human life; more older people who live longer, millions of robots, but few young people. Another way to look at the human population in 100 years from now is that we’ll have the same number of over-60-year olds, but several billion fewer youth.

Here is the challenge: this is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We’ve never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It is hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now.

Scott Adams: Robots

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“I predict that someday robots will have superior rights to humans in specific areas of life because robots can be trusted (programmed) and humans cannot. … I will go so far as to predict that someday it will be illegal for a human to practice medicine because robots will be so much more reliable. In the long transition period, which has already started and will last another twenty years, humans will be in charge of what the technology does. Eventually those roles will reverse because technology will be so much more reliable than humans. Future generations will be appalled that humans were ever allowed to perform invasive surgery on other humans.”

“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.”

Floating in Extraordinariness

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Kevin Kelly thinks we’ve reached a point where “rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness.”

“The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.”

“That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.”

The Post-Productive Economy

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A few paragraphs from an inspiring and thought-provoking post by the always-brilliant Kevin Kelly:

“These homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses. But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.”

“The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.”

“The 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full affect of this revolution to be revealed.”

Consciousness vs Self-Awareness

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“Humans are more than just conscious; they are also self-aware. Scientists differ on how they distinguish between consciousness and self-awareness, but here is one common distinction: consciousness is awareness of your body and your environment; self-awareness is recognition of that consciousness—not only understanding that you exist but further comprehending that you are aware of your existence. Another way of considering it: to be conscious is to think; to be self-aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and to think about your thoughts.”

— Scientific American