Our Robot Future

It was chaos over Zuccotti Park on the early morning of Nov. 15. New York City policemen surrounded the park in Lower Manhattan where hundreds of activists had been living as part of the nationwide Occupy movement. The 1:00 AM raid followed a court order allowing the city to prohibit camping gear in the privately-owned park.

Many protestors resisted and nearly 200 were arrested. Journalists hurrying towards the park reported being illegally barred by police. The crews of two news-choppers–one each from CBS and NBC–claimed they were ordered out of the airspace over Zuccotti Park by the NYPD. Later, NBC claimed its crew misunderstood directions from the control tower. “NYPD cannot, and did not, close air space. Only FAA can do that,” a police spokesperson told Columbia Journalism Review. The FAA said it issued no flight ban.Regardless, the confusion resulted in a de facto media blackout for big media. Just one reporter had the unconstrained ability to get a bird’s-eye view on police action during the height of the Occupy protests. Tim Pool, a 26-year-old independent video journalist, in early December began sending a customized two-foot-wide robot–made by French company Parrot–whirring over the police’s and protestors’ heads. The camera-equipped ‘bot streamed live video to Pool’s smartphone, which relayed the footage to a public Internet stream.If the police ever noticed the diminutive, all-seeing automaton–and there’s no evidence they did–they never did anything to stop it. Unlike CBS and NBC, the boyish Pool, forever recognizable in his signature black knit cap, understood the law. He knew his pioneering drone flights were legal–just barely.

Pool’s robot coup was a preview of the future, as rapid advances in cheap drone technology dovetail with a loosening legal regime that, combined, could allow pretty much anybody to deploy their own flying robot–and all within the next three years. The spread of do-it-yourself robotics could radically change the news, the police, business and politics. And it could spark a sort of drone arms race as competing robot users seek to balance out their rivals.

Imagine police drones patrolling at treetop level down city streets, their cameras scanning crowds for weapons or suspicious activity. “Newsbots” might follow in their wake, streaming live video of the goings-on. Drones belonging to protest groups hover over both, watching the watchers. In nearby zip codes, drones belonging to real estate agents scope out hot properties. Robots deliver pizzas by following the signal from customers’ cell phones. Meanwhile, anti-drone “freedom fighters,” alarmed by the spread of cheap, easy overhead surveillance, take potshots at the robots with rifles and shotguns.

These aren’t just fantasies. All of these things are happening today, although infrequently and sometimes illegally. The only thing holding back the robots is government regulations that have failed to keep up with technology. The regs are due for an overhaul in 2015. That’s the year drones could make their major debut. “Everyone’s ready to do this,” Pool tells ANIMAL. “It’s only going to get crazier.”

by David Axe, AnimalNewYork |  Read more:

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Amber Waves of Green

The gap between the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder, from a guy washing dishes for 200 bucks a week in Miami to a self-storage gazillionaire. What he found are some surprising truths about class, money, and making it in America.

As I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu, I catch glimpses of incredible cliff-top mansions discreetly obscured from the road, which is littered with abandoned gas stations and run-down mini-marts. The offlce building I pull up to is quite drab and utilitarian. There are no ornaments on the conference-room shelves—just a bottle of hand sanitizer. An elderly, broad-shouldered man greets me. He's wearing jogging pants. They don't look expensive. His name is B. Wayne Hughes.

You almost definitely won't have heard of him. He hardly ever gives interviews. He only agreed to this one because—as his people explained to me—income disparity is a hugely important topic for him. They didn't explain how it was important, so I assumed he thought it was bad.

I approached Wayne, as he's known, for wholly mathematical reasons. I'd worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a guy making ten bucks an hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one representative of each multiple. By connecting these income brackets to actual people, I hoped to understand how money shapes their lives—and the life of the country—at a moment when the gap between rich and poor is such a combustible issue. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There's a dishwasher in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-class Iowans with quite difflcult lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he's "pissed off" right now.

"I live my life paying my taxes and taking care of my responsibilities, and I'm a little surprised to find out that I'm an enemy of the state at this time in my life," he says. (...)

In 2006, Wayne was America's sixty-first-richest man, according to Forbes, with $4.1 billion. Today he's the 242nd richest (and the 683rd richest in the world), with $1.9 billion. He's among the least famous people on the list. In fact, he once asked the magazine to remove his name. "I said, 'It's an imposition. Forbes should not be doing that. It's the wrong thing to do. It puts my children and my grandchildren at risk.' "

"And what did they say?" I ask.

"They said when Trump called up, he said the number next to his name was too small."

When Wayne is in Malibu, he stays in his daughter's spare room. His home is a three-bedroom farmhouse on a working stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

"I have no fancy living at all," he says. "Well, I have a house in Sun Valley. Five acres in the woods. I guess that's fancy."

I like Wayne very much. He's avuncular and salt of the earth. I admire how far he has risen from the Grapes of Wrath circumstances into which he was born; he's the very embodiment of the American Dream. I'm surprised, though, and a little taken aback, by his anger. I'll return to Wayne—and the curiously aggrieved way he views his place in the world—a bit later.

But first let's plummet all the way down to the very, very bottom, as if we're falling down a well, to a concrete slab of a house in a downtrodden Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti.

by Jon Ronson, GQ |  Read more:

Sergei Ivanov:  Firing Squad (1905)
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Why We Cheat

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who teaches at Duke University, is known as one of the most original designers of experiments in social science. Not surprisingly, the best-selling author’s creativity is evident throughout his latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people. Here, in Ariely’s own words, are seven lessons you didn’t learn in school about dishonesty. (Interview edited and condensed by Gary Belsky.)

1. Most of us are 98-percenters.

“A student told me a story about a locksmith he met when he locked himself out of the house. This student was amazed at how easily the locksmith picked his lock, but the locksmith explained that locks were really there to keep honest people from stealing. His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another.”

2. We’ll happily cheat … until it hurts.

“The Simple Model of Rational Crime suggests that the greater the reward, the greater the likelihood that people will cheat. But we’ve found that for most of us, the biggest driver of dishonesty is the ability to rationalize our actions so that we don’t lose the sense of ourselves as good people. In one of our matrix experiments [a puzzle-solving exercise Ariely uses in his work to measure dishonesty], the level of cheating didn’t change as the reward for cheating rose. In fact, the highest payout resulted in a little less cheating, probably because the amount of money got to be big enough that people couldn’t rationalize their cheating as harmless. Most people are able to cheat a little because they can maintain the sense of themselves as basically honest people. They won’t commit major fraud on their tax returns or insurance claims or expense reports, but they’ll cut corners or exaggerate here or there because they don’t feel that bad about it.”

3. It’s no wonder people steal from work.

“In one matrix experiment, we added a condition where some participants were paid in tokens, which they knew they could quickly exchange for real money. But just having that one step of separation resulted in a significant increase in cheating. Another time, we surveyed golfers and asked which act of moving a ball illegally would make other golfers most uncomfortable: using a club, their foot or their hand. More than twice as many said it would be less of a problem — for other golfers, of course — to use their club than to pick the ball up. Our willingness to cheat increases as we gain psychological distance from the action. So as we gain distance from money, it becomes easier to see ourselves as doing something other than stealing. That’s why many of us have no problem taking pencils or a stapler home from work when we’d never take the equivalent amount of money from petty cash. And that’s why I’m a little concerned about the direction we’re taking toward becoming a cashless society. Virtual payments are a great convenience, but our research suggests we should worry that the farther people get from using actual money, the easier it becomes to steal.”

by Gary Belsky, Time |  Read more:
Photo: Getty Images

Tokyo

Eurythmics

54 Smart Thinkers Everyone Should Follow On Twitter

Today everyone is getting their news and information from Twitter. At Business Insider, it's how we get a lot of our story ideas.

But figuring out exactly who to follow is a tough task. So we've put together a guide of some of the most influential thought leaders in the world who tweet.

Our criteria was simply this: that these people are respected voices in their fields — whether it be neuroscience, economics, business or journalism — and that they have developed a following for their insightful commentary on Twitter.

by Aimee Groth, Danielle Schlanger and Kim Bhasin, Business Insider |  Read more:

Cities Grow More than Suburbs, First Time in 100 Years

For the first time in a century, most of America's largest cities are growing at a faster rate than their surrounding suburbs as young adults seeking a foothold in the weak job market shun home-buying and stay put in bustling urban centers.

New 2011 census estimates released Thursday highlight the dramatic switch.

Driving the resurgence are young adults, who are delaying careers, marriage and having children amid persistently high unemployment. Burdened with college debt or toiling in temporary, lower-wage positions, they are spurning homeownership in the suburbs for shorter-term, no-strings-attached apartment living, public transit and proximity to potential jobs in larger cities.

While economists tend to believe the city boom is temporary, that is not stopping many city planning agencies and apartment developers from seeking to boost their appeal to the sizable demographic of 18-to-29-year olds. They make up roughly 1 in 6 Americans, and some sociologists are calling them "generation rent." The planners and developers are betting on young Americans' continued interest in urban living, sensing that some longer-term changes such as decreased reliance on cars may be afoot.

The last time growth in big cities surpassed that in outlying areas occurred prior to 1920, before the rise of mass-produced automobiles spurred expansion beyond city cores. (...)

"The recession hit suburban markets hard. What we're seeing now is young adults moving out from their parents' homes and starting to find jobs," Shepard said. "There's a bigger focus on building residences near transportation hubs, such as a train or subway station, because fewer people want to travel by car for an hour and a half for work anymore."

Katherine Newman, a sociologist and dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins University who chronicled the financial struggles of young adults in a recent book, said they are emerging as a new generation of renters due to stricter mortgage requirements and mounting college debt. From 2009 to 2011, just 9 percent of 29- to 34-year-olds were approved for a first-time mortgage.

"Young adults simply can't amass the down payments needed and don't have the earnings," she said. "They will be renting for a very long time."

by Hope Yen and Kristen Wyatt, MSNBC |  Read more:
Photo: Kristen Wyatt

Obamacare Upheld: How and Why Did Justice Roberts Do It?

[ed. See also: A Confused Opinion, NY Times]

The Supreme Court closed out its 2011–12 term today in dramatic fashion, upholding the Affordable Care Act by a sharply divided vote. The Court’s bottom line, reasoning and lineup of justices all came as a shock to many. While I had earlier cautioned doomsayers that the law was “not dead yet” after an oral argument that others deemed disastrous for the law’s defenders, I don’t think anyone predicted that the law would be upheld without the support of Justice Anthony Kennedy, almost always the Court’s crucial swing vote. And while most of the legal debate focused on Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause, the Court ultimately upheld the law as an exercise of the taxing power—even though President Obama famously claimed that the law was not a tax. The most surprising thing of all, though, is that in the end, this ultraconservative Court decided the case, much as it did in many other cases this term, by siding with the liberals.

Justice Kennedy, on whom virtually all hope for a decision upholding the law rested, voted with Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. They would have invalidated all 900 pages of the law—even though the challengers had directly attacked only two of the law’s hundreds of provisions. But Chief Justice John Roberts sided with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan to uphold the law as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

The Individual Mandate As a Tax

What led Roberts to cast his lot with the law’s supporters? The argument that the taxing power supported the individual mandate was a strong one. The mandate provides that those who can afford to buy healthcare insurance must do so, but the only consequence of not doing so is the payment of a tax penalty. The Constitution gives Congress broad power to raise taxes “for the general welfare,” which means Congress need not point to some other enumerated power to justify a tax. (By contrast, if Congress seeks to regulate conduct by imposing criminal or civil sanctions, it must point to one of the Constitution’s affirmative grants of power—such as the Commerce Clause, the immigration power, or the power to raise and regulate the military.)

The law’s challengers—and the Court’s dissenters—rejected the characterization of the law as a tax. They noted that it was labeled a “penalty,” not a tax; that it was designed to encourage people to buy health insurance, not to raise revenue; and that Obama himself had rejected claims that the law was a tax when it was being considered by Congress. But Roberts said the question is a functional one, not a matter of labels. Because the law in fact would raise revenue, imposed no sanction other than a tax and was calculated and collected by the IRS as part of the income tax, the Court treated it as a tax and upheld the law.

Chief Justice Roberts did go on to say (for himself, but not for the Court’s majority) that he thought the law was not justified by the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause, because rather than regulating existing economic activity it compelled people to enter into commerce. When one adds the dissenting justices, there were five votes on the Court for this restrictive view of the Commerce Clause. But that is not binding, because the law was upheld on other grounds. And while some have termed this a major restriction on Commerce Clause power, it is not clear that it will have significant impact going forward, as the individual mandate was the first and only time in over 200 years that Congress had in fact sought to compel people to engage in commerce. It’s just not a common way of regulating, so the fact that five justices think it’s an unconstitutional way of regulating is not likely to have much real-world significance.

by David Cole, The Nation |  Read more:
AP Photo/Dana Verkouteren

'Having It All'? How About: 'Doing The Best I Can'?

Anne-Marie Slaughter's remarkable article Why Women Still Can't Have It All clearly has meant different things to different people since it was published and posted. To me, first, it is further evidence of what I have come to believe after 46 years on this planet: most women are not just smarter than most men but braver and more aspirational, too. There is the noble, ancient striving to "have it all." And then there is the earnest and thought-provoking debate, largely between and among women if I am not mistaken, over exactly what that phrase means and whether the quest to achieve it is even worth it.

Men? Please. Such an earnest public conversation on this topic between and among men is impossible to imagine (no matter how hard The Atlantic tries). That's why so many of us diplomatically stayed on the sideline last week. And haven't men as a group largely given up hope of "having it all" anyway? Did we ever have such hope to begin with? I don't remember ever getting a memo on that. Without any statistics to back me up -- how typical of a man, right? -- I humbly suggest that a great many of us long ago decided in any event to focus upon lesser, more obtainable mottoes, like "doing the best I can" or "hanging in there," as we try to juggle work, family, and a life.

The genius of Slaughter's piece wasn't necessarily her analysis, her conclusions, or her suggestions for societal change. It was also that she was bold enough to aspire to publicly ponder the question again in the first place. The conversation she started last week -- the one that is still taking place today -- is welcome for many reasons. For example, it reminds cynics and pessimists like me that there are still millions of bright people out there who have the time, energy and eloquence to appreciate and explain their pursuit of a lifestyle that is rich, rewarding and successful in all of its many facets.

I have little standing to assess Slaughter's article on its merits -- few men do -- except to say it's my general belief that no one should be so quick to judge the way anyone else balances the priorities in their life. That said, I don't know any men who "have it all," or who say that they do, or who complain that they don't. I know men who are happy in their marriage and unhappy in their work. I know men who are happy in their work but unhappy in their marriage. I know men who are happy but stressed. I know men who work too hard and those who don't work hard enough. And I know many men who don't give a shit about any of this.

When I go out with the boys, and we rarely go out anymore anyway, we talk about the specific work problems we are facing at that moment. We talk about how we can better parent our kids. We talk about women. We talk about sports. We talk about everything, really, except about whether we've "have it all" or want to have it all or think anyone else can have it all. That's not surprising, is it? My dad never talked about "having it all." Having enough was his goal. He had neither the eloquence nor the self-awareness to spend time on anything other than trying to provide for his loved ones.

by Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: ishane/Flickr

Dan Witz, Mosh Pit
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Agnieszka Kozień. The South 1.
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Charisma: Who Has It, and How to Get It

It’s a rainy, midsummer evening. I’m standing in a draughty hall, holding a glass of cheap, white wine and staring intently at a middle-aged man as if he’s the Messiah. “In my view, the problem with Britain today…” he drones.

A group nearby laughs uproariously. It’s too hot, my shoes pinch. The people here are acquaintances rather than friends, and this is one of those social functions I’m attending out of duty rather than desire. Normally, I’d be appeasing this gasbag with the occasional “Oh?” Meanwhile I’d be shuffling in my tight shoes, eavesdropping on the fun gang.

But tonight is different. Tonight, rather than sinking in discomfort, I decide to bask in it. Dispassionately, I analyse the sensation of sore toes. I objectify the uproarious laughter by dismissing it as just another sound, rather than a siren call. When the man pauses, instead of interrupting with a story of my own, my eyes remain fixed on him. I pause two seconds, then ask a question. He runs a hand through his hair. I run a hand through mine.

Am I attempting a seduction? Heaven forbid. Do I care what he thinks about me? Not particularly. No matter. For I have just obtained the latest American must-have, a charisma coach, and tonight I am practising my new skills.

Until I encountered Olivia Fox Cabane, whom US executives at firms like Google, Deloitte and Citigroup pay up to $100,000 a year to help boost their X-factor, I’d have naively believed charisma was an intangible, magical aura.

by Julia Llewellyn Smith, The Telegraph |  Read more:

Marilyn Monroe, 1953 Photo: REX FEATURES

Hans Jorgen Henriksen. Groupish.
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Carol Marine
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The Way We Live: Drowning in Stuff

From 2001 to 2005, a team of social scientists studied 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles, a project documenting every wiggle of life at home. The study was generated by the U.C.L.A. Center on the Everyday Lives of Families to understand how people handled what anthropologists call material culture — what we call stuff. These were dual-earner households in a range of ethnic groups, neighborhoods, incomes and occupations, with at least two children between the ages of 7 and 12 — in other words, households smack in the weeds of family life.

What the researchers gleaned was an unflinching view of the American family, with all its stresses and joys on display. They’ve organized their findings into a book, scheduled to be available next week, called “Life at Home in the 21st Century.” It’s full of intriguing data points about the number of possessions the families owned (literally, thousands), much of it children’s toys. Women’s stress-hormone levels spiked when confronted with family clutter; the men’s, not so much. Finally, there was a direct relationship between the amount of magnets on refrigerators and the amount of stuff in a household.

One of the authors, Anthony P. Graesch, 38, an assistant professor of anthropology at Connecticut College, was a newly married, childless graduate student when the study was conducted (his co-authors are Jeanne E. Arnold, Enzo Ragazzini and Elinor Ochs). What Dr. Graesch witnessed as a lead researcher deeply imprinted his behavior as a husband and father, he said, in a recent interview.

I understand you once jumped out a family’s window to remove yourself from spousal combat? Also, you told a colleague, Benedict Carey, that the study was “the very purist form of birth control ever devised.” Discuss.

The study was an opportunity to see how families are doing it, working and raising children, every day, all the while trying to do that other job, maintaining a relationship with your spouse. In many ways that’s the job that suffered most. Parents are stretched the thinnest. Watching this unfold, I’d think: Why do I want to do this? It’s so much work. There are so many challenges. But there was also so much warmth and closeness, as much positive stuff as the tenseness, which was me jumping out the window.

Why do you think families are unable to manage the influx of material culture?

We can see how families are trying to cut down on the sheer number of trips to the store by buying bulk goods. How they can come to purchase more, and then not remember, and end up double purchasing. We can see how an increasingly nucleated family structure contributes to this.

Can you explain?

It means we don’t have extended family households. We don’t live next to grandparents. And we are further away from our relatives. We go to work, we come home, and there is only four hours of time we spend together. We feel guilty about this, and oftentimes buy gifts as a result. Grandparents contribute to possessions in no small way. Here comes Christmas, here come the birthdays. The inflow of objects is relentless. The outflow is not. We don’t have rituals, mechanisms, for getting rid of stuff.

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: C. M. Glover

Silence, Exile, Punning

On a day in May, 1922, in Paris, a medical student named Pierre Mérigot de Treigny was asked by his teacher, Dr. Victor Morax, a well-known ophthalmologist, to attend to a patient who had telephoned complaining about pain from iritis, an inflammation of the eye. The student went to the patient’s apartment, in a residential hotel on the Rue de l’Université. Inside, he found a scene of disarray. Clothes were hanging everywhere; toilet articles were scattered around on chairs and the mantelpiece. A man wearing dark glasses and wrapped in a blanket was squatting in front of a pan that contained the remains of a chicken. A woman was sitting across from him. There was a half-empty bottle of wine next to them on the floor. The man was James Joyce. A few months before, on February 2nd, he had published what some people regarded then, and many people regard now, as the greatest work of prose fiction ever written in the English language.

The woman was Nora Barnacle. She and Joyce were unmarried, and had two teen-age children, Giorgio and Lucia, who were living with them in the two-room apartment. The conditions in which the student discovered them were not typical—Joyce lived in luxury whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn’t—but the scene was emblematic. Joyce was a nomad. He was born in 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and grew up the oldest of ten surviving children. After he started school, his family changed houses nine times in eleven years, an itinerancy not always undertaken by choice. They sometimes moved, with their shrinking stock of possessions, at night, in order to escape the attention of creditors. They did not leave a forwarding address.

James was the favorite of his charming, cantankerous, and dissolute father, John Stanislaus Joyce, and was adored by his brothers and sisters. They called him Sunny Jim, because he laughed at everything. He was a brilliant student when he chose to excel, a prodigy; and, despite the family’s relentless downward spiral—John Joyce wasted a considerable inheritance—he received a serious education at Jesuit schools. By the time he got his degree, from University College, Dublin, in 1902, the family was living in the northern suburb of Cabra. A friend later described the house: “The banisters were broken, the grass in the back-yard was all blackened out. There was laundry there and a few chickens, and it was a very very miserable home.” Joyce’s mother, Mary, died there, of liver cancer, in 1903.

Joyce left Ireland a year later, when he was twenty-two, but he never really left the manner of life he had known. Like his father, he was a raconteur and a barfly. He had a good tenor voice (as did John Joyce), and he loved to sing and to dance. When he had no money, he borrowed it; when he had it, he picked up the tab for whatever company he was in, booked himself and his family into fancy hotels, and bought fur coats for Nora and Lucia. He was generous in the free-spirited way that only the inveterately insolvent can be.

For many years after he moved to the Continent, he scraped a living as a language teacher in Berlitz schools, a job he disliked. He started out in Pula, moved to Trieste, to Rome, then back to Trieste, and, finally, to Zurich. He changed residences regularly wherever he was, sometimes under a landlord’s gun. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he was supported by patrons and—though only toward the end of his life, since “Ulysses” was banned for twelve years in the United States and for fourteen in Britain—by royalties. During the twenty years he lived in Paris, he had eighteen different addresses.

“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how Joyce described himself to Carl Jung. He was frail—he avoided contact sports like rugby as a child and barroom pugilism as a grownup—and he was frequently laid low by nervous attacks and illnesses. His eye troubles forced him to submit to a series of tricky and painful operations. At times, he was virtually blind. When he wrote, which he did usually stretched out across a bed, he wore a white jacket, so that light was reflected onto the paper; as he got older, he used a magnifying glass, in addition to his eyeglasses, to read.

After the Second World War broke out and the Germans occupied Paris, Joyce managed to get to Switzerland. He died there, in Zurich, of a perforated ulcer, on January 13, 1941. He was fifty-eight, and a very old man. He had burned the candle all the way down. He had spent eight years on “Ulysses,” and fifteen years on “Finnegans Wake,” which was published in 1939. “My eyes are tired,” he wrote in a letter to Giorgio, in 1935. “For over half a century, they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing.”

by Louis Menand, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Delphine Lebourgeois

Tiny Camera to Rival the Pros

This is a review of the best pocket camera ever made.

But first, a history lesson.

For years camera makers worried about competition from only one source: other camera makers. But in the end, the most dangerous predator came from an unexpected direction: cellphones.

Today, more photos are taken with phones than with point-and-shoot cameras. On photo sites like Flickr, the iPhone is the source of more photos than any real camera. No wonder sales of inexpensive pocket cameras are going down each year.

Cameras in phones are a delightful development for the masses. If you have your camera with you, you’re more likely to take photos and more likely to capture amazing images.

But in a sense they are also great for camera makers, which are being forced to double down in areas where smartphones are useless: Zoom lenses. High resolution. Better photo quality. Flexibility and advanced features. That’s why, even if sales of pocket cameras are down, sales of high-end cameras are up.

Now you know why the time is ripe for the new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100. It’s a tiny, pants-pocketable camera that will be available in late July for the nosebleed price of $650.

Or, rather, won’t be available. It will be sold out everywhere. I’ll skip to the punch line: No photos this good have ever come from a camera this small.

by David Pogue, NY Times |  Read more: