Caitlyn Murphy, Hallam Corner Store (2016)
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Sally West, The Beach
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The 401(k) Problem We Refuse to Solve

There’s a perpetual pundit debate over the best way to provide for retirement: defined benefit plans (pensions), defined contribution plans (401(k)s, IRAs and the like) or pay-as-you-go social insurance schemes (Social Security). Most retirement experts I’ve talked to prefer a mix of these, a “three-legged stool.” But as I’ve written before, this is a bit like arguing whether the Titanic would have survived the iceberg if only its hull had been painted green. All three types of retirement savings have different costs and benefits. But these costs and benefits are not the primary reason that people in Western countries have to worry about an impoverished old age.

The funny thing is that, for all the people arguing that some dire problem in one of these three retirement systems urgently requires that we switch to another kind at once, the major problem with all three is exactly the same. It’s even a problem that’s easy to state and easy to fix -- no need for extensive blue-ribbon commissions or elaborate white papers. Here’s the solution: Pick whichever system you prefer; it really doesn’t matter. Now slap a 10 to 15 percent surcharge on a worker's wage income, and divert that money into the system for the worker’s future use. Problem basically solved, because in all three cases, the only flaw that actually matters is that they’re badly underfunded.

If you expect to spend 40 years of your life working, and then another 20 or 30 years living off the money you made during that time, then you need to save a large portion of your salary. Imagine yourself storing up food for the last 30 years of your life from the harvests made during the first 40. You might hope that when you're older, and no longer toiling in the fields, you won’t need to eat so much. Nonetheless, you’d understand that you would need to put aside a considerable portion of your harvest -- something close to what you're eating each day -- to ensure that you don’t starve to death in your old age.

Somehow, we imagine that modern society can make the math different for all the other stuff we consume, from cars to televisions to little paper umbrellas to stick in the cocktails at our retirement parties. And to be fair, to some extent, it has. If productivity is growing quickly, then it is easier to maintain our pre-retirement lifestyles with a smaller pool of savings, because that savings will buy more.

Alternatively, we can have a lot of kids. No matter how you manage your retirement system, you are ultimately expecting to depend on the labor of people younger than you. Whether that labor comes to you in the form of a dividend check or a government benefit or a saintly daughter-in-law building you a new annex in the backyard, you are still expecting someone else younger than you to make stuff, then give it to you without expecting more than gratitude in return. The more workers there are relative to retirees, the smaller the fraction of their income each worker has to give up to support each retiree, and the easier it will be to get them to do so.

Unfortunately, productivity isn’t growing rapidly, and we didn’t have a lot of kids. That leaves plowing a great deal of money into savings and investment, in the hopes that productivity will start to grow again. There is no substitute, no neat transformation we can enact to make that fundamental problem go away.

by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: uncredited via:

Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook

[ed. I know. Broken record...].

I wrote this for my friends and family, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. Maybe it’ll help you too. External references – and steps to get off properly – at the bottom.

A few factual corrections have been brought to my attention, so I’ve fixed them. Thanks everyone!

“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off Facebook,” is the guilty and reluctant question I’m hearing a lot these days. Like we kinda know Facebook is bad, but don’t really want to know.

I’ve been a big Facebook supporter - one of the first users in my social group who championed what a great way it was to stay in touch, way back in 2006. I got my mum and brothers on it, and around 20 other people. I’ve even taught Facebook marketing in one of the UK’s biggest tech education projects, Digital Business Academy. I’m a techie and a marketer – so I can see the implications – and until now, they hadn’t worried me. I’ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.

Just checking…

Over the holidays, I thought I’d take a few minutes to check on the upcoming privacy policy change, with a cautious “what if” attitude. With our financial and location information on top of everything else, there were some concerning possibilities. Turns out what I suspected already happened 2 years ago! That few minutes turned into a few days of reading. I dismissed a lot of claims that can be explained as technically plausible (or technically lazy), based on a bit of investigation, like the excessive Android app permissions. But there was still a lot left over, and I considered those facts with techniques that I know to be standard practice in data-driven marketing.

With this latest privacy change on January 30th, I’m scared.

Facebook has always been slightly worse than all the other tech companies with dodgy privacy records, but now, it’s in it’s own league. Getting off isn’t just necessary to protect yourself, it’s necessary to protect your friends and family too. This could be the point of no return – but it’s not too late to take back control.

A short list of some Facebook practices

It’s not just what Facebook is saying it’ll take from you and do with your information, it’s all the things it’s not saying, and doing anyway because of the loopholes they create for themselves in their Terms of Service and how simply they go back on their word. We don’t even need to click “I agree” anymore. They just change the privacy policy and by staying on Facebook, you agree. Oopsy!

Facebook doesn’t keep any of your data safe or anonymous, no matter how much you lock down your privacy settings. Those are all a decoy. There are very serious privacy breaches, like selling your product endorsement to advertisers and politicians, tracking everything you read on the internet, or using data from your friends to learn private things about you - they have no off switch.

Facebooks gives your data to “third-parties” through your use of apps, and then say that’s you doing it, not them. Everytime you use an app, you’re allowing Facebook to escape it’s own privacy policy with you and with your friends. It’s like when my brother used to make me punch myself and ask, “why are you punching yourself?” Then he’d tell my mum it wasn’t his fault.

As I dug in, I discovered all the spying Facebook does – which I double-checked with articles from big reputable news sources and academic studies that were heavily scrutenised. It sounds nuts when you put it all together!

• They have and continue to create false endorsements for products from you to your friends - and they never reveal this to you.
• When you see a like button on the web, Facebook is tracking that you’re reading that page. It scans the keywords on that page and associates them to you. It knows much time you spend on different sites and topics.
• They read your private messages and the contents of the links you send privately.
• They’ve introduced features that turn your phone’s mic on – based on their track-record changing privacy settings, audio surveillance is likely to start happening without your knowledge.
• They can use face recognition to track your location through pictures , even those that aren’t on Facebook. (Pictures taken with mobile phones have time, date and GPS data built into them.)
• They’ve used snitching campaigns to trick people’s friends into revealing information about them that they chose to keep private.
• They use the vast amount of data they have on you, from your likes, things you read, things you type but don’t post, to make highly accurate models about who you are – even if you make it a point of keeping these things secret. There are statistical techniques, which have been used in marketing for decades, that find correlating patterns between someone’s behaviour and their attributes. Even if you never posted anything, they can easily work out your age, gender, sexual orientation and political views. When you post, they work out much more. Then they reveal it to banks, insurance companies, governments, and of course, advertisers.

“I have nothing to hide”

A lot of people aren’t worried about this, feeling they have nothing to hide. Why would they care about little old me? Why should I worry about this when I’m not doing anything wrong?

One of the more obvious problems here is with insurance companies. The data they have on you is mined to predict your future. The now famous story of the pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!

The same is done about you, and revealed to any company without your control.

by Salim Varani |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known?

Of course, not everyone likes the idea of spreading scientific understanding. Remember what the Bishop of Birmingham’s wife is reputed to have said about Darwin’s claim that human beings are descended from monkeys: "My dear, let us hope it is not true, but, if it is true, let us hope it will not become generally known."

Introduction: Scientia

Of all the scientific terms or concepts that ought to be more widely known to help to clarify and inspire science-minded thinking in the general culture, none are more important than “science” itself.

Many people, even many scientists, have traditionally had a narrow view of science as controlled, replicated experiments performed in the laboratory—and as consisting quintessentially of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. The essence of science is conveyed by its Latin etymology: scientia, meaning knowledge. The scientific method is simply that body of practices best suited for obtaining reliable knowledge. The practices vary among fields: the controlled laboratory experiment is possible in molecular biology, physics, and chemistry, but it is either impossible, immoral, or illegal in many other fields customarily considered sciences, including all of the historical sciences: astronomy, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, most of the earth sciences, and paleontology. If the scientific method can be defined as those practices best suited for obtaining knowledge in a particular field, then science itself is simply the body of knowledge obtained by those practices.

Science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—is an essential part of psychology and the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences (such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is nothing more nor less than the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great figures in history, or the structure of DNA.

It is in this spirit of Scientia that Edge, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, is pleased to present the Edge Annual Question 2017. Happy New Year!

—John Brockman, Editor, January 1, 2017

*****

Richard H. Thaler
Father of Behavioral Economics; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Author, Misbehaving

The Premortem

Before a major decision is taken, say to launch a new line of business, write a book, or form a new alliance, those familiar with the details of the proposal are given an assignment. Assume we are at some time in the future when the plan has been implemented, and the outcome was a disaster. Write a brief history of that disaster.

Applied psychologist Gary Klein came up with “The Premortem,” which was later written about by Daniel Kahneman. Of course we are all too familiar with the more common postmortem that typically follows any disaster, along with the accompanying finger pointing. Such postmortems inevitably suffer from hindsight bias, also known as Monday-morning quarterbacking, in which everyone remembers thinking that the disaster was almost inevitable. As I often heard Amos Tversky say, “the handwriting may have been written on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?”

There are two reasons why premortems might help avert disasters. (I say might because I know of no systematic study of their use. Organizations rarely allow such internal decision making to be observed and recorded.) First, explicitly going through this exercise can overcome the natural organizational tendencies toward groupthink and overconfidence. A devil’s advocate is unpopular anywhere. The premortem procedure gives cover to a cowardly skeptic who otherwise might not speak up. After all, the entire point of the exercise is to think of reasons why the project failed. Who can be blamed for thinking of some unforeseen problem that would otherwise be overlooked in the excitement that usually accompanies any new venture?

The second reason a premortem can work is subtle. Starting the exercise by assuming the project has failed, and now thinking of why that might have happened creates the illusion of certainty, at least hypothetically. Laboratory research shows that by asking why did it fail rather than why might it fail, gets the creative juices flowing. (The same principle can work in finding solutions to tough problems. Assume the problem has been solved, and then ask, how did it happen? Try it!)

An example illustrates how this can work. Suppose a couple years ago an airline CEO invited top management to conduct a premortem on this hypothetical disaster: All of our airline’s flights around the world have been cancelled for two straight days. Why? Of course, many will immediately think of some act of terrorism. But real progress will be made by thinking of much more mundane explanations. Suppose someone timidly suggests that the cause was the reservation system crashed and the backup system did not work properly.

Had this exercise been conducted, it might have prevented a disaster for a major airline that cancelled nearly 2000 flights over a three-day period. During much of that time, passengers could not get any information because the reservation system was down. What caused this fiasco? A power surge blew a transformer and critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to backups properly. This havoc was all initiated by the equivalent of blowing a fuse.

This episode was bad, but many companies that were once household names and now no longer exist might still be thriving if they had conducted a premortum with the question being: It is three years from now and we are on the verge of bankruptcy. How did this happen?

And, how many wars might not have been started if someone had first asked: We lost. How? (...)

*****

Joichi Ito
Director, MIT Media Lab; Coauthor (with Jeff Howe), Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

Neurodiversity

Humans have diversity in neurological conditions. While some, such as autism are considered disabilities, many argue that they are the result of normal variations in the human genome. The neurodiversity movement is an international civil rights movement that argues that autism shouldn’t be “cured” and that it is an authentic form of human diversity that should be protected.

In the early 1900s eugenics and the sterilization of people considered genetically inferior were scientifically sanctioned ideas, with outspoken advocates like Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Winston Churchill and US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The horror of the Holocaust, inspired by the eugenics movement, demonstrated the danger and devastation these programs can exact when put into practice.

Temple Grandin, an outspoken spokesperson for autism and neurodiversity argues that Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Mozart and Nikola Tesla would have been diagnosed on the “autistic spectrum” if they had been alive today. She also believes that autism has long contributed to human development and that “without autism traits we might still be living in caves.” Today, non-neurotypical children often suffer through a remedial programs in the traditional educational system only to be discovered to be geniuses later. Many of these kids end up at MIT and other research institutes.

With the invention of CRISPR the possibility of editing the human genome at scale has suddenly become feasible. The initial applications that are being developed involve the “fixing” of genetic mutations that cause debilitating diseases, but they are also taking us down a path with the potential to eliminate not only autism but much of the diversity that makes human society flourish. Our understanding of the human genome is rudimentary enough that it will be some time before we are able to enact complex changes that involve things like intelligence or personality, but it’s a slippery slope. I saw a business plan a few years ago that argued that autism was just “errors” in the genome that could be identified and “corrected” in the manner of “de-noising” a grainy photograph or audio recording.

Clearly some children born with autism are in states that require intervention and have debilitating issues. However, our attempts to “cure” autism, either through remediation or eventually through genetic engineering, could result in the eradication of a neurological diversity that drives scholarship, innovation, arts and many of the essential elements of a healthy society.

We know that diversity is essential for healthy ecosystems. We see how agricultural monocultures have created fragile and unsustainable systems.

My concern is that even if we figure out and understand that neurological diversity is essential for our society, I worry that we will develop the tools for designing away any risky traits that deviate from the norm, and that given a choice, people will tend to opt for a neuro-typical child.

As we march down the path of genetic engineering to eliminate disabilities and disease, it’s important to be aware that this path, while more scientifically sophisticated, has been followed before with unintended and possibly irreversible consequences and side-effects.

by Edge.org |  Read more:

Image: "Spiders 2013" by Katinka Matson

Spiritual Sedona: the Arizona Town Bursting With Positive Vibes

[ed. It's bursting with something, for sure.]

Locals call Sedona, Arizona, a cathedral without walls. It’s not just the landscape – those red cliffs, mesas rearing up against a crisp and empty sky, that inspired Hollywood producers of the 1930s and 40s to shoot westerns such as Broken Arrow and Stagecoach in the area. Three million tourists a year come to this town of barely 10,000, nestled among towering rusty sandstone rock formations in the northern Verde valley. Many of these visitors are pilgrims, particularly at this time of year, headed to Arizona in search of spiritual renewal.

Sedona has no major churches, no relics, no established holy sites. But what it does have are “vortexes” – a series of unmarked points around Sedona’s various cliffs that locals and visitors alike imbue with new-age significance.

Where that significance comes from – like the actual number of vortexes in Sedona, which varies from guide to guide – is subject to debate. Locals cite legends about the area’s sanctity to local Native American tribes. However, Sedona didn’t become America’s new age capital until the 1980s, when a US psychic named Page Bryant identified the vortexes after a vision. These vortexes were places where spiritual energy was at its highest point, where you could tap into the frequencies of the universe, where you could, by closing your eyes, start to change your life. Spiritual seekers across the country listened. In 1987, Sedona was host to one of the largest branches of the Harmonic Convergence – a new age synchronised meditation – when 5,000 pilgrims came to get in touch with the universe at the Bell Rock butte, believed by many to be a vortex.

Now, among the juniper trees, you can find strip-malls full of crystal shops, aura-reading stations and psychics. At ChocolaTree Organic Eatery, shiva lingams – statues normally associated with Hindu temples – stand against the walls; next door, a UFO-themed diner called ET Encounter (formerly the Red Planet) serves Roswell-themed burgers and old Star Trek episodes play on the TV. Every other office along the state route running through town offers a “spiritual tour” of the vortexes. The national forests are full of small cairns people have left as spiritual offerings. These are regularly removed by forest service rangers in order to preserve the site’s ecological integrity.

Many of Sedona’s businesses are also geared towards wellbeing and purification, if not enlightenment: the town’s highest-end “hotel”, L’Auberge de Sedona (rooms from $270), which consists of luxury cottages and lodges, supplements traditional spa offerings with an outdoor “creekside massage”, where guests are invited to dip their feet in the river and squelch mud between their toes, washing off the dirt with creek water scented with flower petals. My own hotel, the Sedona Rouge (doubles from $150 B&B), a ranch-inspired boutique hotel near Coffee Pot Rock, which towers over western Sedona, offers guests morning poolside yoga sessions before their turmeric-tofu breakfast scrambles. (...)

It’s easy to be sceptical about Sedona. The relentless barrage of wellness and self-improvement-focused tourism can border on the cloying (after a delicately-spiced breakfast of quinoa and almond milk at ChocolaTree, I find myself all but begging a waitress at a nearby downmarket diner to give me the strongest, worst-quality filter coffee she can find). My vortex tour with Mark Griffon of Sedona Mystical Tours ($135, three hours) – who starts off the morning with a sage cleansing near a stone-circle “medicine wheel” he’s assembled himself in his backyard – is at times uncomfortably intense, as one of the attendees breaks down into sobs during a meditation against a juniper tree called Fred.

by Tara Isabella Burton, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy

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Let There Be Light

Two blue flames, each reaching more than one thousand degrees Celsius, converge on a small glass tube. It takes a few seconds before the pinky-width cylinder bursts into an orange flare, like a marshmallow about to char. That’s when Andrew Hibbs begins to work his magic. He spins the glass with his bare fingertips, waving it across the flames to distribute the heat. Then, using a rubber hose that hangs between his lips like a reed, he breathes life into the glass. In one smooth gesture, he curls it up into an arc: the first bend for a neon sign that will eventually read “It was all a dream.” The piece is one of the hundred or so that Hibbs will create this year, each selling for upwards of a thousand dollars.

We are in a nondescript warehouse, tucked away in the scrubby, industrial outskirts of Vancouver. “It’s a bit like a science lab in here, isn’t it?” Hibbs says, offering me a tour. His workbench is covered with sheets of brown tracing paper and archaic-looking drawing tools, which he uses to hand-render patterns for new signs. At the far end is the pumper table: a series of black knobs and dials mounted to a wooden counter with the tops of two neon-filled canisters poking through. In the middle of the shop floor stand three chest-high torches, known as crossfires, where glass tubes are heated and shaped into the sinuous curves neon lights are famous for.

At twenty-nine, Hibbs is an anomaly—a young master of a dying art. He started learning the trade by his father’s side at thirteen, helping out in their backyard workshop. His father showed him how to pump neon into the glass tubes and repair broken signs before slowly teaching his young apprentice the craft of bending. “It takes about five years to get decent at it,” Hibbs explains. He then holds out his hands: scars caused by shattered glass run up and down his fingers. Their tips are polished smooth from repeated burns.

Over the past few years, Hibbs has been leading a neon revival of sorts in Vancouver. His work has been featured by the Juno Awards as well as a host of local media, including Breakfast Television and the Georgia Straight. In 2014, he turned heads with a towering three-storey advertisement for a high-rise beside the Granville Street Bridge that read “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a German phrase meaning “complete work of art”). “It was all a dream,” like much of his work, will be sold to an upscale private buyer.

Hibbs explains that he is one of the few neon sign-makers left in Vancouver. Most, like his father, have reached or are nearing retirement. It’s a far cry from the art’s 1950s glory days, when the city had some 19,000 glowing signs rising above its streets—roughly one for every eighteen residents. At its height, Vancouver reportedly had more neon per capita than New York, Tokyo and even Las Vegas. During that period, dozens of local sign-makers worked overtime to keep up with the demand for bigger, brighter and ever more eye-catching displays. Those days have long since ended.

In recent years, LEDs—cheaper, less finicky and more efficient—have mostly replaced neon in commercial applications. But that’s only part of the story. Neon’s real decline happened decades earlier, when Vancouver’s carnival of lights became the focal point of a bitter aesthetic war that would forever change the city. (...)

By 1940, neon had transformed Vancouver: the city’s dark, wet winters offered a perfect backdrop for its warm, multicoloured glow. Photographs from that era show a metropolis that may look foreign to current residents: gritty streetscapes cluttered with signs and bulletin boards, sidewalks hectic with shoppers and vendors. Granville Street, the heart of the entertainment district, became known as the “Great White Way” for its landing strip of lights that could be seen from blocks away. “As a small city, we were an incredibly urban, vibrant place,” says Atkin. “You would bump into Hollywood stars and all manner of well-known musicians and nightclub performers. The signs encapsulated the exuberance and optimism of that period.”

In the post-war years, Vancouver was home to at least a dozen neon shops, each competing to create ever more outlandish displays: a giant tugboat rocked through waves over the Gulf of Georgia Towing office; the bellows of an antique camera accordioned in and out above a downtown photography shop; a pot-bellied Buddha perched atop the popular Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret nightclub. In those days, neon must have seemed as much a part of the city as the rain itself.

By the early 1960s, anyone driving westbound on Hastings Street would have seen little evidence of that seemingly irrepressible city. Storefronts that previously housed clothiers and jewelry shops were boarded up. Shuttered theatres littered the strip. Streetcars, once the lifeblood of the neighbourhood, were no longer running. Even the storied retailer Eaton’s, the anchor of Hastings’ business district, was struggling—in just a few years, it would move across town to a new mall. One of the only things that hadn’t disappeared were the neon signs.

That decade was a tumultuous time in Vancouver. Middle-class families were moving to the suburbs and other parts of the city, seeking backyards and carports. Plans were being drawn up for an elevated freeway that would slice through the downtown to better serve these new commuters. Neighbourhoods such as the Downtown Eastside became downtrodden. “The life was sucked out of the downtown area,” says Viviane Gosselin, curator of contemporary culture with the Museum of Vancouver. What was left were businesses in seedier areas, she says, and these impoverished pockets soon became associated with neon’s buzz.

Neon, once seen as glamorous, became the emblem of urban decay and was increasingly seen as a beacon for vice. “In a movie, if you wanted to show someone who was down on their luck, you put then in a hotel room, on their bed, in their undershirt, with a flashing red neon sign outside the window,” says Atkin.

Those bright lights had been a way for the young city to assert its prosperity and sophistication. But as Vancouver’s regional population swelled to more than one million residents, its anxieties shifted. Many Vancouverites were less worried about being seen as a big urban centre and more concerned that its man-made excess distracted from the natural beauty of its mountains, ocean and beaches. In 1966, Vancouver Sun writer Tom Ardies opined that the proliferating neon signs were a hideous monstrosity. “They’re outsized, outlandish, and outrageous,” he wrote. “They’re desecrating our buildings, cluttering our streets, and—this is the final indignity—blocking our views to some of the greatest scenery in the world.”

by Brad Badelt, Maisonneuve |  Read more:

Image: Wendy Cutler/Flickr

It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer.

The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades. And given the rapid pace of its development, AI may soon advance to artificial general intelligence—intelligence that, like human intelligence, can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. From there it is a short leap to superintelligent AI, which is smarter than humans in every respect, even those that now seem firmly in the human domain, such as scientific reasoning and social skills. Each of us alive today may be one of the last rungs on the evolutionary ladder that leads from the first living cell to synthetic intelligence.

What we are only beginning to realize is that these two forms of superhuman intelligence—alien and artificial—may not be so distinct. The technological developments we are witnessing today may have all happened before, elsewhere in the universe. The transition from biological to synthetic intelligence may be a general pattern, instantiated over and over, throughout the cosmos. The universe’s greatest intelligences may be postbiological, having grown out of civilizations that were once biological. (This is a view I share with Paul Davies, Steven Dick, Martin Rees, and Seth Shostak, among others.) To judge from the human experience—the only example we have—the transition from biological to postbiological may take only a few hundred years.

I prefer the term “postbiological” to “artificial” because the contrast between biological and synthetic is not very sharp. Consider a biological mind that achieves superintelligence through purely biological enhancements, such as nanotechnologically enhanced neural minicolumns. This creature would be postbiological, although perhaps many wouldn’t call it an “AI.” Or consider a computronium that is built out of purely biological materials, like the Cylon Raider in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series.

The key point is that there is no reason to expect humans to be the highest form of intelligence there is. Our brains evolved for specific environments and are greatly constrained by chemistry and historical contingencies. But technology has opened up a vast design space, offering new materials and modes of operation, as well as new ways to explore that space at a rate much faster than traditional biological evolution. And I think we already see reasons why synthetic intelligence will outperform us.

An extraterrestrial AI could have goals that conflict with those of biological life

Silicon microchips already seem to be a better medium for information processing than groups of neurons. Neurons reach a peak speed of about 200 hertz, compared to gigahertz for the transistors in current microprocessors. Although the human brain is still far more intelligent than a computer, machines have almost unlimited room for improvement. It may not be long before they can be engineered to match or even exceed the intelligence of the human brain through reverse-engineering the brain and improving upon its algorithms, or through some combination of reverse engineering and judicious algorithms that aren’t based on the workings of the human brain.

In addition, an AI can be downloaded to multiple locations at once, is easily backed up and modified, and can survive under conditions that biological life has trouble with, including interstellar travel. Our measly brains are limited by cranial volume and metabolism; superintelligent AI, in stark contrast, could extend its reach across the Internet and even set up a Galaxy-wide computronium, utilizing all the matter within our galaxy to maximize computations. There is simply no contest. Superintelligent AI would be far more durable than us.

Suppose I am right. Suppose that intelligent life out there is postbiological. What should we make of this? Here, current debates over AI on Earth are telling. Two of the main points of contention—the so-called control problem and the nature of subjective experience—affect our understanding of what other alien civilizations may be like, and what they may do to us when we finally meet.

Ray Kurzweil takes an optimistic view of the postbiological phase of evolution, suggesting that humanity will merge with machines, reaching a magnificent technotopia. But Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and others have expressed the concern that humans could lose control of superintelligent AI, as it can rewrite its own programming and outthink any control measures that we build in. This has been called the “control problem”—the problem of how we can control an AI that is both inscrutable and vastly intellectually superior to us. (...)

Why would nonconscious machines have the same value we place on biological intelligence?

...Raw intelligence is not the only issue to worry about. Normally, we expect that if we encountered advanced alien intelligence, we would likely encounter creatures with very different biologies, but they would still have minds like ours in an important sense—there would be something it is like, from the inside, to be them. Consider that every moment of your waking life, and whenever you are dreaming, it feels like something to be you. When you see the warm hues of a sunrise, or smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, you are having conscious experience. Likewise, there is also something that it is like to be an alien—or so we commonly assume. That assumption needs to be questioned though. Would superintelligent AIs even have conscious experience and, if they did, could we tell? And how would their inner lives, or lack thereof, impact us?

The question of whether AIs have an inner life is key to how we value their existence. Consciousness is the philosophical cornerstone of our moral systems, being key to our judgment of whether someone or something is a self or person rather than a mere automaton. And conversely, whether they are conscious may also be key to how they value us. The value an AI places on us may well hinge on whether it has an inner life; using its own subjective experience as a springboard, it could recognize in us the capacity for conscious experience. After all, to the extent we value the lives of other species, we value them because we feel an affinity of consciousness—thus most of us recoil from killing a chimp, but not from munching on an apple.

But how can beings with vast intellectual differences and that are made of different substrates recognize consciousness in each other? Philosophers on Earth have pondered whether consciousness is limited to biological phenomena. Superintelligent AI, should it ever wax philosophical, could similarly pose a “problem of biological consciousness” about us, asking whether we have the right stuff for experience.

Who knows what intellectual path a superintelligence would take to tell whether we are conscious. But for our part, how can we humans tell whether an AI is conscious? Unfortunately, this will be difficult. Right now, you can tell you are having experience, as it feels like something to be you. You are your own paradigm case of conscious experience. And you believe that other people and certain nonhuman animals are likely conscious, for they are neurophysiologically similar to you. But how are you supposed to tell whether something made of a different substrate can have experience?

by Susan Schneider, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence | Read more:
Image:YouTube/Warner Bros

byung hoon choi, water meditation
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Shoji Ueda
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It's Not Just Blue-Collar Jobs

[ed. I can't stress this enough (and have been harping on it for years): AI is coming for your job. Assembly lines and other forms of manual labor are low hanging fruit. Next come "knowledge workers", anyone who's job relies on retreiving and processing information. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, utilities managers, every form of clerical and managerial worker, mappers, engineers, pilots, weather forecasters, and so on, so on, and so on. I give it ten, fifteen years at the most.]

Manufacturing jobs have already been decimated by robots. White collar workers are next in line.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance in Japan is about to replace claim adjusters with a software robot from IBM.

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent.

One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer,” starting by January 2017.

The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Fukoku Mutual will spend $1.7 million (200 million yen) to install the AI system, and $128,000 per year for maintenance, according to Japan’s The Mainichi. The company saves roughly $1.1 million per year on employee salaries by using the IBM software, meaning it hopes to see a return on the investment in less than two years.

Watson AI is expected to improve productivity by 30%, Fukoku Mutual says. The company was encouraged by its use of similar IBM technology to analyze customer’s voices during complaints. The software typically takes the customer’s words, converts them to text, and analyzes whether those words are positive or negative. Similar sentiment analysis software is also being used by a range of US companies for customer service; incidentally, a large benefit of the software is understanding when customers get frustrated with automated systems.

The Mainichi reports that three other Japanese insurance companies are testing or implementing AI systems to automate work such as finding ideal plans for customers. An Israeli insurance startup, Lemonade, has raised $60 million on the idea of “replacing brokers and paperwork with bots and machine learning,” says CEO Daniel Schreiber.

by Mike “Mish” Shedlock, Mish Talk | Read more:
Image: Herman J. Knippertz

Politics 101

Trump and the Batman Effect

He's Making a List

The Republican Party’s Corruption Will Bring Them Down—Again

Forecast 2017: When the Wheels Finally Come Off

WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

[ed. I think the GOP will realize soon enough (if the Ethics Committee fiasco this week was any indication) that they're being punked just as much as the Dems. In fact, they have a much bigger problem: they actually have to advance whatever hairbrained agenda Trump decides to pursue. There are big egos in Congress, it'll be interesting to see how they deal with being lapdogs in their own party.]

Miroslava Rakovic
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Schadenfreude with Bite

Trolls are the self-styled pranksters of the internet, a subculture of wind-up merchants who will say anything they can to provoke unwary victims, then delight in the outrage that follows. When Mitchell Henderson, a 12-year-old boy from Minnesota, killed himself in 2006, trolls descended on his MySpace page, where his friends and relatives were posting tributes. The trolls were especially taken with the fact that Henderson had lost his iPod days before his death. They posted messages implying that his suicide was a frivolous response to consumerist frustration: ‘first-world problems’. One post contained an image of the boy’s gravestone with an iPod resting against it.

What’s so funny about trolling? ‘Every joke calls for a public of its own,’ Freud said, ‘and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychical conformity.’ To understand a joke is to share a culture or, more precisely, to be on the same side of an antagonism. Trolls do what they do for the ‘lulz’ (a corruption of ‘LOL’, Laughing Out Loud), a form of enjoyment that derives from someone else’s anguish. Whitney Phillips, whose research has involved years of participant-observation of trolls, describes lulz as schadenfreude with more bite. The more furious and upset the Henderson family became, the funnier the trolls found it.

In 2011, one of these ‘RIP trolls’, Sean Duffy, a 25-year-old from Reading, was jailed for posting messages online about dead teenage girls. He called Natasha MacBryde, who had killed herself aged 15, a ‘slut’; on Mothers’ Day he posted a message on the memorial page of 14-year-old Lauren Drew, who had died after an epileptic fit: ‘Help me mummy, it’s hot in hell.’ Often, trolls gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded.

RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls care one way or another about the person who has died. It’s that they regard caring too much about anything as a fault deserving punishment. You can see evidence of this throughout the trolling subculture, even in more innocuous instances. In one case, participants phoned video-game stores to inquire about the non-existent sequel to an outdated game. They called so persistently that the workers answering the phone would fly into a rage at the mention of the game, to the amusement of the trolls. The supreme currency of trolling is exploitability, and the supreme vice is taking anything too seriously. Grieving parents are among the easiest to exploit – their rage and sorrow are closest to the surface – but no one is invulnerable.

The controlled cruelty of the wind-up didn’t need trolls to invent it. In the pre-internet era, it perhaps seemed more innocent: Candid Camera; Jeremy Beadle duping a hapless member of the public. The ungovernable rage of the unwitting victim is always funny to someone, and invariably there is sadistic detachment in the amusement. The trolls’ innovation has been to add a delight in nonsense and detritus: calculated illogicality, deliberate misspellings, an ironic recycling of cultural nostalgia, sedimented layers of opaque references and in-jokes. Trolling, as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall.

Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to continue, the joke has to stop, and the victim be let in on the laughter. Trolls, though, form a community precisely around the extension of their transgressive sadism beyond the limits of their offline personas. That the community consists almost entirely of people with no identifying characteristics – ‘anons’ – is part of the point. It is as if the laughter of the individual troll were secondary; the primary goal is to sustain the pleasure of the anonymous collective. (...)

If the yield of trolling is the outcry of the aggrieved, it depends utterly on the preservation of value. Trolls depend on there being enough people who care about enough things – an indifferent shrug means failure. The choice of victim almost always conveys a moral position on what it is more or less appropriate to care about. RIP trolls are most incensed by the suicides of seemingly privileged white people; they see such deaths as self-indulgent, and public displays of grief over them as a façade, as one troll put it, for ‘boredom and a pathological need for attention’. Other campaigns, such as the trolling of the National Security Agency after the exposure of its extensive wiretapping, suggest that another cardinal sin for trolls is the suppression or misuse of information.

The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman. The troll acts ‘as a self-appointed cultural critic’ in a tradition of clowns and jesters, according to Benjamin Radford, while simultaneously ‘plausibly maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are left with is the logic of punishment in its distilled form: if even the grieving are punishable, who isn’t? ‘None of us,’ goes the refrain, ‘is as cruel as all of us.’ It is around this principle that the most infamous trolling community forged its identity: ‘We are Anonymous, and we do not forgive.’ And what goes unforgiven is weakness.

Sociological analyses of ‘online deviancy’ tend to focus on such traits as Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism. Phillips debunks all this. It does little more, she says, than redescribe the phenomena with a particular moral accent, while asking us to take for granted the meaningfulness of the categories (‘deviancy’, ‘personality type’) used. Instead, she stresses the role of mainstream culture, arguing that trolls are ‘agents of cultural digestion’.

by Richard Seymour, LRB |  Read more:

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The Canada Experiment

As 2017 begins, Canada may be the last immigrant nation left standing. Our government believes in the value of immigration, as does the majority of the population. We took in an estimated 300,000 newcomers in 2016, including 48,000 refugees, and we want them to become citizens; around 85% of permanent residents eventually do. Recently there have been concerns about bringing in single Arab men, but otherwise Canada welcomes people from all faiths and corners. The greater Toronto area is now the most diverse city on the planet, with half its residents born outside the country; Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal aren’t far behind. Annual immigration accounts for roughly 1% of the country’s current population of 36 million.

Canada has been over-praised lately for, in effect, going about our business as usual. In 2016 such luminaries as US President Barack Obama and Bono, no less, declared “the world needs more Canada”. In October, the Economist blared “Liberty Moves North: Canada’s Example to the World” on its cover, illustrated by the Statue of Liberty haloed in a maple leaf and wielding a hockey stick. Infamously, on the night of the US election Canada’s official immigration website crashed, apparently due to the volume of traffic.

Of course, 2016 was also the year – really the second running – when many western countries turned angrily against immigration, blaming it for a variety of ills in what journalist Doug Saunders calls the “global reflex appeal to fear”. Alongside the rise of nativism has emerged a new nationalism that can scarcely be bothered to deny its roots in racial identities and exclusionary narratives.

Compared to such hard stances, Canada’s almost cheerful commitment to inclusion might at first appear almost naive. It isn’t. There are practical reasons for keeping the doors open. Starting in the 1990s, low fertility and an aging population began slowing Canada’s natural growth rate. Ten years ago, two-thirds of population increase was courtesy of immigration. By 2030, it is projected to be 100%.

The economic benefits are also self-evident, especially if full citizenship is the agreed goal. All that “settlers” – ie, Canadians who are not indigenous to the land – need do is look in the mirror to recognize the generally happy ending of an immigrant saga. Our government repeats it, our statistics confirm it, our own eyes and ears register it: diversity fuels, not undermines, prosperity.

But as well as practical considerations for remaining an immigrant country, Canadians, by and large, are also philosophically predisposed to an openness that others find bewildering, even reckless. The prime minister, Justin Trudeau, articulated this when he told the New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the “first postnational state”. He added: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

The remark, made in October 2015, failed to cause a ripple – but when I mentioned it to Michael Bach, Germany’s minister for European affairs, who was touring Canada to learn more about integration, he was astounded. No European politician could say such a thing, he said. The thought was too radical.

For a European, of course, the nation-state model remains sacrosanct, never mind how ill-suited it may be to an era of dissolving borders and widespread exodus. The modern state – loosely defined by a more or less coherent racial and religious group, ruled by internal laws and guarded by a national army – took shape in Europe. Telling an Italian or French citizen they lack a “core identity” may not be the best vote-winning strategy.

To Canadians, in contrast, the remark was unexceptional. After all, one of the country’s greatest authors, Mavis Gallant, once defined a Canadian as “someone with a logical reason to think he may be one” – not exactly a ringing assertion of a national character type. Trudeau could, in fact, have been voicing a chronic anxiety among Canadians: the absence of a shared identity.

But he wasn’t. He was outlining, however obliquely, a governing principle about Canada in the 21st century. We don’t talk about ourselves in this manner often, and don’t yet have the vocabulary to make our case well enough. Even so, the principle feels right. Odd as it may seem, Canada may finally be owning our postnationalism.

There’s more than one story in all this. First and foremost, postnationalism is a frame to understand our ongoing experiment in filling a vast yet unified geographic space with the diversity of the world. It is also a half-century old intellectual project, born of the country’s awakening from colonial slumber. But postnationalism has also been in intermittent practise for centuries, since long before the nation-state of Canada was formalised in 1867. In some sense, we have always been thinking differently about this continent-wide landmass, using ideas borrowed from Indigenous societies. From the moment Europeans began arriving in North America they were made welcome by the locals, taught how to survive and thrive amid multiple identities and allegiances.

That welcome was often betrayed, in particular during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when settler Canada did profound harm to Indigenous people. But, if the imbalance remains, so too does the influence: the model of another way of belonging.

Can any nation truly behave “postnationally” – ie without falling back on the established mechanisms of state governance and control? The simple answer is no.

Canada has borders, where guards check passports, and an army. It asserts the occasional modest territorial claim. Trudeau is more aware than most of these mechanisms: he oversees them.

It can also be argued that Canada enjoys the luxury of thinking outside the nation-state box courtesy of its behemoth neighbour to the south. The state needn’t defend its borders too forcefully or make that army too large, and Canada’s economic prosperity may be as straightforward as continuing to do 75% of its trade with the US. Being liberated, the thinking goes, from the economic and military stresses that most other countries face gives Canada the breathing room, and the confidence, to experiment with more radical approaches to society. Lucky us.

Nor is there uniform agreement within Canada about being it post-anything. When the novelist Yann Martel casually described his homeland as “the greatest hotel on earth,” he meant it as a compliment – but some read it as an endorsement of newcomers deciding to view Canada as a convenient waystation: a security, business or real-estate opportunity, with no lasting responsibilities attached.

Likewise, plenty of Canadians believe we possess a set of normative values, and want newcomers to prove they abide by them. Kellie Leitch, who is running for the leadership of the Conservative party, suggested last autumn that we screen potential immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” A minister in the previous Conservative government, Chris Alexander, pledged in 2015 to set up a tip-line for citizens to report “barbaric cultural practises”. And in the last election, the outgoing prime minster, Stephen Harper, tried in vain to hamstring Trudeau’s popularity by confecting a debate about the hijab.

To add to the mix, the French-speaking province of Quebec already constitutes one distinctive nation, as do the 50-plus First Nations spread across the country. All have their own perspectives and priorities, and may or may not be interested in a postnational frame. (That said, Trudeau is a bilingual Montrealer, and Quebec a vibrantly diverse society.)

In short, the nation-state of Canada, while wrapped in less bunting than other global versions, is still recognisable. But postnational thought is less about hand-holding in circles and shredding passports. It’s about the use of a different lens to examine the challenges and precepts of an entire politics, economy and society.

by Charles Foran, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jacqui Oakley

Boris Rogozin, Cyberpunk
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Trump and the Case of Congressional Ethics

How much does Donald Trump care about congressional ethics? The principles at stake can’t bother him much, it’s reasonable to say, given the choices that he has made so far regarding his own conflicts, and in a hundred other areas. That is what congressional Republicans may have guessed when, late in the evening of Monday, a federal holiday, they made the dismantling of the Office of Congressional Ethics the first order of business for their new term. So much during the election year had pushed the limits of self-parody, so why shouldn’t they? For about eighteen hours, it looked like a triumph for legalized graft. Under the new measure, the ethics office would not be independent, would not be allowed to talk to the press, would not be able to do, really, anything. And the Republicans who had pushed their caucus to back it, led by Representative Robert Goodlatte, of Virginia, had done so in a closed meeting with no warning, as part of a package of rules changes. The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet. (...)

A couple of hours after Trump tweeted, the Republican conference met again, in what Politico described as an “emergency meeting” called by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and, for now, abandoned the plan. Reportedly, the ethics-gutting embarrassed McCarthy and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House; supposedly, Ryan (who was reëlected as Speaker on Tuesday) had never liked the idea, at least behind closed doors, though on Tuesday morning he claimed that it would leave Congress as ethical as ever, for whatever that’s worth. So how did it get as far as it did? The partisanship in the House is such that what counts, generally, is simply who gets the majority when the Republicans meet as a caucus—the majority of the majority—which the Party is then expected to get behind. This meant that the ethics-rule change looked like a done deal because Republicans alone favored including it in that rules package by a margin of 119–74. (A number of Democrats, some of whom have their own ethical problems, might have favored the measure, too.) That is no reason to feel sorry for Ryan, who has lived by and fortified this culture. There were moments during the campaign when Ryan was critical of Trump. But in its last days he campaigned for Trump by name. Ryan seems to have his own gold-painted fantasies of what that means. He talks frequently about how much “Donald” likes his ideas. If, in his focus on getting Trump’s help in dismantling the safety net, he let himself be exposed to a day of humiliation, he can’t be surprised. Nor does he deserve much credit for his late effort, with the reversal of the rule change, to salvage his dignity. Indeed, by doing it so quickly after the Trump tweets he has made himself look all the more like the President-elect’s messenger, or maybe his intern.

One mystery of all this is how the Republicans could have been so foolish—so conspicuous—given the populist rhetoric they themselves benefitted from in the past election. But when politicians become too used to saying things that they don’t believe, it becomes easy for them to forget that members of the public might actually be dismayed. And if they thought that Trump would cover for them, and help make them look good, the picture is that much more pathetic. (Chris Christie, now slumping in his office in Trenton, seems to have believed that, too.) Maybe, looking at the way business is done in the Tower, the congressional Republicans imagined that they might have a role like that ascribed to Trump’s adult children, seeking out the projects they liked and then bringing them to him for a wave of the hand. They may have thought that, when they smiled at his speeches, they’d shimmer a little, like Ivanka. Or maybe they thought that they’d be like his foreign partners, paying a modest fee to license the Trump name, using it to bring the locals into the golf course and keeping the serious money for themselves. They appear to have been wrong. In this case, they were the low-level Atlantic City contractors, sending a bill to Manhattan for the electrical work, having eagerly helped to build something bankrupt, and not even getting paid.

by Amy Davidson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: uncredited

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

Early in June, Sloan was readmitted to U.C.S.F., and Baldwin, his mother, returned to San Francisco to be with him. Miller saw both of them for an appointment that morning, and when he walked in, it hit him how quickly Sloan’s body was failing: In roughly six weeks, Sloan had gone from a functioning, happy 27-year-old, walking his dog up a hill, to very clearly dying. His decline was relentless, by any standard. At no point had any doctor been able to give him a single bit of good news. Even now, Sloan’s oncologist was reporting that after the first dose of chemotherapy, his heart was likely too frail to take more. (...)

Good palliative-care doctors recognize there’s an art to navigating clinical interactions like this, and Miller seems particularly sensitive to its subtleties. In this case, Miller realized, his job was to “disillusion” Sloan without devastating him. Hope is a tricky thing, Miller told me. Some terminal patients keep chasing hope through round after round of chemo. But it’s amazing how easily others “re-proportion,” or recalibrate, their expectations: how the hope of making it to a grandchild’s birthday or finishing “Game of Thrones” becomes sufficiently meaningful. “The question becomes,” Miller says, “how do you incorporate those hard facts into your moment-by-moment life instead of trying to run away from them?”

At an initial appointment with Sloan, two weeks earlier, Miller made the calculation not to steer Sloan toward any crushing realizations. He worried that if he pushed too hard, Sloan might feel alienated and shut down. (“I needed his allegiance,” Miller later explained; it was more important, in the long term, that Sloan see him as an advocate.) At the second meeting, Miller remembered, “I felt the need to be more brutal.” And, he imagined, by now Sloan would have started to suspect that the story he’d been telling himself didn’t fit the reality. “I just said, ‘Randy, this is not going like any of us want for you,’ ” and Miller began, calmly, to level with him.

Traveling was out of the question, Miller explained; best guess, Sloan had a few months to live. “You could just watch his world collapse,” Miller recalled. “With each sentence, you’re taking another possibility away.” Sloan started crying. And yet, Baldwin also knew that her son had been waiting for his doctors to say this out loud. Sloan couldn’t understand why, if he had Stage 4 of an incurable cancer, he was still taking 70 pills every day, with the doses laid out in a dizzying flowchart. And as Miller went on, he was stunned by how well Sloan seemed to be absorbing this new information, without buckling under its weight. “He was actually kind of keeping up with his grief, reconciling the facts of his life,” he says. “It was a moving target, and he kept hitting it.” Baldwin told me: “Randy was a simple guy. He would say to me, ‘Mom, all I want is one ordinary day.’ ” He was sick of being sick — just like he’d been saying. He wanted to go back to living, as best he could.

Quickly the conversation turned to what was next. A standard question in palliative care is “What’s important to you now?” But Sloan didn’t muster much of a response, so Miller retooled the question. He told Sloan that nothing about his life was going the way he expected, and his body was only going to keep breaking down. “So, what’s your favorite part of yourself? What character trait do we want to make sure to protect as everything else falls apart?” Sloan had an immediate answer for this one. “I love everybody I’ve ever met,” he said. (...)

Sloan got apprehensive when Miller started telling him about Zen Hospice’s residential facility, known as the Guest House; it sounded as if it was for old people. But Miller explained that it was probably the best chance he had for living the last act of his life the way he wanted. His other options were to tough it out at home with two weekly visits from a home hospice nurse or go to a nursing home. At Zen Hospice, Sloan’s friends would always be welcome, and Sloan could come and go as he pleased as long as someone went with him. He could eat what he wanted. He could step out for a cigarette. He could even walk up the street and smoke on his own stoop — the Guest House was just two blocks from Sloan’s apartment. Besides, Miller told him: “It’s where I work. I’ll be there.” (...)

I never met Randy Sloan. But as I heard these stories in the months after his death, it became impossible for me not to fixate on the unfathomability of his interior life, or anyone’s interior life, at the end — to wonder how well Sloan had come to terms with what was happening to him, how much agony he might have felt. Erin Singer, the kitchen manager, told me that Sloan seemed intent on keeping his distance from the Guest House. Usually, she said, he sat under a tree in the park next door, silently smoking a cigarette. And it struck Singer as significant that Sloan “didn’t sit looking at the street or the garden. He always sat looking at the house,” as if he was wrestling with what it would mean to go inside.

The question that was unsettling me was about regret: How sure was everyone that Sloan didn’t have desires he would have liked to express or anguish he would have liked to work through — and should someone have helped him express and work through them, instead of just letting him play video games with his friends? My real question, I guess, was: Is this all there is?

Later, when I admitted this to Miller, he told me he understood this kind of anxiety well, but was able, with practice, to resist it. “Learning to love not knowing,” he said, “that’s a key part of this story. Obviously, I don’t know the depths of Randy’s soul, either. Was Randy enlightened or did he just not have the right vocabulary for this, if any of us do? We’ll never know. And maybe the difference between those things is unimportant. I think of it as: Randy got to play himself out.”

This is a favorite phrase of Miller’s. It means that Randy’s ability to be Randy was never unnecessarily constrained. What Sloan chose to do with that freedom at the Guest House was up to him. Miller was suggesting that I’d misunderstood the mission of Zen Hospice. Yes, it’s about wresting death from the one-size-fits-all approach of hospitals, but it’s also about puncturing a competing impulse, the one I was scuffling with now: our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience. “Most people aren’t having these transformative deathbed moments,” Miller said. “And if you hold that out as a goal, they’re just going to feel like they’re failing.” The truth was, Zen Hospice had done something almost miraculous: It had allowed Sloan and those who loved him to live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together, until Sloan’s share of present moments ran out.

by Jon Mooallem, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Todd Hido for The New York Times

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