Estonia, the Digital Republic

Estonia, The Digital Republic
Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure.

Image: Eiko Ojala

Facebook Job Ads Raise Concerns About Age Discrimination

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

Verizon is among dozens of the nation’s leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it unlawful to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.

“It’s blatantly unlawful,” said Debra Katz, a Washington employment lawyer who represents victims of discrimination.

Facebook defended the practice. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.

The revelations come at a time when the unregulated power of the tech companies is under increased scrutiny, and Congress is weighing whether to limit the immunity that it granted to tech companies in 1996 for third-party content on their platforms.

Facebook has argued in court filings that the law, the Communications Decency Act, makes it immune from liability for discriminatory ads.

Although Facebook is a relatively new entrant into the recruiting arena, it is rapidly gaining popularity with employers. Earlier this year, the social network launched a section of its site devoted to job ads. Facebook allows advertisers to select their audience, and then Facebook finds the chosen users with the extensive data it collects about its members.

The use of age targets emerged in a review of data originally compiled by ProPublica readers for a project about political ad placement on Facebook. Many of the ads include a disclosure by Facebook about why the user is seeing the ad, which can be anything from their age to their affinity for folk music.

The precision of Facebook’s ad delivery has helped it dominate an industry once in the hands of print and broadcast outlets. The system, called microtargeting, allows advertisers to reach essentially whomever they prefer, including the people their analysis suggests are the most plausible hires or consumers, lowering the costs and vastly increasing efficiency. (...)

Other tech companies also offer employers opportunities to discriminate by age. ProPublica bought job ads on Google and LinkedIn that excluded audiences older than 40 — and the ads were instantly approved. Google said it does not prevent advertisers from displaying ads based on the user’s age. After being contacted by ProPublica, LinkedIn changed its system to prevent such targeting in employment ads.

The practice has begun to attract legal challenges. On Wednesday, a class-action complaint alleging age discrimination was filed in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of the Communications Workers of America and its members — as well as all Facebook users 40 or older who may have been denied the chance to learn about job openings. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said the complaint was based on ads for dozens of companies that they had discovered on Facebook. (...)

‘They Know I’m Dead’

Age discrimination on digital platforms is something that many workers suspect is happening to them, but that is often difficult to prove.

Mark Edelstein, a fitfully employed social-media marketing strategist who is 58 and legally blind, doesn’t pretend to know what he doesn’t know, but he has his suspicions.

Mr. Edelstein, who lives in St. Louis, says he never had serious trouble finding a job until he turned 50. “Once you reach your 50s, you may as well be dead,” he said. “I’ve gone into interviews, with my head of gray hair and my receding hairline, and they know I’m dead.”

Mr. Edelstein spends most of his days scouring sites like LinkedIn and Indeed and pitching hiring managers with personalized appeals. When he scrolled through his Facebook ads on a Wednesday in December, he saw a variety of ads reflecting his interest in social media marketing: ads for the marketing software HubSpot (“15 free infographic templates!”) and TripIt, which he used to book a trip to visit his mother in Florida.

What he didn’t see was a single ad for a job in his profession, including one identified by ProPublica that was being shown to younger users: a posting for a social media director job at HubSpot. The company asked that the ad be shown to people aged 27 to 40 who live or were recently living in the United States.

“Hypothetically, had I seen a job for a social media director at HubSpot, even if it involved relocation, I ABSOLUTELY would have applied for it,” Mr. Edelstein said by email when told about the ad.

A HubSpot spokeswoman, Ellie Botelho, said that the job was posted on many sites, including LinkedIn, The Ladders and Built in Boston, and was open to anyone meeting the qualifications regardless of age or any other demographic characteristic.

She added that “the use of the targeted age-range selection on the Facebook ad was frankly a mistake on our part given our lack of experience using that platform for job postings and not a feature we will use again.”

For his part, Mr. Edelstein says he understands why marketers wouldn’t want to target ads at him: “It doesn’t surprise me a bit. Why would they want a 58-year-old white guy who’s disabled?”

by Julia Angwin, Noam Scheiber, and Ariana Tobin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Whitney Curtis
[ed. I've often wondered how companies (especially tech companies) circumvent the Age Discrimination Act (other than slave-labor wages and hours that only a desperate young person would accept). This article is about job postings. If an older person were to actually get an interview I imagine it would mainly be because HR metrics require at least some token effort to address non-discrimination (before a younger person is hired).]

John Cage and David Tudor in Japan
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In Praise of the Deep Cold

For 15 years now, I have lived in Homer, Alaska, a small coastal town with a local economy fueled by summer tourists and commercial fishing. Although Homer is in Alaska’s “banana belt,” winters last for six months and summers are always cool and damp. We wear wool sweaters and down jackets year-round, and on summer’s sunniest days, a sharp wind whips off the 50-degree bay on which I live and finds me everywhere.

I wasn’t consciously seeking cold when I decided to move to Alaska a few years after graduating from college, instead I sought the things that cold so often brings: vast stretches of wilderness, undeveloped coastlines, rich ocean waters you can eat out of, and dark starry skies. I took my decision to move lightly, even as I mailed change of address postcards to friends and family, indicating I was relocating to nearly the farthest point I could while still within in the US, and began amassing the kinds of possessions I would need in Alaska: heavy down parka, rubber boots, field guides to western birds. I was too young to see the ways in which a single decision can lead to the next and to the next until the course of your life has been shifted without you really understanding how or why.

What is it to live in such a cold place? It means that the world around you is drowned for half a year under a sea of snow and ice. You won’t see your backyard for months. It means a winter so cold it’s devoid of smells and even of color. Nothing is blooming, the leaves have dropped, all of the colorful birds have flown south, and the spruce trees—blue-green during the summer months—seem to turn black against the snowy drop cloth. On the most frigid days, the fabric of your jacket becomes stiff and noisy. Skis squeak across snow so cold and dry it has no glide. In the middle of winter, the sun—if it appears at all—is barely higher than eye level above the horizon. Even at noon, the light is lean, casting long shadows across the frozen ground. And during our few midwinter thaws, each a brief respite from the regular deep freeze, we are not warm. Rain pelts the snow, partially melting the entire town until everything is lacquered in ice. Broken collarbones, fractured arms, cracked pelvises—these are some of the side effects of this warmth.

To live in a cold place like this, you forget what real warmth is. We often have to turn on the heat inside the house during the summer to take away the chill. We lose muscle memory of the wonderful full-body ease that true warm weather brings. Until we travel elsewhere, we forget the feeling of walking outside in a T-shirt and shorts and feeling absolutely, profoundly, just right.

Before I moved here, I didn’t realize that the cold—preparing for it, insulating from it, warding it off, and reacting to it—would be the focus of life. Fall is the season of gearing up for winter, and spring the season of cleaning up after it. Summer—those light-drenched months that pass in the blink of an eye—is the season when you can finally coax green things out of the garden that are winter crops for people in the rest of the country: cabbage, broccoli, kale.

Paradoxically, summer is what brought many Alaska residents here, but winter is why so many of us have stayed. People who don’t live here think winter must shut Alaskans inside for half the year. But it is the time of ice and snow when this—and other cold parts of the world—are their most accessible. A blanket of snow in the hills behind town smoothes out miles of tangled willow shrubs and untraversible hummocks, creating limitless skiing and snowmobiling terrain. In the northern part of Alaska, frozen rivers become marked highways connecting remote villages otherwise only reachable by slow-going boat or bush plane. Winter there means that cab service to a village of three hundred people is possible, as is pizza delivery. And since much of the state is sliced by rivers, bogged down in wetlands, and serrated by frilled coastline, the freeze turns the soggy expanse solid, making it navigable. Thank goodness, because we have to get out—to work, to eat, to play.

Unlike scurvy, cabin fever can’t be cured by a daily pill. A few winters ago, when I was pregnant with my second daughter, a cold front plunged us into a spell of frigid weather for weeks, and the temperature rarely broke five degrees. I bundled my toddler to go out anyway. First the inside clothing, then fleece overalls and a fleece jacket, a heavy-duty snowsuit over that, thick mittens, thick socks, a hat, hood, and boots. Even then, we could only stay out for half an hour—25 minutes to be safer. An extra five minutes and she’d be bawling, hands and feet cold and red beneath her layers and unable to get warm.

Cold kills far more people in Alaska each year than bears, wolves, and bush planes combined. Winter here plucks people from life, by avalanche, car accident, broken-down snowmobile far from help, or errant wave across the deck of a Bering Sea crab boat. Living here can sometimes feel like a list of “don’ts”: don’t tip your kayak into the bay; don’t drop your car keys in the snow; don’t go boating, hiking, or skiing without telling friends of your plan; don’t go snowmobiling alone.

Even in summer, a simple afternoon fishing trip gone awry can mean drowning in frigid water within the first five minutes of being immersed. In whatever form, too much cold can make you lose your mind. You stumble, mumble, and lose your connection to reality. This is why people suffering from hypothermia often take off their clothes, insisting that they’re hot. (...)

People assume that to choose to live in a cold place is to choose austerity and a life without comfort. Because, of course, to escape the cold—to winter in the tropics, retire under the sun, take off for the islands at Christmas—has always meant you had achieved a certain level of success. But a cold life is not without its own riches. There are clear winter days when the surface of the snow glitters like diamonds. We have access to silence, one of the rarest commodities. And cold ocean waters make for extravagant dinners: salmon hooked minutes before, clams and mussels gathered into buckets by cold hands, oysters slurped raw so that you can feel the ocean dribbling deliciously down your throat.

Living here means we have the opportunity to see how cold can shape a place. The terrain out my living room windows was under ice until about ten thousand years ago, and the landscape—a mash-up of rounded hills, sharp mountains, steep fjords, and a four-and-a-half-mile gravel spit that pokes out into the middle of the bay—are remnants the ice left behind. Relatively low tree line makes for not only endless hiking opportunities and vast expanses of low-growing blueberries, but a tundra landscape that blazes red in autumn. (...)

Even so, the benefits of the cold can be hard to remember in the face of ice cleats, May snowstorms and frozen pipes. Not to mention our cultural bias against the cold. There’s no comfort in cold comfort, no welcoming from a cold shoulder. A killer is made even worse by being cold-blooded, an enemy by being cold-hearted. There is nothing cathartic or healthful about breaking a cold sweat, and a cold fish is not attractive as entrée or lover.

In spite of it all, being cold makes me feel alive. I’m not sure who I would be if I moved back to the comfortable life—if I swapped rubber boots that are always getting mucky for sleek sandals that knew only pavement. How would I fill all of the hours I now spend with my children, dressing and undressing them? Whom would I relate to if I could no longer commiserate with those around me about the cold?

And yet, between our frequent laments about the cold, my friends and I breezily discuss our half-formed plans to leave: one considers moving back to her small, Iowan hometown near her parents, where you can bike everywhere year-round, and the kids can spend the summer in the local pool. Another friend applied for a school counselor job elsewhere—where summers promise tank top weather and extended family is only a two-hour drive away. I scan online want ads from towns within a day’s road trip of my parents. But beneath the seemingly flippant exchanges among my friends, there is something tender and vulnerable: Are our friends going to abandon us in this cold place? If we left, would we realize that we’ve been wrong about everything all along, wrong about the correlations between proximity and intimacy, isolation and connection, cold and contentment?

I am more than 3,000 miles from where I grew up and where my parents still live in suburban Maryland. We are four time zones, three airplanes, and more than a day of travel apart. My husband and I take our girls to visit my parents at least twice a year—I can’t imagine seeing them any less. But for my parents, coming to visit us is like traveling to Japan. They don’t need their passports or a foreign language pocket dictionary, but the hours of travel and the tricky airplane itineraries, the necessity to pack for a climate not their own—forcing them to drag winter clothes up from the basement even when they come in the middle of summer—and the brain-addling time change make the journey particularly arduous and the destination feel foreign to them. Without the ability to fly, call, email and video chat, I would never live here, so far away. (...)

“Do you like all of that snow and ice?” my mother asks me every time I visit her. It’s a funny question to try to answer. “No,” I often say, “I hate it.” Or, No, but I put up with it. No, I sometimes want to say, but it is attached to certain things I do like, things I even love, things I may now not just desire in my life, but need. It’s too long an answer to describe empty cross-country ski trails a ten-minute drive from my house. Or how we feel that the stars have magically aligned when the lakes freeze with solid, clear ice and we can skate across them, marveling at the silver, dinner-plate-sized bubbles trapped inches below our blades. Or the thrill of seeing the tracks of wild animals in the snow—moose, hare, lynx, wolves—and the way they are tangible proof of the beautiful, unruined landscape in which we live. “I could never live there. I could never stand all of that snow and ice,” she says.

by Miranda Weiss, LitHub | Read more:
Image: markk

Grit, Gus, and Glory

Of the “Original Seven” Mercury astronauts, Gus Grissom, the runt of the litter, has also gotten the shortest shrift in the public mind. Regarded at the time of his death in the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire as a prime candidate to be the first man to walk on the Moon, Grissom was posthumously eviscerated by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, as Wolfe created a foil for his heroic portrait of all-star test-pilot Chuck Yeager. There, and in the movie made from Wolfe’s bestseller, Grissom was transformed in the public mind into “Little Gus” or “Gruff Gus,” the plodding, Hoosier-dull, slightly incompetent antithesis of superhero Yeager.

Wolfe’s caricature did both history and the memory of Gus Grissom a terrible disservice. Thus the best thing to be said about George Leopold’s book Calculated Risk is that it corrects Wolfe’s numerous historical errors and, in doing so, restores Grissom to where he belongs: in the first rank of the pantheon of heroes of manned space exploration.

After an unexceptional boyhood in Mitchell, Indiana, Virgil I. Grissom took off, as a man and a pilot, when his adolescent fascination with aviation led him into the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and then to Purdue University, one of the great engineering schools in the world (and to this day one of the institutions of higher education that produces the most astronauts). As a junior officer in the newly created U.S. Air Force, Grissom flew a hundred combat missions in Korea before graduating in 1957 from the Air Force’s Test Pilot School and testing one new aircraft design after another at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Grissom excelled as a test pilot and later, after his two missions into space, reflected in an indirect way on just how competent an engineer he had become through his flight-test experience: “They don’t hand out PhDs in test piloting,” he wrote, “but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody’s theory. You have to understand that theory pretty well to check it out fully. Every new plane, every test flight, is a brand new challenge.”

Which, among other things, gives the lie to Wolfe’s suggestion, in The Right Stuff, that the Mercury Seven astronauts were somehow second-stringers in the flight-test fraternity — “Spam in a can” who wouldn’t be doing any real flying. On the contrary, and notwithstanding the invaluable contributions made to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs by a diverse group of scientists and engineers, Calculated Risk makes it clear that the astronaut corps played a significant role in the development of spaceflight. From the beginning, they were most certainly not just passengers, chosen merely because they could take the pressures of high-G flight environments.

After volunteering and making it through the screening process, Grissom accepted NASA’s invitation to join the Mercury program because he understood that this was “where the future of test piloting lay.” He had always wanted to go higher and faster, and Project Mercury and its follow-ons, Gemini and Apollo, were the tickets to achieve that ambition. That Gus Grissom made the first cut in a contest involving some of the most competitive men on the planet suggests that his Hoosier grit was wedded to professional competence of a high order.

George Leopold, a technology journalist and science writer, is at his best in vindicating Grissom’s conduct during the mission of Liberty Bell 7, the second human suborbital spaceflight by an American, in July 1961. As Leopold puts it pungently (and accurately), Tom Wolfe “fictionalized” Grissom’s mission, suggesting that a panicky astronaut had “screwed the pooch” by inadvertently firing the mechanism that blew open the capsule’s hatch while the spacecraft bobbed in the Atlantic Ocean — an emergency in which Liberty Bell 7 was lost and Grissom almost drowned. Leopold demonstrates that the blown hatch was the result of a faulty design and an electrostatic discharge from the recovery helicopter; that Grissom maintained his cool throughout the ordeal, risking his life to try to save the sinking spacecraft; and that the incident did not do permanent damage to Grissom’s reputation for either courage or competence within NASA — as evidenced by his commanding the first two-man Gemini mission (making him the first human being to be in space twice) and then getting the command pilot assignment on the first Apollo flight.

In fact, if Grissom had been listened to more carefully, the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire disaster that cost Grissom his life and killed crewmates Ed White and Roger Chafee might not have happened. Grissom, the highly competent engineer and veteran test pilot, strongly suspected that the Block 1 Apollo spacecraft designed by North American Aviation was a lemon: a death-trap in which various engineering tradeoffs involving a pure-oxygen internal spacecraft atmosphere had created a tinder box in which a single spark from faulty and exposed wiring would cause an instant and catastrophic conflagration. Moreover, North American was ill-organized to build the Apollo spacecraft, its management structure so diffuse that there was no one to respond to the astronauts’ concerns about the machine they were to take into Earth’s orbit and beyond. Thus Grissom was not sardonically joking, Yeager-style, when he said, at a pre-flight press conference, that a “successful flight” of Apollo 1 would be one in which “all three of us get back.” The press completely missed the point, but Grissom was signaling his deep concern that the Block 1 Apollo spacecraft was unfit to fly.

by George Weigel, New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Teresa Cucala
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Don’t Forget Testosterone

Well, I guess I should have seen this coming:

We have to stop seeing sexual harassment and sexual assault as some sort of flattery of women gone awry. In truth, sexual assault has nothing to do with sex, or sexuality, or flirting, or courtship, or love. Rather, sexual assault is a kind of hate. The men who gratify themselves by abusing women aren’t getting off on those women, but on power. These men don’t sexually assault women because they like women but because they despise them as subordinate creatures.

Here’s a question. If sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are entirely about misogyny, sexism, and hate, how do you explain the cases of Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer and James Levine? Their patterns seem very similar to many of the other heterosexual cases — and worse than many. And yet there are no women involved whatsoever. What gives?

My own suggestion of an answer to this conundrum is a combination of two things: the resilient human ability (which knows no gender) to abuse power; and the role that testosterone plays in making sex an area in which men abuse that power far more frequently than women. I’m sure that if you’ve endured a lifetime of male depredations (as many women have) it’s utterly understandable why you might see this as entirely about misogyny — and in many cases, you’d be at least partly right. But it’s also, it seems to me, about what testosterone does to men’s minds and bodies, whether there are women around or not.

I’ve been fascinated by this question for quite a while now — my interest was sparked by my own medical use of testosterone as part of my HIV regimen, and I explored the issue at length here. To experience a sudden surge in testosterone — and to see oneself almost structurally altered by it — is to wake up to forces that are so much part of the background we can forget they’re there at all. Men have ten times as much testosterone as women, and testosterone is deeply connected with aggression, power, ambition, drive, pride, stubbornness, strength, and violence. In every species, testosterone makes one gender the more risk-taking, the more physically powerful, and the more assertive, and this includes the small number of species in which testosterone is predominant among females. It is also worth reflecting (for a few seconds, at least) on the simple physical fact that human reproduction requires the male to penetrate a female repeatedly in order to orgasm. This cannot happen in reverse. In the act itself, if it is to achieve its most obvious purpose, sex and power are inherently fused.

And so it is no big surprise that gay male sexuality, for example, has more in common with straight male sexuality than most of us want to acknowledge — because we’re afflicted and blessed with the same psyche-forming hormone. Many gay men, especially younger ones, want to get laid any time all the time, and will drop anything at any moment to get it. Gay men also objectify other men in exactly the same way straight men objectify women (“locker room talk” is by no means an exclusively straight phenomenon, except with gays, it’s other men whose body parts get scrutinized). If you want to know what handsy can really mean, check out the middle of the dance floor. And yes, the gay male sex drive leads us into blind alleys, and horrible blunders (as well as some of the greatest loves humans can ever know). We can often see sex as an act rather than as a relationship. We can be blind to the feelings of others. There’s a ruthlessness to the hierarchy of beauty and youth in many parts of gay culture that would be instantly recognizable to any woman. On the apps, where most gay sexual socializing now takes place, we broadcast desire with all the subtlety of a Breitbart op-ed.

The absence of women, moreover, removes most obstacles to getting laid any time you really want to. So gay men are particularly vulnerable to drowning, or at least getting swept up, in the undertow of testosterone. Gay men, like straight men, risk jobs, relationships, marriages, you name it … for a quick and ready lay. And when we’re really horny, most of our brains disappear out the window in an obsessive pursuit of the nut, seconds after which we come to, shake our heads, and wonder “How on Earth did I end up here?” This has never been better expressed than in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, and I don’t usually get a chance to air the Bard, so check out this small slice of genius:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

“All this the world well knows.” Except today’s debate about men and women seems to have missed it.

I’m not praising or lamenting this. I’m just recognizing it. It excuses nothing with respect to abuse, assault, harassment, and so on. There’s a bright line here and I see little moral difference between Spacey’s foulness and Weinstein’s. But testosterone helps explain why male power primarily gravitates toward sex, why sexual abuse occurs much more often among men, and why separating sex and power from male sexuality is to miss something important. It is always about both. If we are to have a conversation about men and women, work and play, power and love, then ignoring nature — pretending that this is all about social power dynamics or even hatred — is a very misleading thing.

by Andrew Sullivan, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: via

Why All Designers Should Read Cyberpunk

Molly Millions is cool. Her augmented eyes are coated in mirrors, and beneath her immaculately manicured nails, quicksilver daggers wait to be sprung. Her boyfriend was Johnny Mnemonic, a human hard drive, gray matter encrypted with a passcode that only the highest bidder can unlock. But that was before he died. Now, Molly is a “razorgirl”: a lithe assassin periodically hired for jobs involving computer espionage. Not that she jacks into cyberspace herself. She leaves that to her charges, the console cowboys she’s paid to protect as they slump in their VR rigs.

You might never have heard of Molly Millions, the street-samurai heroine of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but in a way, you’re living in her era. Like Helen of Troy, hers is a face that has launched a thousand ships: Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and and Snapchat have all—in one way or another—been directly inspired by cyberpunk, the once-obscure ’80s genre of science fiction to which Molly Millions belongs and which is now more relevant to designers than ever.

Writer Bruce Bethke coined the term “cyberpunk” in 1983, in his short story of the same title. He created the word to refer to what he thought would be the true disruptors of the 21st century: “the first generation of teenagers who grew up ‘truly speaking’ computer.” Other authors, inspired by the more psycho-literary science fiction of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick from the ’60s and ’70s, embraced the term. The enduring works of cyberpunk of the ’80s and ’90s—Neuromancer or Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, about a virus so deadly it can be spoken verbally and hack the human mind—examine dystopian futures in which the lines between virtual and authentic, human and machine have blurred. The heroes of cyberpunk novels are heroic hackers; the villains, all too often, monolithic mega-corporations.

You need only look to Hollywood to see that cyberpunk is big right now. Blade Runner 2049 is in theaters, Mr. Robot is on TV. At Fox, Deadpool’s Tim Miller is hard at work on a Neuromancer movie; Amazon has a Snow Crash mini-series on the production slate. Even Steven Spielberg is getting in on the action, with the movie version of Ready Player One, the popular cyberpunk novel by Ernest Cline. The reason is simple: The fantastical themes of cyberpunk—the tension between man and machine, virtual and real—have never been more real. And a large part of that is because the people who read cyberpunk as kids grew up to be the major movers and shakers of Silicon Valley, which now sets the world’s cultural compass.

Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example. The Facebook founder famously suggests that all his employees read Snow Crash. For cyberpunk aficionados, then, it was no surprise when, in 2014, Facebook dropped $2 billion on Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift headset. A huge chunk of Snow Crashhappens in what Stephenson calls the Metaverse, a virtual social network that is accessed exclusively through VR headsets. Inspired by the book, Zuckerberg had already created half of the Metaverse; by buying Oculus, his company is making a long-term investment in making its CEO’s teenage sci-fi dream a reality.

There are plenty of other analogues. For example, Google named its Nexus devices in a nod to the Nexus series of replicants in Blade Runner. Apple’s whole design motif is essentially cyberpunk, in the way it makes high technology feel organic: Sleek, sexy, silver, and glass, the new iPhone X is a street samurai of a phone. Likewise, augmented-reality products like Google Glass, Snapchat’s Snap, Apple’s ARKit, and Magic Leap are attempts to make real, at least in part, Molly Millions’s mirrored eyes, folding the virtual into the real.

The examples go on and on. Virtual assistants like Siri that whisper into your ear through wireless AirPods. Consumer genetic testing such as 23andme. Apps that translate foreign languages in real time. High-speed, vacuum-sealed rail networks like the Hyperloop. Artificial retinas and cochlear implants. Hacker collectives like Anonymous. All of these have their direct equivalents in cyberpunk.There’s a reason, then, that cyberpunk has suddenly become a thing again in the cultural zeitgeist. Look at filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s widely well-regarded Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. I won’t spoil anything for you, but the movie poses several questions that, for the first time ever, are relevant to your average person, in ways that its 1982 original was not.

• What does it mean to be “human”? In the world of Blade Runner, this is about the distinction between humans, AIs, and android replicants. But it’s just as relevant to our world, where the average person might behave very differently in real life than they do on Facebook, or where it’s unclear which of the president’s more zealous Twitter followers are human or bots.

• What is the difference between a real memory and a fake one? In Blade Runner, memories can be implanted, and they can be either real or virtual. Even if one of your memories is “real,” though, it might not be one you made; it could have been altered, or somehow even copied from someone else. Sound familiar in an era in which Facebook and Google “reminds” you of your memories from a certain date, which are then served back to you, altered with Instagram filters or other neural-network-driven improvements?

• Where does real life end and the virtual begin? In the world of Blade Runner 2049, holographic ads interact with each person, AIs cater to our every need when we’re at home, and augmented-reality glasses allow people to “exist” in multiple places at once. How different is this from our world, where each person receives individually targeted web ads? Where Siri- and HomeKit-connected houses are quickly becoming the norm? Where all of us carry a virtual world everywhere with us, within our smartphones?

All of these questions would have been solely the purview of sci-fi back in the analog ’80s. Now, though, they are eerily relevant to everyone. Tech has caught up.

by John Brownlee, Magenta |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See reviews for: Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (which anticipates digital/cryptocurrencies long before bitcoin came into existence.]

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[ed. Sorry postings have been so thin lately. Traveling. ]

Steamed Fish w/Chung Choi (Salted Turnip)

Ingredients

2 lb. onaga*, cleaned
3 TB Aloha shoyu
1 TB vegetable oil
1 TB sesame seed oil
1 piece chung choi (salted turnip), rinsed, minced
2 tsp. ginger, peeled, grated
¼ c. + ¼ c. green onion, minced
1 bunch Chinese parsley, chopped
¼ c. vegetable oil

*Red snapper is a great alternative to onaga. Try to get the fish whole with skin on.

Cooking Process:

In a flat dish; combine soy sauce, 1 TB of vegetable oil, sesame seed oil and chung choi. Dip fish on both sides into mixture. Place on steamer; top with ginger and ¼ cup of green onion. Drizzle with soy sauce mixture. Steam 5-6 minutes, until cooked through. In a skillet over medium heat; warm oil. Drizzle over fish; top with remaining green onion and Chinese parsley.

Serves 4

by Deirdre K. Todd, Cooking Hawaiian Style | Read more:

Image: James Temple
[ed. This should work well with any whole firm, white-fleshed fish. You don't even need a steamer, just microwave so it's partly cooked, then throw in the oven in a shallow foil-covered pan with a little bit of water. Stuff with whatever you like... shrimp, bacon, sautéd scallops, mayonnaise, lap cheong... My brother uses smoking peanut oil to finish, drizzling over the cooked fish and garnish so it sizzles.]

Facebook Says It's Bad For You and It Has a Solution

Yesterday (Dec. 15), a strange post went up on Facebook’s corporate blog. It was strange because it suggested that Facebook might, in fact, be bad for you.

What solution can the social network provide? The same answer it gives to every question: namely, more Facebook.

The post was the latest in Facebook’s somewhat new series, “Hard Questions.” This set of blog posts aims to address concerns that social media broadly, and Facebook specifically, might be having a negative impact on society. Topics include “Hate Speech,” “How We Counter Terrorism,” and the latest one, “Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?”

The structure of these posts is usually the same. Step one: identify some ill in society. Step two: admit that people think technology, and Facebook, might be contributing to that ill. Step three: assert that more Facebook, not less, is the cure for said ill.

In the new post on the potential downside of social media, the authors, who are researchers at Facebook, begin by correctly saying that people are worried about the effect social media has on relationships and mental health. They then point to research that suggests scrolling through Facebook, and blindly hitting the “like” button, makes people feel like crap. “In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information—reading but not interacting with people—they report feeling worse afterward,” they write.

The key phrase is “passively consuming.” The authors’ solution to this problem is not, as you might think, using Facebook less. It is using it more, and more actively. Instead of just liking things, and scrolling through our feeds, they suggest that we should be all-in. Send more messages, post more updates, leave more comments, click more reaction buttons. “A study we conducted with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness,” they cheerily note.

They then add a caveat that “simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.” But wait. Isn’t Facebook a social network, connecting me to hundreds or thousands of other people? I don’t need Facebook to interact one-on-one, over text, email, or coffee.

Facebook might admit it has some negative effects, but it is unwilling to face up to the fact that the solution might be using it less. This latest post mentions Facebook’s “take a break” feature. This will hide your ex-partner’s profile updates for you after a break-up, to help in “emotional recovery.” Because, sure, that seems healthier than just not using Facebook at all for a little while.

by Nikhil Sonnad, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: via

A Public Internet is Possible

A favorite party trick of neoliberalism is claiming that whatever the public sector can do, the private market can do better. For the last three decades, the two major political parties have teamed with the corporate sector to inform us that government is a rusty machine: too burdened by red tape to innovate, too slow-churning to adapt to change and operate efficiently. Then they turn around and sell us a plethora of terrible ideas—private schools, private prisons, private emergency services. Because the privatized approach is more complicated, less democratized, and overall less appealing than the public version, its proponents have to paint the public option as an utter failure. And what better way to ensure this failure than by actively investing in its destruction? Then they dare ask us to believe that privatization is actually increasing our choices. It was only a matter of time before the privatization mafia turned its attention to the internet.

(Yes, this is an article about net neutrality. Please don’t stop reading. Yes, there are a million pieces out there about net neutrality. If you’re like me, you probably avidly avoid them. But as boring, overplayed, and obnoxiously hyped as this issue is by internet bros, and as much as there are infinite other pressing attacks on our common humanity, this is actually really important and it’s a fantastic microcosm for American politics right this minute. And there is a little-discussed alternative even better than the net neutrality status quo—a true public option! Stay with me!)

I probably don’t need to extoll the virtues of broadband access for you. Odds are, you logged onto Twitter or Facebook or Current Affairs’s website to get to this very paragraph. So you already know that for better or worse (and full disclosure: I lean towards “better”), the internet has revolutionized the way we consume and process information, the way we communicate and connect with each other, and the way we buy and sell things, including our time. For the most part, we’ve been able to enjoy it with little interference from internet service providers, which are overwhelmingly private corporations dominated by a few behemoths at the top of the market.

Since ISPs control the infrastructure that connects us to the internet, they are technically able to control a lot of things about that access. For example, your ISP can determine how quickly you upload or download information. For a long time, ISPs could only really limit internet access speed as a whole. ISPs did what you might expect someone in control of access speeds writ large to do: they charged more for faster access, or limited the amount of data one household could access unless it paid for more.

Other restrictions like age-limits (for websites that advertise alcohol or sexual content) or the order of search results by search engines are imposed by the actual websites and not ISPs. Until now, the law prevented ISPs from having much more of a say in what websites we visited. So if you were willing to pay for a certain internet speed or amount of data, then your ISP could not subject you to slower speeds to punish you for looking at a website that it did not like, or for looking at a website that hadn’t paid the ISP a separate fee. This version of the internet that we’re used to, that we probably take for granted, is net neutrality.

The world without net neutrality is the world where ISPs can decide which consumers get to access which websites at which speeds. Imagine how attractive this is for the ISPs. They know that people really like Facebook, cat videos, or holiday gift catalog hate blogs. So they can simultaneously charge consumers extra money if they want to access holiday gift catalog hate blogs and even more extra money if they want to access those hate blogs at reasonable speeds. They can also charge the blogs for making their sites available to customers at all. They sit between the audience and the content and can extort money from both sides at once. (Excited for Comcast to determine what is going viral then charge you more to view it? Internet surge pricing, anyone?) (...)

Even if you believe in competition and the free market generally, it’s really not a thing here. Most people can’t just hop over to another ISP if they don’t like the one they have. With infinite wisdom and foresight, our forebears encouraged the ISPs to form regional monopolies. So many of us live in cities with no more than three or four ISPs altogether if that many. But that’s city-wide. We also live in buildings or neighborhoods with a single option for internet service. Unless we were willing to forgo having the internet altogether at home, thousands of us will probably give in to spiking prices for website access subject to the whims of our ISP overlords. (...)

What to do? In the last few years, several cities or counties around the the country entered the broadband market themselves. Their goal was to provide cheaper and faster internet. The list includes Chattanooga in Tennessee, Lafayette in Louisiana, and Wilson in North Carolina. The results have been astonishing. For example, Chattanooga was able to provide discounted prices to lower income residents and sell internet access at speeds that surpassed Google Fiber, which until then was the fastest internet in the country. Other cities like Sandy, Oregon were able to offer fast speeds for prices lower than the average ISP’s packages. The winners in all this were the consumers rescued from the Invisible Consolidating Hand’s shortcomings by a government able to prioritize the provision of an important public good over maximizing profit.

You could imagine a future in which every city and state ran an ISP that would ignore the FCC’s repeal vote and provide faster and cheaper internet on the basis of net neutrality principles. What reasonable consumer would ever choose a private ISP over the public broadband? If we followed this model in more cities, we could create a world where the repeal of net neutrality doesn’t matter. To compete with the public broadband, the private ISPs would have to ditch their restrictions and actually have to lower their prices as well.

But it wouldn’t be an American tale if the next part of the story didn’t include an intervention to thwart a public success. Thanks to the lobbies friendly to the interests of private internet service providers, like the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, and the many politicians whose coffers they line with cash, almost half of states have passed laws to prevent cities from running their own broadband service. This means that states are making sure only the worst corporate conglomerates can provide internet access, even if local residents have voted for a public option and even if the public option would confer the most benefit on the state’s residents.

by Vanessa A. Bee, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via: here and here

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That Giving Feeling

The central question that private bankers ask their clients is: “What does your money mean to you?” It’s a fundamental moral issue at all levels of wealth. Revealing answers range from the odious (controlling the lives of your family members) to the visionary (saving the world).

Eventually, bankers say, new wealth enjoys the luxury lifestyle for about five years before they start looking for some purpose in their lives.

New and old Asian wealth have confused and conflated the meaning of charity versus philanthropy, and the need to accomplish more with their vast assets. The best analogy is that charity is when you hand money to the Salvation Army in the street, who then decides how to distribute it. Philanthropy is when you stand in the street and decide by yourself who to hand money to.

Living with the obligations and responsibilities of wealth isn’t easy. Big money creates its own gravity, forcing their owners’ lives into an orbit. Gift giving as a form of charity is certainly commendable and flexible, allowing donors to shift the management of charity to established organisations.

But this concept is becoming inadequate, even corrupted, considering the super wealth being created by technology success. And charities are also becoming a source of potential abuse. (...)

Here’s a twist on the spirit of giving. In his recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg said he intended to divest between 35 million and 75 million Facebook shares in the next 18 months to fund his charity. He currently holds 53 per cent of the voting stock. If he sold 35 million shares, his voting stake would be reduced to 50.6 per cent.

But, according to the Financial Times, if he sold 75 million shares, he would be dependent on the votes of co-founder Dustin Muskovitz to exercise control over a majority of votes. So Zuckerberg’s advisers cooked up a stock reclassification that effectively created a third non-voting class, that would have solved this problem. Objections and the threat of a lawsuit from investors stopped his plan.

Once the US$12 billion of proceeds from the stock sale is transferred to his foundation, all investment income is tax free. He only needs to donate 5 per cent of principal per year to charity. Most foundations and family investment offices of that magnitude can make investment returns more than 5 per cent per annum. So the principal in the foundation never, ever actually need to be disbursed for charity.

For many foundations, the present value of the tax subsidy to the tycoon personally far exceeds the net disbursement of the principal from the foundation on charity.

New technology wealth seems fixated on funding scalable charity projects with the same model as their companies. Or that which benefit their companies.

Unfortunately, many poverty alleviation projects can’t be scaled, such as finding clean water for poor villages in Africa. It would be more practical and noble if Zuckerberg would simply give away the US$12 billion, rather than playing games with tax planning.

by Peter Guy, South China Morning Post |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: 2017 Was Bad for Facebook. 2018 Will Be Worse.]

The Future is Here – AlphaZero

Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.

DeepMind and AlphaZero

About three years ago, DeepMind, a company owned by Google that specializes in AI development, turned its attention to the ancient game of Go. Go had been the one game that had eluded all computer efforts to become world class, and even up until the announcement was deemed a goal that would not be attained for another decade! This was how large the difference was. When a public challenge and match was organized against the legendary player Lee Sedol, a South Korean whose track record had him in the ranks of the greatest ever, everyone thought it would be an interesting spectacle, but a certain win by the human. The question wasn’t even whether the program AlphaGo would win or lose, but how much closer it was to the Holy Grail goal. The result was a crushing 4-1 victory, and a revolution in the Go world. In spite of a ton of second-guessing by the elite, who could not accept the loss, eventually they came to terms with the reality of AlphaGo, a machine that was among the very best, albeit not unbeatable. It had lost a game after all.

The saga did not end there. A year later a new updated version of AlphaGo was pitted against the world number one of Go, Ke Jie, a young Chinese whose genius is not without parallels to Magnus Carlsen in chess. At the age of just 16 he won his first world title and by the age of 17 was the clear world number one. That had been in 2015, and now at age 19, he was even stronger. The new match was held in China itself, and even Ke Jie knew he was most likely a serious underdog. There were no illusions anymore. He played superbly but still lost by a perfect 3-0, a testimony to the amazing capabilities of the new AI.

Many chess players and pundits had wondered how it would do in the noble game of chess. There were serious doubts on just how successful it might be. Go is a huge and long game with a 19x19 grid, in which all pieces are the same, and not one moves. Calculating ahead as in chess is an exercise in futility so pattern recognition is king. Chess is very different. There is no questioning the value of knowledge and pattern recognition in chess, but the royal game is supremely tactical and a lot of knowledge can be compensated for by simply outcalculating the opponent. This has been true not only of computer chess, but humans as well.

However, there were some very startling results in the last few months that need to be understood. DeepMind’s interest in Go did not end with that match against the number one. You might ask yourself what more there was to do after that? Beat him 20-0 and not just 3-0? No, of course not. However, the super Go program became an internal litmus test of a sorts. Its standard was unquestioned and quantified, so if one wanted to test a new self-learning AI, and how good it was, then throwing it at Go and seeing how it compared to the AlphaGo program would be a way to measure it.

A new AI was created called AlphaZero. It had several strikingly different changes. The first was that it was not shown tens of thousands of master games in Go to learn from, instead it was shown none. Not a single one. It was merely shown the rules, without any other information. The result was a shock. Within just three days its completely self-taught Go program was stronger than the version that had beat Lee Sedol, a result the previous AI had needed over a year to achieve. Within three weeks it was beating the strongest AlphaGo that had defeated Ke Jie. What is more: while the Lee Sedol version had used 48 highly specialized processors to create the program, this new version used only four!

Approaching chess might still seem unusual. After all, although DeepMind had already shown near revolutionary breakthroughs thanks to Go, that had been a game that had yet to be ‘solved’. Chess already had its Deep Blue 20 years ago, and today even a good smartphone can beat the world number one. What is there to prove exactly?

It needs to be remembered that Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind has a profound chess connection of his own. He had been a chess prodigy in his own right, and at age 13 was the second highest rated player under 14 in the world, second only to Judit Polgar. He eventually left the chess track to pursue other things, like founding his own PC video game company at age 17, but the link is there. There was still a burning question on everyone’s mind: just how well would AlphaZero do if it was focused on chess? Would it just be very smart, but smashed by the number-crunching engines of today where a single ply is often the difference between winning or losing? Or would something special come of it?

A new paradigm

On December 5 the DeepMind group published a new paper at the site of Cornell University called "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm", and the results were nothing short of staggering. AlphaZero had done more than just master the game, it had attained new heights in ways considered inconceivable. The test is in the pudding of course, so before going into some of the fascinating nitty-gritty details, let’s cut to the chase. It played a match against the latest and greatest version of Stockfish, and won by an incredible score of 64 : 36, and not only that, AlphaZero had zero losses (28 wins and 72 draws)!

Stockfish needs no introduction to ChessBase readers, but it's worth noting that the program was on a computer that was running nearly 900 times faster! Indeed, AlphaZero was calculating roughly 80 thousand positions per second, while Stockfish, running on a PC with 64 threads (likely a 32-core machine) was running at 70 million positions per second. To better understand how big a deficit that is, if another version of Stockfish were to run 900 times slower, this would be equivalent to roughly 8 moves less deep. How is this possible? 

The paper "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm" at Cornell University.

The paper explains:

“AlphaZero compensates for the lower number of evaluations by using its deep neural network to focus much more selectively on the most promising variations – arguably a more “human-like” approach to search, as originally proposed by Shannon. Figure 2 shows the scalability of each player with respect to thinking time, measured on an Elo scale, relative to Stockfish or Elmo with 40ms thinking time. AlphaZero’s MCTS scaled more effectively with thinking time than either Stockfish or Elmo, calling into question the widely held belief that alpha-beta search is inherently superior in these domains.”

In other words, instead of a hybrid brute-force approach, which has been the core of chess engines today, it went in a completely different direction, opting for an extremely selective search that emulates how humans think. A top player may be able to outcalculate a weaker player in both consistency and depth, but it still remains a joke compared to what even the weakest computer programs are doing. It is the human’s sheer knowledge and ability to filter out so many moves that allows them to reach the standard they do. Remember that although Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue it is not clear at all that it was genuinely stronger than him even then, and this was despite reaching speeds of 200 million positions per second. If AlphaZero is really able to use its understanding to not only compensate 900 times fewer moves, but surpass them, then we are looking at a major paradigm shift.
How does it play?

Since AlphaZero did not benefit from any chess knowledge, which means no games or opening theory, it also means it had to discover opening theory on its own. And do recall that this is the result of only 24 hours of self-learning. The team produced fascinating graphs showing the openings it discovered as well as the ones it gradually rejected as it grew stronger!

by Albert Silver, Chess News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Transhumanist FAQ

1.1 What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it as follows: 

(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. 

(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. Transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived. Humanists believe that humans matter, that individuals matter. We might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow human beings. Transhumanists agree with this but also emphasize what we have the potential to become. Just as we use rational means to improve the human condition and the external world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, the human organism. In doing so, we are not limited to traditional humanistic methods, such as education and cultural development. We can also use technological means that will eventually enable us to move beyond what some would think of as “human”. 

It is not our human shape or the details of our current human biology that define what is valuable about us, but rather our aspirations and ideals, our experiences, and the kinds of lives we lead. To a transhumanist, progress occurs when more people become more able to shape themselves, their lives, and the ways they relate to others, in accordance with their own deepest values. Transhumanists place a high value on autonomy: the ability and right of individuals to plan and choose their own lives. Some people may of course, for any number of reasons, choose to forgo the opportunity to use technology to improve themselves. Transhumanists seek to create a world in which autonomous individuals may choose to remain unenhanced or choose to be enhanced and in which these choices will be respected. 

Through the accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding, we are entering a whole new stage in the history of the human species. In the relatively near future, we may face the prospect of real artificial intelligence. New kinds of cognitive tools will be built that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology. Molecular nanotechnology has the potential to manufacture abundant resources for everybody and to give us control over the biochemical processes in our bodies, enabling us to eliminate disease and unwanted aging. Technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and neuropharmacology could amplify human intelligence, increase emotional well-being, improve our capacity for steady commitment to life projects or a loved one, and even multiply the range and richness of possible emotions. On the dark side of the spectrum, transhumanists recognize that some of these coming technologies could potentially cause great harm to human life; even the survival of our species could be at risk. Seeking to understand the dangers and working to prevent disasters is an essential part of the transhumanist agenda. 

Transhumanism is entering the mainstream culture today, as increasing numbers of scientists, scientifically literate philosophers, and social thinkers are beginning to take seriously the range of possibilities that transhumanism encompasses. A rapidly expanding family of transhumanist groups, differing somewhat in flavor and focus, and a plethora of discussion groups in many countries around the world, are gathered under the umbrella of the World Transhumanist Association, a non-profit democratic membership organization. 

1.2 What is a posthuman?

It is sometimes useful to talk about possible future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard word for such beings is “posthuman”. (Care must be taken to avoid misinterpretation. “Posthuman” does not denote just anything that happens to come after the human era, nor does it have anything to do with the “posthumous”. In particular, it does not imply that there are no humans anymore.) 

Many transhumanists wish to follow life paths which would, sooner or later, require growing into posthuman persons: they yearn to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access. It seems likely that the simple fact of living an indefinitely long, healthy, active life would take anyone to posthumanity if they went on accumulating memories, skills, and intelligence. 

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or they could be enhanced uploads [see “What is uploading?”], or they could be the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound augmentations to a biological human. The latter alternative would probably require either the redesign of the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or its radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, anti-aging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable computers, and cognitive techniques. 

Some authors write as though simply by changing our self-conception, we have become or could become posthuman. This is a confusion or corruption of the original meaning of the term. The changes required to make us posthuman are too profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think about ourselves. Radical technological modifications to our brains and bodies are needed. It is difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to be a posthuman person. Posthumans may have experiences and concerns that we cannot fathom, thoughts that cannot fit into the three-pound lumps of neural tissue that we use for thinking. Some posthumans may find it advantageous to jettison their bodies altogether and live as information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks. Their minds may be not only more powerful than ours but may also employ different cognitive architectures or include new sensory modalities that enable greater participation in their virtual reality settings. Posthuman minds might be able to share memories and experiences directly, greatly increasing the efficiency, quality, and modes in which posthumans could communicate with each other. The boundaries between posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as those between humans. 

Posthumans might shape themselves and their environment in so many new and profound ways that speculations about the detailed features of posthumans and the posthuman world are likely to fail.

by Nick Bostrom, Oxford University |  Read more: (pdf)
[ed. Repost]

Naked 9 – 4
blood moon
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For the Good of Society - Delete Your Map App

I live on an obnoxiously quaint block in South Berkeley, California, lined with trees and two-story houses. There’s a constant stream of sidewalk joggers before and after work, and plenty of (good) dogs in the yards. Trick-or-treaters from distant regions of the East Bay invade on Halloween.

Once a week, the serenity is interrupted by the sound of a horrific car crash. Sometimes, it’s a tire screech followed by the faint dint of metal on metal. Other times, a boom stirs the neighbors outside to gawk. It’s always at the intersection of Hillegass, my block, and Ashby, one of the city’s thoroughfares. It generally happens around rush hour, when the street is clogged with cars.

It wasn’t always this way. In 2001, the city designated the street as Berkeley’s first “bicycle boulevard,” presumably due to some combination of it being relatively free of traffic and its offer of a direct route from the UC Berkeley campus down into Oakland. But since that designation, another group has discovered the exploit. Here, for the hell of it, are other events that have occurred since 2001:

2005: Google Maps is launched.
2006: Waze is launched.
2009: Uber is founded.
2012: Lyft is founded.

“The phenomenon you’re experiencing is happening all over the U.S.,” says Alexandre Bayen, director of transportation studies at UC Berkeley.

Pull up a simple Google search for “neighborhood” and “Waze,” and you’re bombarded with local news stories about similar once-calm side streets now the host of rush-hour jams and late-night speed demons. It’s not only annoying as hell, it’s a scenario ripe for accidents; among the top causes of accidents are driver distraction (say, by looking at an app), unfamiliarity with the street (say, because an app took you down a new side street), and an increase in overall traffic.

“The root cause is the use of routing apps,” says Bayen, “but over the last two to three years, there’s the second layer of ride-share apps.” (...)

All that extra traffic down previously empty streets has created an odd situation in which cities are constantly playing defense against the algorithms.

“Typically, the city or county, depending on their laws, doesn’t have a way to fight this,” says Bayen, “other than by doing infrastructure upgrades.”

Fremont, California, has lobbed some of the harshest resistance, instituting rush-hour restrictions, and adding stop signs and traffic lights at points of heavy congestion. San Francisco is considering marking designated areas where people can be picked up or dropped off by ride-shares (which, hmm, seems familiar). Los Angeles has tinkered with speed bumps and changing two-way streets into one-ways. (Berkeley has finally decided to play defense on my block by installing a warning system that will slow cars at the crash-laden intersection; it will be funded by taxpayers.) (...)

Perhaps you see the problem. If cities thwart map apps and ride-share services through infrastructure changes with the intent to slow traffic down, it has the effect of slowing down traffic. So, the algorithm may tell drivers to go down another side street, and the residents who’ve been griping to the mayor may be pleased, but traffic, on the city whole, has been negatively affected, making everyone’s travel longer than before. “It’s nuts,” says Bayen, “but this is the reality of urban planning.”

Bayen points out that this is sort of a gigantic version of the prisoner’s dilemma. “If everybody’s doing the selfish thing, it’s bad for society,” says Bayen. “That’s what’s happening here.” Even though the app makes the route quicker for the user, that’s only in relation to other drivers not using the app, not to their previous drives. Now, because everyone is using the app, everyone’s drive-times are longer compared to the past. “These algorithms are not meant to improve traffic, they’re meant to steer motorists to their fastest path,” he says. “They will give hundreds of people the shortest paths, but they won’t compute for the consequences of those shortest paths.”

by Rick Paulas, Select/All | Read more:
Image: Waze

How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web

"I just came across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.

I knew this because I was running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me as soon as my message had been opened. It told me where, when, and on what kind of device it was read. With Streak enabled, I felt like an inside trader whenever I glanced at my inbox, privy to details that gave me maybe a little too much information. And I certainly wasn’t alone.

There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.

The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online.

But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”

According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends. And you probably never noticed.

“Surprisingly, while there is a vast literature on web tracking, email tracking has seen little research,” noted an October 2017 paper published by three Princeton computer scientists. All of this means that billions of emails are sent every day to millions of people who have never consented in any way to be tracked, but are being tracked nonetheless. And Seroussi believes that some, at least, are in serious danger as a result. (...)

I stumbled upon the world of email tracking last year, while working on a book about the iPhone and the notoriously secretive company that produces it. I’d reached out to Apple to request some interviews, and the PR team had initially seemed polite and receptive. We exchanged a few emails. Then they went radio silent. Months went by, and my unanswered emails piled up. I started to wonder if anyone was reading them at all.

That’s when, inspired by another journalist who’d been stonewalled by Apple, I installed the email tracker Streak. It was free, and took about 30 seconds. Then, I sent another email to my press contact. A notification popped up on my screen: My email had been opened almost immediately, inside Cupertino, on an iPhone. Then it was opened again, on an iMac, and again, and again. My messages were not only being read, but widely disseminated. It was maddening, watching the grey little notification box—“Someone just viewed ‘Regarding book interviews’—pop up over and over and over, without a reply.

So I decided to go straight to the top. If Apple’s PR team was reading my emails, maybe Tim Cook would, too.

I wrote Cook a lengthy email detailing the reasons he should join me for an interview. When I didn’t hear back, I drafted a brief follow-up, enabled Streak, hit send. Hours later, I got the notification: My email had been read. Yet one glaring detail looked off. According to Streak, the email had been read on a Windows Desktop computer.

Maybe it was a fluke. But after a few weeks, I sent another follow up, and the email was read again. On a Windows machine.

That seemed crazy, so I emailed Streak to ask about the accuracy of its service, disclosing that I was a journalist. In the confusing email exchange with Andrew from Support that followed, I was told that Streak is “very accurate,” as it can let you know what time zone or state your lead is in—but only if you’re a salesperson. Andrew stressed that “if you’re a reporter and wanted to track someone's whereabouts, [it’s] not at all accurate.” It quickly became clear that Andrew had the unenviable task of threading a razor thin needle: maintaining that Streak both supplied very precise data but was also a friendly and non-intrusive product. After all, Streak users want the most accurate information possible, but the public might chafe if it knew just how accurate that data was—and considered what it could be used for besides honing sales pitches. This is the paradox that threatens to pop the email tracking bubble as it grows into ubiquity. No wonder Andrew got Orwellian: “Accuracy is entirely subjective,” he insisted, at one point.

Andrew did, however, unequivocally say that if Streak listed the kind of device used—as opposed to listing unknown—then that info was also “very accurate.” Even if pertained to the CEO of Apple.

by Brian Merchant, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Getty