Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer

The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.

He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.

He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.

He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”

But lately, Mr. Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so?

“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Mr. Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”

When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.

“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”

Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”

Mr. Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than eight million copies and made Mr. Harari a celebrity intellectual.

He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.

Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”

His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”

‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational Reading

Mr. Harari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Mr. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.

At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.

Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.

It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”

He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.

As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Mr. Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”

An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Mr. Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Mr. Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.

He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”

Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Mr. Harari said.

Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Mr. Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”

by Nellie Bowles, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Emily Berl

Seymour Chwast - 1979
via:

Why We Need Difficult Books

"The fascination of what’s difficult,” wrote WB Yeats, “has dried the sap out of my veins ... ” In the press coverage of this year’s Man Booker prize winner, Anna Burns’s Milkman, we’ve read a good many commentators presenting with sapless veins – but a dismaying lack of any sense that what’s difficult might be fascinating.

“Odd”, “impenetrable”, “hard work”, “challenging” and “brain-kneading” have been some of the epithets chosen. They have not been meant, I think, as compliments. The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps unhelpfully, humblebragged that: “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy, so by my standards this is not too hard.” But he added that Milkman is “challenging […] the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top.”

That’s at least a useful starting point. Appiah defends the idea – which, nearly a century after modernism really kicked off, probably shouldn’t need defending – that ease of consumption isn’t the main criterion by which literary value should be assessed. We like to see sportsmen and women doing difficult things. We tend to recognise in music, film, television and the plastic arts that good stuff often asks for a bit of work from its audience. And we’re all on board with “difficult” material as long as it’s a literary classic – we read The Waste Land for our A-levels and we scratched our heads as we puzzled it out, and now we recognise that it is like it is because it has to be that way. So why is “difficult” a problem when it comes to new fiction?

Attacking a literary prize for rewarding a book that doesn’t accord with a critic’s ideas about “readability” is simply philistinism. The question is not where the book sits on some notional sliding scale between “challenging” and “page-turner”: it’s how successfully it answers whatever challenge it sets itself. The question isn’t how difficult a book is, but why it’s difficult. What is it doing with its difficulty? What is it asking of the reader? Does that difficulty reward the reader’s investment of time? You’re entitled, as James Marriott did in the Times, to conclude that in this case the view from the top of Snowdon wasn’t worth the hike. But complaining about the hike per se is to give up on the idea that there might be any case for art that rewards an investment of energy and attention from its consumer. (...)

Easy good books will, with a bit of luck, find their audiences; easy bad books will do so too, because they are often fun in spite of or because of their badness. Difficult bad books will tend to die in a ditch; and difficult good books, without a helping hand, are likely to do so too. Think of prizes like the Folio, Man Booker and next week’s Goldsmiths as that helping hand. Having a panel of serious and thoughtful critics giving a lot of time to noticing something that might otherwise not be widely noticed can’t, surely, be a bad thing. These prizes are set up to reward the best literary fiction. Here, though, something of a definitional abyss opens. What the hell is “literary fiction”?

I’ve heard it said, and it’s an attractive position, that “literary fiction needs to recognise that it’s just another genre and get over itself”. Fair enough. Let’s explore that. I think it’s a pious cop-out to declare, as some do: “There aren’t literary books and popular books: there are just good books and bad books.” If we’re going wilfully to retreat from analysis, we may as well fold our tents as critics. There are indeed good and bad books but books also succeed and fail – and are responded to by readers – in relation to the genres they fit into or escape from.

Like it or not, literary fiction is a category that we use. And if it is just another genre and needs to get over itself, fine. Let’s work with that. We can identify features of other genres. Aliens and nanobots? SF, more often than not. Guns and hats and dead bodies? Crime. Dossiers and dead drops? Spy novels. So we ought to be able to make some, if necessarily vague, stabs at identifying what the features of “literary fiction” are. Let’s leave aside cultural value judgments about “importance” or “seriousness”. Literary fiction can, like most fiction, be unimportant. It can also be unserious: some of the best of it is. I’d call Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller literary fiction, but it doesn’t strike me as either important or serious. 

It’s sometimes fuzzily said that literary fiction gives you more on rereading, or that it stays with you, or that it’s “more profound”. That may be true, some of the time – but these things are more likely to be symptoms than necessary features. I’d suggest that the main identifying feature – and in this respect literary writing can and does compass and mingle with any number of other genres – is to do with complexity and depth of attention. That can be moral or psychological complexity – crudely, the goodies and baddies are less clearly delineated – but it can also be, and tends to be in the best work, allied to a greater attention to the form and to the sentence-by-sentence language itself. And where I say that it mingles with other genres, the point I mean to make is that (just like hats, or nanobots) its features can be found in any genre. You could make the case that Iain M Banks’s Culture novels are literary SF, that Sarah Waters has written literary historical thrillers, that Joseph Kanon or John le Carré write literary spy novels, that the metafictional quality of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a literary quality, and so on. The examples are numberless.

A publishing acquaintance suggests an analogy with music: jazz is more complex than blues. It’s harder to play and harder to appreciate. That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of good blues and lots of bad jazz. It doesn’t mean that jazz is an innately superior artform. It simply describes a formal difference between the two. Likewise, when we talk about a “literary novel” we usually mean something that demands and rewards close attention – though, as ever, there will be exceptions. The quality of that attention isn’t uniform from novel to novel. You don’t, for instance, read the torrential riffings of a Thomas Pynchon or even a Karl Ove Knausgaard the same way as you do the crystalline exactness of Nabokov. And those qualities will, for reasons that should be obvious, sometimes but not always issue in “difficulty”.  (...)

So let’s not assume that challenging work is like some sort of joyless high-fibre diet. Many if not most of the great modernists and postmodernists weren’t just formally challenging: they were outright funny. Samuel Beckett, laureate as he was of existential despair, is wildly funny. So is James Joyce. So, in his pinstriped way, is TS Eliot. More recently, David Foster Wallace is almost dementedly prankish, as is Pynchon. AL Kennedy’s Costa-winning Day, about bomber pilots in the second world war, is a book of high seriousness and some narrative complexity, but is full of jokes. Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island contains, for my money, the funniest gag on that year’s Booker shortlist. And it’s notable that many of those who have enjoyed Milkman commend it not for being solemn or profound but for being funny.

All this is not to say that some difficult novels are not truly ghastly. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, you could say that pretentiousness is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. I remember a colleague on a judging panel surveying the gathered novels and saying, with a certain roll of the eyes: “There’s a lot of ... fine writing in here.” By this he meant overwrought bad writing. The idea of literary fiction – in particular the idea that it is intrinsically high-status or, worse, “important” – is the rock on which many ambitious second-rate writers bark their shins. It’s what gives us plotless novels choked with portentous metaphors and pseudo-profound ruminations, novels that mistake difficulty for accomplishment or, worse, solemnity for seriousness. It’s what gives us, in parody, the “octuple time scheme and sixteen unreliable narrators” of Richard Tull’s unreadable seventh novel in Martin Amis’s The Information. Just because literary fiction doesn’t necessarily tell a story (though it usually at some level does), and frequently spars with its own form, and tends to pay attention to its language, it doesn’t mean that by turning all those things up to 11 you’ve created a worthwhile work of art. And it’s for just that reason that, year by year, we should be grateful rather than indignant that panels of judges on literary prizes labour to bring to our attention those difficult books that really are worth our time.

by Lara Feigel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Franck Allais

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s War on Gerrymandering

Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to travel to the future of the gerrymandering war.

Tuesday brought wins for independent redistricting commissions that Schwarzenegger backed in three of the four states where they were on the ballot—Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, with Utah still counting, but also trending toward yes. Now the former California governor has begun planning a summit for advocates, donors, and the people behind some of the successful campaigns to brainstorm and build to more wins.

It will be held at the Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California. Plans are being made to bring the group together within the next few months.

With Tuesday’s ballot questions, now nearly one-third of House districts will be drawn through independent redistricting according to a new report by the Schwarzenegger Institute, by commission or other methods. Schwarzenegger’s goal is to get that number to half by the end of 2020, and he already has his eyes on Virginia, among other states.

“My biggest complaint is always when people say, ‘This is [what’s] wrong with politics.’ Now I say, ‘What do you do about it?’” Schwarzenegger said in an interview on Thursday. He compared the effort to some of his other passions. “We’re going to make a plan, and this is going to be a new family. It’s like the environmental family or the fitness family.”

Schwarzenegger became obsessed with redistricting reform after successfully pushing a ballot initiative in California, which passed narrowly in 2008 for statehouse races followed by another in 2010 for House seats, with opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. The measure took the power to draw the lines of House and state legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.

At the time, California was one of only a handful of states that did this, and the results changed the makeup of who voters ended up sending to Sacramento and Washington.

After the four ballot questions Tuesday and the federal judge who on Wednesday threw out the Maryland congressional map on the grounds that it violated the Constitution through excessive partisanship, Schwarzenegger said he sees “a wave” of its own, albeit one that most election coverage has missed.

“The only thing I can come up with is that people are so dissatisfied with how things are going that they think this is the next best thing, that they can get power and change,” he said, explaining what drove the wins.

Last month, Schwarzenegger hosted a raffle that raised $50,000 on Crowdpac for redistricting reform. The winners, a physical therapist and a nurse who had never made a political donation before, got to visit him on the set of the latest Terminator movie in Budapest. He also spent a day in mid-November campaigning at rallies and fundraisers in Michigan and Colorado for the ballot amendments there. Ahead of the Ohio ballot question that passed in the spring, he allowed signatures to be gathered at the Arnold Classic bodybuilding competition in Columbus, and did a series of videos promoting it.

Schwarzenegger said he’s ready to do more of that.

by Edward-Isaac Dovere, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

World Chess Championship: Magnus Carlsen Vs. Fabiano Caruana

Fabiano Caruana, the US challenger, escaped from the verge of defeat against world champion Magnus Carlsen on Friday evening as their error-strewn seven-hour marathon in game one (of 12) in their world title series at Holborn, London ended in a 115-move draw.

Caruana played too passively early on against Carlsen’s surprise Sicilian Defence, and the Norwegian gained a clear edge which should have been decisive when the American became acutely short of time. But on move 40, with a full point beckoning, Carlsen made an impatient pawn swap which gave away almost all his advantage and the game then drifted into a drawn rook endgame.

Caruana appeared nervous and was clearly more affected by the occasion. Computer assessments gave Carlsen a clear edge around move 20, and although Caruana recovered somewhat, he then blundered badly at move 33 when acutely short of time, allowing the champion’s queen and rook to penetrate his defences.

Game one of a world title match can be difficult for a challenger. The most famous example was at Reykjavik 1972, when Bobby Fischer, in a level endgame, captured Boris Spassky’s poisoned pawn and was defeated. (...)

At the end, coping with defeat will be hard for whoever loses. Caruana has already suffered at the end of the 2016 candidates when Sergey Karjakin beat him in the decisive game to become the challenger, so this would be his second failure, raising the spectre of becoming an eternal deuxième like Paul Keres or Viktor Korchnoi.

Asked the loser question in a recent interview, Carlsen replied: “I will be very sad. I can’t think too much about it.” His sister Ellen went further, suggesting that he might simply retire. Years ago Carlsen already said that he planned to give up before his 40s, and he could easily afford to do so. So far Bobby Fischer is the only one of the 16 world champions to have retired in youth while still at the top.

Caruana is the first US challenger since Fischer famously took the crown from Boris Spassky at Reykjavik 1972, so who would win if the Caruana of 2018 played the Fischer of 1972?

Caruana’s current rating of 2832 beats Fischer’s highest live rating of 2790, which reflects major advances in opening theory and all-round strength, stimulated by easily available 3400 strength computer programs. If Fischer had a year or two to get up to date, it could be a different story.

When Caruana was very young, his parents sought advice from Garry Kasparov, who warned that devoting a life to chess was too risky. They were determined, and still went ahead. His father gave up his work in data processing and used property income to manage his son and finance a move to Europe in search of high-class coaching and for travel to tournaments.

Both Fischer and Caruana were raised in Brooklyn so had easy access to New York’s active chess life. Bobby lived with his single mother and his sister, and had no top-class coach. He was an avid reader, and was one of the first in the US to acquire Schachmatny Bulletin, which published high-class material including secret training games by the top Soviet GMs. He absorbed, analysed and retained everything, and became a human database in his favoured systems like the Najdorf and Bc4 Sicilians or the King’s Indian.

So who would win between Caruana and an updated Fischer? It would be close, for sure.

by Leonard Barden, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty

[ed. See also: The Queen's Gambit]

Queen

When Queen Took ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to Live Aid (NY Times)

[ed. I wasn't much of a Queen or Freddie Mercury fan but this performance is pretty amazing. See also: Queen Guitarist Brian May On Writing Anthems And Studying Astrophysics (NPR).]

Why Do White Women Support Republicans? Because They Are Republicans.

Immediately after the midterms ended and the media started reporting that a majority of white women voted for Republicans Ted Cruz in Texas (59 percent), Ron DeSantis in Florida (51 percent), and Brian Kemp in Georgia (76 percent), the calls for white women's heads started rolling in on social media. White women didn't vote for those candidates in higher numbers than white men, but instead of calling out men, progressive white women started self-flagellating and promising to make other white women, collectively, "do better." Others were less conciliatory, like the actor Heather Mattarazzo, who tweeted that white women should “choke to death on the white supremacist patriarchal cock.”

None of the people issuing either mea culpas or threats seem to have actually voted for Cruz or DeSantis or Kemp or Trump, but apparently they think they can sway those who did by using some combination of shame and bullying, including the Women's March, which tweeted:

This tweet was not well received, at least if the 4,800 replies—the vast majority of which are some variation of “fuck off”—are any indication. As one woman replied, "I’m going to just take a stab in the dark here, but I’m not sure if condescendingly telling an entire demographic of women that they have a lot to learn and need growth is a good strategy."

While I understand the impulse to blame anonymous populations for our problems and defeats, it's not hard to see why people bristle at this kind of message. Blaming white women for not electing Democrats is based on the false presumption that white women are a homogenous population, that we are all supposed to be allies for the great feminist cause. When the right does this—treating, for instance, all Arabs (and Indians, Pakistanis, and Sikhs) as criminals when a Muslim extremist commits an act of violence—those of us on the left tend to object, and for good reason: Punishing the collective for the actions of the few is how we get things like the Muslim ban, the border wall, racial profiling, and vague demands that all Muslims get together and condemn ISIS attacks in unison. It’s ridiculous thinking: People are individuals, and we should treat them like it—and that even includes white women.

White women are not a monolith. We don't all know each other. We don't all go to the same church or yoga class. Some of us, in fact, don't go to church or yoga at all. White women, like all populations, are a large, unwieldy group made up of individuals with an array of concerns and values, and less than half (48 percent) of white women lean Democratic. The fact that conservative women voted for Republican candidates should be no more surprising than the fact that liberal women voted for Dems, regardless of their race.

There are reasons not to blindly shout about "white women" when you’re pissed about the outcome of the election. For one, why the hell aren't you shouting at white men? They vote for Republicans at even higher rates than white women. This women-blaming rhetoric reeks of misogyny, which may be ironic considering it comes primarily from progressive women. Regardless, it won’t fix anything. The way to win races is to actually appeal to voters (or to suppress them), and the only way to appeal to voters is to either try and change their opinion (and good luck with that) or to meet them where they already stand.

by Katie Herzog, The Stranger |  Read more:
Image: Twitter

What You Have to Fear From Artificial Intelligence

These days, advancements in artificial intelligence are not only making rich people billions of dollars, but inspiring wild-eyed fear-mongering about the end of civilization. Those concerned include Elon Musk, who has said that the technology could eventually produce an “immortal dictator,” and the late Stephen Hawking, who warned that the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization.” Generally, the fear is that we will produce machines so intelligent that they are capable of becoming smarter and smarter until we no longer have control over them. They will become a new form of life that will rule over us the way we do the rest of the animal kingdom.

As a professional in the AI industry, I can tell you that given the state of the technology, most of these predictions take us so far into the future that they’re closer to science fiction than reasoned analysis. Before we get to the point where computers have an unstoppable “superintelligence,” there are much more pressing developments to worry about. The technology that already exists, or is about to exist, is dangerous enough on its own.

Let me focus on some real-world developments that are terrifyingly immediate. Of the many different kinds of artificial neural networks, algorithms modeled after a rough approximation of how groups of neurons in your brain operate (which make up what is commonly called AI) I will focus on two: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs).

GANs are good at making counterfeit images, and thus videos as well. A GAN is made up of two neural networks that have each been “trained” on what a certain thing looks like, like a bathroom or an animal or a person of a certain identity. When the training is complete, one network is told to start generating new images of the thing on its own. The other network is presented with a stream of these counterfeit images with real images interspersed and tries to guess which are fakes. Human input tells each network its successes and failures. Each then adjusts itself to try to do better and they push each other to greater and greater heights of success. RNNs work with data that exists as an ordered sequence, such as a record of daily high temperatures in a city, or the words in a paragraph. Processing and generating written and spoken communication are two of the tasks RNNs are most commonly used for.

A computer program that can generate convincing images, or another that can understand human speech and generate it, might not seem world-shaking. But as these “counterfeiters” steadily improve, the implications are immense. GANs can produce photorealistic images and videos of nonexistent people. Magazines and advertisers can simply replace real people with generated pictures, saving money on photo shoots which require lighting, sets, technicians, photographers, and models. Stock photos will no longer be of people pretending to be students, professionals, workmen, etc. They will be computers pretending to be people. Many of the images you see on the internet will be of people who literally do not exist. If that sounds implausible, realize that it’s just another small step in the kind of fakery that occurs already through Photoshop and CGI. It just means that instead of starting with a photo, you can start by asking the computer to generate one. (...)

These people do not actually exist

If you think “fake news” is a problem now, just wait. When an image can be generated of literally anyone doing literally anything with perfect realism, truth is going to get a whole lot slipperier. The videos will soon catch up to the images, too. Already, it’s possible to make a moderately convincing clip that puts words in Barack Obama’s mouth. Fake security camera footage, fake police body camera footage, fake confessions: we are getting close. Marco Rubio has worried that “a foreign intelligence agency could use the technology to produce a fake video of an American politician using a racial epithet or taking a bribe” or a “fake video of a U.S. soldier massacring civilians overseas.” More worrying is what the U.S. military and police forces could do with it themselves. It didn’t take much deception to manipulate the country into supporting the invasion of Iraq. Fake intelligence is going to become a whole lot more difficult to disprove.

AI-generated images and videos are not just going to cast doubt on reporting, but will pose a major challenge for the legal system. Photographic evidence in trials will always be in doubt once generated images can’t be distinguished from real ones by human experts or other AIs. They can also be used as alibis, with claims that the real images are the counterfeit ones. In this dizzying world of forgery and illusion, how is anyone going to know what to believe? So-called “deepfake” videos will make Donald Trump’s claims of “fake news” that much more plausible and difficult to counter.

Mimicking ordinary human speech is coming to be a cinch. Google recently unveiled a new AI assistant that can talk like a person. It even puts “ums” and “uhs” where they need to go. Called Duplex, it can run on a cell phone, and not only sounds like a human but can interact like one. Duplex’s demo used it to call a hair salon and make an appointment. The woman on the line had no idea she wasn’t talking to a person. Google says it is building Duplex “to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable.”

Imagine how tomorrow’s technology could have worked in 2016. Two days before the election, a video appears, showing Hillary Clinton muttering “I can’t believe Wisconsin voters are so stupid,” supposedly caught on a “hot mike” at a rally in Eau Claire. It circulates on Facebook through the usual rightwing channels. Clinton says she never said it, and she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. It’s impossible to tell it’s fake. The fact-checkers look into it, and find that there never was an event in Eau Claire, and that Clinton had never even been to Wisconsin. It doesn’t matter. By that time, the video is at 10 million shares. The “Wisconsin can’t believe you’re so stupid” shirts are already being printed. Clinton loses, Trump becomes president. Catastrophe. (...)

By far the most serious and most frightening AI development is in military technology: armed, fully autonomous attack drones that can be deployed in swarms and might ultimately use their own judgment to decide when and whom to kill. Think that’s an exaggeration? The Department of Defense literally writes on its websites about new plans to improve the “autonomy” of its armed “drone swarms.” Here’s FOX News, which seems excited about the new developments:

No enemy would want to face a swarm of drones on the attack. But enemies of the United States will have to face the overwhelming force of American drone teams that can think for themselves, communicate with each other and work together in hundreds to execute combat missions…. Say you have a bomb maker responsible for killing a busload of children, our military will release 50 robots – a mix of ground robots and flying drones…Their objective? They must isolate the target within 2 square city blocks within 15 to 30 minutes max… It may sound farfetched – but drone swarm tech for combat already exists and has already been proven more than possible.

The focus here is on small quadcopter drones, designed to be deployed en masse to kill urban civilians, rather than the large Predator drones used to murder entire rural wedding parties in Muslim countries. DARPA’s repulsive Twitter account openly boasts about the plan: “Our OFFSET prgm envisions future small-unit infantry forces using unmanned aircraft systems and/or unmanned ground systems in swarms of >250 robots for missions in urban environment.” The Department of Defense is spending heavily in pursuit of this goal—their 2018 budgetary request contained $457 million for R&D in the technology. Combined with our new $275 million drone base in Niger, the United States is going to have a formidable new capacity to inflict deadly harm using killer robots.

Perhaps more telling, the Department of Defense is also spending heavily on counter-drone systems. They know from experience that other entities will acquire this technology, and that they’ll need to fight back. But while the offensive murder technology is likely to be incredibly effective, the defensive efforts aren’t going to work. Why? Because a swarm of cheap drones controlled by AI are almost unstoppable. Indeed, the DoD counter-drone efforts are pathetic and comically macabre: “The Air Force has purchased shotgun shells filled with nets and the Army has snatched up the Dronebuster, a device used to jam the communications of consumer drones…the Army and Navy are developing lasers to take down drones.” Lord help me, shotgun shells with nets! And if a drone is autonomous, communications jamming doesn’t do anything. If you were facing a swarm of drones, communications jamming would disrupt their coordination, making them less effective, but there would still be hundreds of drones trying to kill you.

It’s ironic, given all the fear that powerful members of the tech industry and government have about killer AI taking over the world, that they are silent as we literally build killer robots.

by Ryan Metz, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For proof, look no further than today's news: White House Releases Doctored Video To Back Up Attack on CNN Reporter (With video - TPM).]

Handmade Bamboo Furniture

Li Zikai
[ed. Soothing video despite the laborious effort involved.]

via:

Rolling Stones

America Is No Longer Attracting The Top Minds In Physics

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, America emerged at the pre-eminent place to be for physics research in the world. Of the 209 people to ever win the Nobel Prize in Physics, a whopping 93 of them claimed United States citizenship: triple that of Germany, the next-closest country. This was reflected not only at the highest levels of prestige and accomplishment in research, but also in education.

The United States of America became the most desired place in the world to study physics at the highest levels. From fewer than 20 PhDs a year in 1900 to around 500 per year in the 1950s, we now award nearly 2,000 PhDs in physics every year. Moreover, since the 1990s, international students, representing some of the best and brightest talent the world has to offer, represent almost half of those degrees.

Yet, according to the American Physical Society, the past year has seen an alarming, unprecedented drop in the number of international applications to physics PhD programs in the United States. In an extremely large survey of 49 of the largest physics departments in the country, representing 41% of all enrolled physics graduate students in the United States, an overall decrease of almost 12% in the number of international applicants was observed from 2017 to 2018.

This was a tremendous surprise, as no such study was even planned. The impetus for this study was prompted by a small number of American Physical Society members contacting the Office of Government Affairs to report a substantial decrease in the number of applications from international students. Upon completion of this survey, it was found that although some departments noted no decrease at all, many of the most prestigious institutions saw a drop of up to 40% in international applications. (...)

It is well understood that the best places in the world to learn and research physics and astronomy are the places that ought to attract the best students. But the converse is also true: the places that attract the top students from around the world also rise up to become the best places for education and research as well. As the president of the American Physical Society, Roger Falcone, recently said:

"Physics students want to come to the United States from all over the world because they know their educational and career opportunities here will be extraordinary. Our country's research, technology, and economy have been enormously strengthened by a positive attitude towards such immigration of students. We should continue to be a welcoming place, and to embrace open and global mobility for people."

Yet given the sudden severe drop, it is clear that the United States is at risk at no longer attracting the best and brightest minds in physics. (...)

The elephant in the room, of course, is the tremendous shift in United States politics and, specifically, the country's attitude towards foreigners and non-citizens since early 2017.

This policy shift has affected far more than just physics and astronomy, of course. "The current administration's 'America First' mantra is causing [international students] a great deal of anxiety and fear," said Earl Johnson of the University of Tulsa. Across the board, international enrollment is down across colleges and graduate schools in the United States, as the number of F-1 visas precipitously dropped by 17% last year. From 2016 to 2017, the United States saw a decrease of nearly 80,000 F-1 visas in a single year, with the largest drop coming from China and India. The government's tougher stance on issuing H-1B work visas, making it more difficult for international students to remain in the United States and find work, may play a role as well.

Furthermore, students from countries that are affected by the current administration's travel ban, such as Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia have seen historic lows in the number of visas issued to them. As Francis Slakey, the Chief Government Affairs Officer at the American Physical Society, bluntly stated, "The US is at high risk of no longer attracting the best minds in physics."

by Ethan Siegel, Forbes | Read more:
Image: NASA/JPL

What I've Learned About Men From Countless Hours of Tinder

In 2014, I started Tinder Live! – a comedy show exploring the crazy world of Tinder. This means that in the last five years, I’ve spent many, many hours browsing the app (so much so in fact that I am relieved there’s no way to know how many hours I lost on there).

Like many people, I’ve had multiple profile versions, and deleted and undeleted my profile countless times. It’s come to the point where I frequently see the same men and think, “You’ve come up like five times now buddy, what’s going on, are you OK?”

Through all this swiping, I like to think I’ve learned a lot about men. To be fair, “men” in this case can mean men I’ve never met but see a lot on Tinder, men I did meet on Tinder and men I talked to on Tinder but never went out with. Here’s what I learned, using an admittedly broad brush because it’s what dating apps push you to do: sense a pattern and then become upset by how persistent the pattern is, leading you to believe (usually falsely) that everyone is the same.

They don’t want to be ‘just’ pen pals … but they also don’t want to meet

This blows my mind. So many men on Tinder will bemoan becoming pen pals, say they don’t want their time wasted and just want to meet already, but will also think that their saying “Hey” and asking you how your Sunday was, the end, should be enough conversation for you to invest $50 and two hours getting ready and traveling to a bar to see if they’re worth your night out.

I guess the idea here is to have no connection at all, and presume this guy is the total package, and to spend a few hours in person seeing if you’re wrong because, eh, what’s a waste of a night of your life? I don’t get this, I’ll never get this, and I hate it.

They might want casual sex, but aren’t willing to admit it

I’ve seen so many men try to find a cute, chill way to say in their bio that casual sex is fine I guess, but they’d prefer a connection lol no big deal or not haha whatever: here’s a quote from The Office. It’s such a bummer and so relatable. Because while men are busy trying to be coy about whether or not they want something more, so are women.

But what if, WHAT IF, we were both honest and both got what we truly wanted?

They seem super interested – then they ignore you

I don’t know if it’s in an effort to play it cool, but even men who “super like you” will not message you. They won’t message you first, leaping at the chance to because OMG you liked them back and they liked you so much! And they might not even message you back if you message them first.

Nope, they super liked you, just to let you know they’d … what? Super bang you? I have no idea, but it really bums me out.

They either really love online dating – or really hate it

I’m convinced the guys who match with you and never message you just love online dating because they like having a capsule full of women who would, in their minds, definitely sleep with them. Which is bizarre because when I swipe right, it’s because someone’s face – combined with my very vague idea of who they are – is enough to get me to the next level. I want to know how they speak, how they treat me, how their mind works, what jokes they tell, what they do, who they are, how they’d be to date. And then maybe, maybeI’ll meet them and see if I wanna meet them again.

I don’t think I’ve ever swiped right on someone and thought, “10/10 would fuck. I don’t even need to know if this guy has a brain, or if he hates gay people, or has a swastika tattoo. Nope, my vagina says yes!” But whatever you need to tell yourself, dudes.

And then there are the yellers. These are the guys whose profiles just say, “I’m on here to get off this app. Please don’t waste my time. If you can’t carry a conversation, swipe LEFT!!!”

I get it. Spend long periods of time on any dating app with the intention of finding even the most fleeting meaningful connection and you’re bound to get to a point where you’re tempted to make your profile, “OMG if you don’t want to meet someone on here swipe left, seriously, WTF I’m a good person!!!!!!!”

The yelling and aggression aside, it’s comforting for me to know that some men are as fed up as women are with the games and the flakiness and the waste of time that dating apps can be.

by Lane Morgan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Katia Temkin

Quantum Political Scientists Hypothesize Country Headed In Both Right And Wrong Directions Simultaneously

PASADENA, CA—Upending the conventionally held assumption that the United States must exclusively be moving along a single good or bad path forward, quantum political scientists at the California Institute of Technology published a paper Thursday hypothesizing that the country is, in fact, headed in both the right and wrong directions simultaneously. “Rather than inhabiting a single reality where the nation’s future looks bright or an opposite one where Americans are struggling like never before, our research suggests that these two conditions actually exist concurrently in a state of superposition,” said lead researcher David Rimbaud, adding that, according to their analysis of quantum wave function and Gallup polls, the nation’s best days were found to lie, paradoxically, both ahead of and behind it. “In addition, our research has revealed for the first time that this country is currently changing beyond all recognition while at the same time remaining the same as it’s always been. Similarly, the United States was found to be both a beacon of freedom and hope in the world and an antagonist to those very same hopes and freedoms. Though seemingly contradictory, all of these scenarios are equally true.” Rimbaud added that in both divergent realities, China was still the world’s dominant economic force.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Key Takeaways From The 2018 Midterms (The Onion)]

The scent of green papaya (1993) dir. by Trần Anh Hùng

via:

I Voted in the Last Frontier

Alaska wins election stickers race
[ed. Cute, but look where the votes went. Even salmon lost (ADN).]

via:

Robert Riggs, Zoot Suit 1947
via:

Mobile Laundry for the Homeless Goes International

A mobile laundry and shower service for the homeless has begun international expansion after being inundated with requests from struggling cities around the globe.

Four years ago two young Australian men saw a gap in the market and fitted out a van with a washer and dryer, driving it to parks, churches and drop-in centres in a bid to bring hygiene services to the homeless community on their own turf.

Lucas Patchett, co-founder of Orange Sky, said washing was initially viewed as a low priority for the community, and there was widespread scepticism about the plan.

“When we dreamed this up it was a world first, and we had a lot of practical issues to overcome. How would we power the machines, where would we dispose of the waste water?” says Patchett.

“But we strongly believed that access to hygiene was a basic human right.”

There are more than 100,000 homeless Australians, and the population has complex needs. Patchett says Orange Sky has been able to forge bonds with the community by bringing the vans to its doorstep, and because it has no agenda besides the straightforward, free services it offers.

Health benefits of the mobile laundry include halting the spread of mould, scabies and bed bugs, but Patchett says it is the mental health boost that is most significant.

“We’re not preaching anything, or teaching anything or pushing anything. But it does take an hour to wash and dry someone’s clothes and during that time people tend to hang around. That’s when the conversations start.

“Ninety-nine percent of the day, these people are walked past and ignored and not even looked at, and that can have a huge impact on psyche and sense of self-worth. So we just say g’day and offer something really practical that makes people immediately feel more confident to engage with the broader society.”

There are now 27 Orange Sky laundry and shower vans operating in Australia, using generators and solar power to run the machines. Operated by volunteers, they do around 15-20 laundry loads and showers each day.

A number of other mobile laundry services have launched around the world, including in several US states, Brighton in the UK and Athens, Greece, where 20,000 people are homeless. Orange Sky has also been asked to provide services to Singapore, Hong Kong and other British cities.

According to Auckland council, at least 1,000 people sleep rough in New Zealand’s biggest city every night, and Orange Sky’s expansion has been welcomed by those caring for the community, saying the service has been embraced.

The New Zealand housing and urban development minister, Phil Twyford, said Orange Sky offered rough sleepers something many New Zealanders took for granted, and was one part of giving them back their dignity and self-respect.

“While superficially the service is about clean clothes and showers, the main benefits are the social interactions,” said Twyford.

by Eleanor Ainge Roy, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Orange Sky Laundry

Of America and the Rise of the Stupefied Plutocrat

Of America and the Rise of the Stupefied Plutocrat (LitHub)
Image: 'Mash' via