Brain implant questions

In the Wall Street Journal, psychologist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Christof Koch offer a fairly upbeat take on "The Future of Brain Implants" that enhance memory, intelligence and more. They conclude:

Will these devices make our society as a whole happier, more peaceful and more productive? What kind of world might they create?

It's impossible to predict. But, then again, it is not the business of the future to be predictable or sugarcoated. As President Ronald Reagan once put it, "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."

The augmented among us—those who are willing to avail themselves of the benefits of brain prosthetics and to live with the attendant risks—will outperform others in the everyday contest for jobs and mates, in science, on the athletic field and in armed conflict. These differences will challenge society in new ways—and open up possibilities that we can scarcely imagine.

Me: Some things people might want to consider before they get the electrodes:

Can these things be taken out (and their effects reversed)? Does the person getting them have a legal right to such removal? Does the person have a legal right to decline them? Will parents be getting them for their children on a basis of implied consent? Will employers be able to discriminate on the basis of presence or absence of implants? Will frequent upgrades be needed to keep the implants on the cutting edge or even just in working order? Will these upgrades occur automatically? Will the NSA have a backdoor into the workings of the equipment? Will hackers be able to access this technology (and if not, what technology is stopping them)? Will either licit or illicit controllers be able to turn a person with implants into an unwitting or unwilling robot or zombie?

Living "with the attendant risks" could mean quite a lot. Also, I wonder how left and right will divide, or get reshuffled, as this technology matures. Free implants for all? Stop hindering the augmented with taxes and regulations that were intended for lesser humans anyway? Interesting times.

Mini-review: Time Reborn

Finally got around to reading Lee Smolin's Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, which I'd mentioned before. Smolin's work is always interesting, though I'd say The Life of the Cosmos (which I discussed long ago) and The Trouble With Physics (which I reviewed less long ago) resonated with me more. This may be because I'm already receptive to a lot of what Smolin has to say (the future being open is an idea to which I've long* had an emotional attachment) and he reprises a number of his earlier themes while developing his new one (that many physicists and philosophers have tended to deny or downplay the existence of time, and that this is an error). Still, I recommend the book, and suggest practical-minded people pay particular attention to the epilogue, which ranges across issues such as climate change and financial stability (and how we think about those, influenced subtly by how we think about time).

* - Historical accuracy: If you follow that link, note the snowstorm was in Queens, not Manhattan.

Robo-pong

What's the world coming to when you can't trust a human vs. robot ping-pong video?

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Book note: Surviving Your Thirties

Robin Madell, a talented writer/editor and longtime friend of mine, has a book out: Surviving Your Thirties: Americans Talk about Life After 30. I've ordered a copy at Amazon (and if you do the same through the links in this post I may receive a small portion of the revenue). This book, Robin tells me, is in large part an oral history. In fact, I was among those interviewed for it, years ago, and I recall that Robin asked many interesting questions; I expect she received many interesting answers from her interviewees.

Cosmos redux [updated]

I was delighted, and a bit nostalgic, to see the impressive first episode of the new Cosmos (though I missed the last few minutes and will have to re-watch). The original TV show and book both were influential on me, as were the works of Carl Sagan more broadly. I hope Nick Sagan, my long-ago colleague at Space.com, is pleased with the new version, and I was happy to see in the credits that Mitchell Cannold, company exec back then, is executive producer of the new series.

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UPDATE 3/12: I see some controversy has developed about the show's depiction of the life and death of Giordano Bruno. Let's stipulate that the Cosmos cartoon of Bruno's story was a bit cartoonish. It's still folly to try to downplay or implicitly defend what the Inquisition did: "Roman Catholics gave him 10 years to back off from his claim that his alternate religion was empirical fact they needed to accept." Or: "The Roman Inquisition, however, was no mindlessly brutal force with a lust for setting heretics afire. They saw their work as medicinal, as they tried to persuade people to recant heresies and rejoin the Church."

Reductio ad Hitlerum

It's odd that in 2014 so much political debate is still about Hitler. Was Napoleon still so prominent in people's minds almost 70 years after his downfall? Nonetheless, I recommend as interesting and generally persuasive this piece "Hitler wasn't a socialist. Stop saying he was," by Tim Stanley at The Telegraph, written in response to "Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism," by Daniel Hannan. I weighed in on a similar issue a few years ago with my FrumForum piece "Yes, James Von Brunn Is Right Wing." The Nazis/fascists-are-socialists-are-liberals argument is a reaction to, but no smarter than, the conservatives-are-Nazis/fascists argument (and I recall being called a fascist at least once in college for being a libertarian conservative; now that I'm a centrist, I suppose I could be called that from either side). Right and left in politics are cumbersome but not useless terms. I'd apply left to those who think they represent some advance from a benighted past, and right to those who draw more on the past (often an idealized past). Granted, that doesn't readily capture the environmentalist/socialist who exalts preindustrial, precapitalist society, or the libertarian transhumanist who wants to upload his (or, more rarely, her) mind into a computer, but it at least moves us away from the they-started-it insult-fest of which they're-like-Hitler is but one part.

Note: this post initially was titled Reduction ad Hitlerum, for which I blame spell check.

Review: Unleashing the Second American Century

I'm pleased to report that the picture of U.S. prospects presented in Joel Kurtzman's Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance is not only highly optimistic but also considerably convincing. Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, highlights this quartet of factors: the U.S. has enormous creativity, manifested saliently in tech development and entrepreneurship; it has enormous energy resources, including natural gas now being tapped on an unprecedented scale; its capital reserves are gigantic too, notably in the huge cash piles accumulated by companies in recent years; and, contrary to claims that "we don't make anything here anymore," the country is having a manufacturing renaissance, with factories returning and 3D printing coming online.

Of course, there are counterpoints and problems one could raise. The environmental benefits (or lack thereof) of natural gas are hotly debated. Powerful technologies can harm as well as help. Capital reserves count for little if banks aren't lending and people aren't working. Still, Kurtzman compiles a lot of information that suggests that good news about America has been overlooked or distorted while much media and public focus has been on America's downsides, including its political dysfunctions. In the course of the book, he travels through some interesting geography, strolling the "innovation corridor" around Cambridge, Mass., and driving a Tesla to a Bay Area virtual reality demo and more.

Kurtzman argues that an economic boom is already under way (which also means that if he's wrong, it should be evident soon enough). "The American economy began to gather speed in 2013," he writes. "In my view, as people begin to notice that jobs are becoming more plentiful, money is less tight, and home prices are improving, they will become more positive, if not outright optimistic, about the future." If they read this excellent book, they may become yet more so.

Common Core math/politics

Subject to keep an eye on: Common Core and opposition to it. Some complaining about math problems got my attention online, and I'd already heard some grumbling face to face. Common Core's become a Tea Party issue, but one that won't necessarily be limited to them. I saw some poorly worded math problems in my brief research online, but will have to look into this further before forming a strong opinion. But I've seen enough to recognize a political issue that's likely to have resonance.

Some Time ideas

Time Ideas, an online opinion section under the direction of Ryan Sager, has a lot of interesting, well, ideas. Two pieces up now that I recommend: "How to Make Kids Smarter: 10 Steps Backed by Science" by Eric Barker, and "Dave Barry Learns Everything You Need to Know About Being a Husband From Reading '50 Shades of Grey'." (There are, I should add, also pieces on topics such as the Ukraine crisis.) Remembering my 2009 debate with Ryan on "Has the right hit bottom?" I'd now revise my "yes" position, in that subsequent years saw mixed political results and further intellectual decline, such that here we are a half-decade later and the right's condition can be seen as promising or lamentable (depending on what data you focus on) but is hard to portray as strong and recovered.

Next president credentials

I've suggested previously that the next U.S. president will and should be a "foreign policy president," something we haven't seen since George H.W. Bush got the gold watch (in significant part for being that, when the Cold War was ending and voters no longer put much value on knowing where Crimea is and other such skills). We're now third in a series of U.S. presidents who came to the office with minimal or less foreign policy experience, and the world situation is becoming less and less forgiving of on-the-job training. Here's an interesting and relevant post about the next vice president, but I think the world will look troubled enough by 2016 that its condition will shape the top of the ticket as well.

UPDATE: "Putin Smashes Washington's Cocoon." Well worth reading, and for general background I recommend my own bubble/cocoon piece "Who's Kidding Whom?" I agree with the gist of what Walter Russell Mead and/or staff are saying there, but I'd add it's not purely a left-liberal bubble being burst. In recent years, we've seen the rise of a don't-call-us-isolationist wing of the Republican Party, epitomized by Rand Paul, and that wing is looking less and less like the future of anything anywhere.

Google AI moderation

Glenn Reynolds links to this excerpt of a Glenn Beck interview of Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen about artificial intelligence and related topics. Reynolds expresses surprise that Beck is so interested and knowledgeable on the subject; I have pointed out his interest, and its internal tensions, previously. In the excerpt, Schmidt does all the answering, and has what seems to me a rather measured and thoughtful view of things, including skepticism about (now Google employee) Ray Kurzweil's timeline of when things will happen.


For some recent AI-related posts, see here, here, here and here. And more here.

Book note: The Furies

Mark Alpert, former colleague from Scientific American whose books I've mentioned before, has a new novel coming out: The Furies: A Thriller. I'm ordering it now, and if you do so through the links in this post, I may earn a small portion of the resulting revenues. I'm intrigued by the prospect of fiction that mixes some biology into themes normally relegated to the supernatural or paranormal; the Underworld movies, with their genetically mutated vampires and werewolves, took such a tack but did so a bit crudely and superficially. Mark was the sort of writer whose nonfiction didn't need much fact checking, and so is a very good bet for making a real-science-of-witchcraft type story work.

Art therapy traction

Dan Summer, art therapist extraordinaire and contributor to this blog, was featured in a recent Fox News story about his field and its growing importance. Take a look.

UPDATE 2/24: No longer on YouTube, it seems, but still viewable at link above.

Hackers vs AI [updated]

The always interesting Edward Tenner has some thoughts at The American on "Could Computers Get Too Smart?" He writes in response to James Barrat's Our Final Invention, which I reviewed recently, and the gist of Tenner's piece is that there are some reasons you shouldn't worry too much about the dangers posed by out-of-control AI. He makes the intriguing observation that the vulnerability of computers to hacking is a point against the grim scenarios Barrat and others have outlined. Now, one could take a darker view there, saying that hackers getting into advanced AI is the sort of thing we ought to worry about; but it's important to recognize that the news isn't all bad.

UPDATE: For more on the future of technology, see these responses to a recent paper by economist Robert Gordon, in which bloggers take Gordon to task for underestimating what automation is going to achieve in the next few decades. I find not particularly compelling Matthew Yglesias's deployment of exponential growth, as illustrated by the old Persian chessboard story, to argue for massive imminent advances. That chessboard was an abstraction on which you could put an incredible amount of wheat on a square. In the real world, even if you can keep doubling your wheat production as you pile it on one chess square after another, your towering pile of wheat will fall over. You'll also run out of chess squares. The real world has limits, and the interesting, unknown question in computing is what they are.

UPDATE 2: "How the rise of smart machines will affect the US economy and jobs: A Q&A with Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee." I long assumed technology would always produce more jobs than it eliminated, which is one of many longtime ideological assumptions I've come to doubt in the last years. However, if as they suggest is plausible, technology drives the workforce toward more flexible and part-time work arrangements, my technophilia might get back on the upswing.

Robots, Downton Abbey, etc.

A couple of misc. notes on items of interest:

-- In Slate there's a piece on "Why Watson is real artificial intelligence," by Miles Brundage and Joanna Bryson, written as a rejoinder to Douglas Hofstadter's "Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI," in Popular Mechanics. Why the rejoinder doesn't discuss Siri I'm not sure, and there's an element of semantic quibbling in discussing what constitutes "real AI." Still, I don't think Brundage and Bryson adequately rebut Hofstadter's argument, which is that the programs in question don't understand the meaning of the questions with which they're grappling. The critics cite Daniel Dennett in making the point that intelligence arises from numerous sub-intelligent parts, but the more important point Hofstadter is making is that in current-day AI the parts have not been arranged in such a way as to constitute an entity that actually knows or cares what it's talking about or that it even exists.

-- Castigating "Downton Abbey" for sugar-coating Edwardian* labor relations has been a left-liberal cause and is becoming a right-libertarian one with this Megan McArdle piece (and this gloss on it by Instapundit). I think the show does a decent job of conveying that not every employer of the time was as generally benevolent as the Crawleys, and I am impressed by this Foreign Affairs piece in which Jeremy Musson discusses some ways in which the series' depictions of servant life do have veracity. Bear in mind that the people working in a house like that would have had a set of alternative options in mind that also were not necessarily desirable from a 21st-century middle-class perspective.

* - Added: and post-Edwardian

-- Something to look forward to: man-versus-machine ping pong.

Backlashes against immigrants and robots [updated]

Tyler Cowen writes about "Why cosmopolitanism is utopian but useful nonetheless." The subject is Switzerland's recent vote to restrict EU immigration, and Cowen is writing in response to a post by Bryan Caplan that argued (based on Swiss voting patterns) that the way to overcome anti-immigration sentiment is through more immigration. Cowen thinks very high levels of immigration will spur a backlash, and so it's better to be open to immigration on a marginal, moderate basis.

I agree with Cowen. I grew up in the highly ethnically diverse area of Elmhurst, Queens, with immigrants from throughout Asia and Latin America, and got an up-close view of plenty of ethnic tensions, in multiple directions. Knowing many people from other countries may have made some people more cosmopolitan in some ways, but it was hardly an invariable or universal reaction.

Backlashes, it seems to me, are an underrated phenomenon. Predictions of technological transformation, for instance, tend to edit out the tremendous fear and loathing that will be precipitated by such developments (even if they are basically benign; witness genetically modified foods). Seeing that the world you're going to grow old in has little in common with the one you grew up in, whether because of immigrants or robots or whatever, will spark a strong reaction, and often not a positive one especially if one's job security seems diminished, and the assurances of elites that it's all beneficial or inevitable can produce some notably angry dissension.

UPDATE 2/15: Tyler Cowen's co-blogger Alex Tabarrok takes him to task for not being willing to "launch a revolution" in the cause of open borders, and for failing to recognize a historical lesson that great things can be done when you have the moral high ground. I find Tabarrok's historical analogies rather overstated, in that eliminating immigration restrictions does not, to me at least, carry anything remotely like the moral weight of eliminating slavery and serfdom. (I also note that the most effective proponent of abolishing slavery, Abraham Lincoln, took a more incrementalist approach than some others did back then.) Here we have an example of the absolutism to which the libertarian movement is all too prone: immigration is a good thing, so it must be infinitely good and must never be limited; there's an absolute right to mobility across national borders, but if the streets are privately owned such that nobody can walk through without permission, that's fine.

Libertarian vs neocon

An interesting post from my old friend Todd Seavey: "Is it possible to be both a libertarian and a neocon?" For my part, I used to consider myself to be both, and now don't consider myself to be either, but even as a centrist I remain influenced by those two now-feuding but once somewhat allied schools of thought. Todd is already getting pushback in the comments for wishy-washiness in the imperative of demonizing "neocons," and while his anarchocapitalism should shield him from accusations of ideological impurity, it doesn't. So welcome, Todd, to the community of the hard-to-pigeonhole.

Book note: Unleashing the Second American Century

Still reading, as previously mentioned: Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance, by Joel Kurtzman. I plan to review it here at Quicksilber in the near future. In the meantime, here's an article based on an interview with the author by my friend and colleague Gil Weinreich. (As always, no employer has any responsibility for anything appearing at my blog.) Having read a rather dark vision of the future recently, it's good to shift mental gears by considering an optimistic view.

Also, I'd like to remind readers that this blog is an Amazon affiliate, such that I may get a small portion of revenues generated by Amazon purchases done via links here to books and other products.

UPDATE 3/6: My review.

The sofalarity is near

An interesting piece in The New Yorker: "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?" by Tim Wu. Particularly memorable line: "If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity." Defined: "That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts." A WALL-E reference follows.

Also: "The technology industry, which does so much to define us, has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just our narrow interests." That strikes an unduly passive note; the consumer "defined" by the tech industry, which should "cater" to our better selves. Still, I agree with the basic sentiment. Too much time staring into electronic screens, not enough time amid society or nature--can be a very bad thing even if the robots don't decide to exterminate humanity in the next few decades.

Recommended readings

Posting may be light,  as various weather-, work- and tax-related matters press on my time. A few recommendations for reading things on topics I found interesting:

--"Will more workers be artists in the future?" James Pethokoukis commenting on a post by Martin Hutchinson on robots and work. If I were the president of the United States, FWIW, I would appoint a commission to examine a range of societal dangers and opportunities arising from robotics and artificial intelligence, and would ask its members behind the scenes to produce something worthwhile, not BS.

--Walter Olson with a Cato post "About That Coke Ad." I didn't see the Superbowl, but now that I've read this and watched that commercial, I feel I am up-to-speed on the most important part.

--"A Beautiful Map of Global Ocean Currents." I'm increasingly impressed by how io9 covers real science and science fiction without making a hash of the distinction between them. On a similar note, I recommend Nature Futures, which runs science fiction under the auspices of the science journal Nature.

UPDATE 2:08 PM: Review copy received: Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance, by Joel Kurtzman. Looks interesting. UPDATE: My review.