Safety settings

I remember well my first exposure to pornography. A group of teenage boys, we would go on dump raids now and then. A short hike took us to the town landfill, closed on Sundays in those years, and trivially easy to break into. A landscape of riches, it never disappointed, and on one foray we found a real treasure chest: a box of discarded porno in the recycling truck. Dozens of Penthouse, Playboy, and issues of another title or two, I can't remember. Nor can I recall the pictures therein, though a quick search for "80s porn" will turn up the body hair, camp expressions, and bad 'dos I and my companions must have wondered at. Nothing scary there, nothing scarring for even the country boys we were. Had we wanted more of the same we'd have had to go to a store, avoid eye contact, put money on a counter, barriers enough between us and titillation somewhat less powerful than that provided by the choice sections of the Jackie Collins novels (God rest her) found on all our parents' bookshelves.

Today, pornography is an inescapable part of the nearly ubiquitous online world we all share, with each other, and with our children (which is what this post is about, if you're wondering). The body hair's gone from modern porn, but a whole lot has been added, much of which I can't help but characterize, after careful perusal, as "unhealthy." I don't want my kids seeing this stuff, but, inevitably, they will. And there's a lot else out there I'd rather they didn't discover but can't pretend they won't, up to and including the current Republican debates. Things that will give them bad ideas or, worse, bad dreams.

But mine isn't the only computer, and surprisingly there isn't a Trump blocker add-in for Firefox, so sooner or later they'll see material that I, and maybe they, will wish they hadn't. They'll see it in places where I can't monitor them and so it may happen without my even knowing. How do I prepare them, and when, and for what exactly? I tell the older one this, and I do it now:

You know when you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. You can feel it, maybe a sense of doubt, maybe a sense of shame, but you know. You should always listen to those feelings, but on the Internet you have to pay very close attention to those voices inside you, for two really important reasons:

• The bad guys: If it makes you feel ashamed then you might not be able to tell adults about it without getting in trouble. Bad guys know that, so they hide behind pages populated with things you can't talk about. Why? Because then when they do something bad, you can't tell on them without admitting where you were and what you were looking at. What do the bad guys do on those pages? They infect your computer, steal your baby photos, worm their way into your parents' bank account and leave us without any money for birthday gifts. So sad.

• The "good" guys: Whatever you do on our computers at home I see. I know the games you played, the videos you watched, the places you surfed. And not only do I know it, the people on the other end of the wire know it, too. What wire? That wire. They know it here, they know it at school, they know it at your friends' houses. You are never in private on a computer, so don't ever do something with one you wouldn't want everybody to see.

The Internet is a dangerous, freaky place, and increasingly, so is the rest of the world. You live in a bubble, and that's by design. One day you'll leave it, and long before then we'll start stepping out of it together now and again, That's a process, and not one that needs to be rushed.

And later on I'll point out to him that if he feels the process is going too slow, he can take another look at Daddy's record collection, or the top shelf in my library. There's inspiration enough there, and a boy's imagination will go farther on a little fuel than a lot.

Summer Reading

Some combination of special projects at work, my Twitter feed, and an ongoing debate with a friendly roboticist has left me with quite a stack of worries about the future: structural joblessness, the end of privacy, a return to feudalism, economic upheaval, the Singularity...Agh! My reading for the past few months has been dedicated to learning more about these issues, and it’s high time to come to a point of view on some of this, which means it’s time for another of my rare blog posts.

So what are we supposed to be worried about? The future! We can’t quite see it, but the signs are there, warn various magi, the signs of a paradigm shift, of a runaway chain reaction, of a Future Beyond Our Control.

Really?

“Real social danger today is that the technology is erupting and moving so much faster than it ever ever ever has in all of our historical experience…” writes one. To be a bit more specific, the concerns are these:

AI is going to take our jobs and that will be the end of the middle class: Narrow AI (expert systems with deep learning capabilities) are going to multiply and will be applied to anything that can be even partially codified and standardized. This means that white collar jobs that have an element of routine will at best be changed and at worst (and in most cases it will be the worst) will disappear, and, along with those jobs, most of the middle class.

AI robots are going to take everyone else’s jobs, too, and wreck the economy: AI is going to make robots so competent that manual labor will in every case be better performed by these uncomplaining, unerring slaves, and so these jobs will disappear as well. Since this is the majority of work in most economies we will find ourselves with structural mass unemployment. Most consumers will no longer be able to consume, turning capitalism on its head.

And by taking away labor’s ability to earn money it will leave only a tiny part of the population with all the riches and all the power: Labor won’t have jobs, so labor won’t have money. Nor will most of the executives, financiers, and owners of businesses because in the world of digital-native companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon) it’s winner take all. The very few people in charge of the very few companies that matter will own the world, thank you very much Citizens United. 

AI and ubiquitous sensors (the Internet of Things) are going to strip us of all privacy: With sensors literally everywhere—in every public space, in the drone-filled air, in your car, in your house, on your body, in your body—and with AI capable of seeing, hearing, and “thinking” about all of this information, you are never alone and can have no secrets. Some claim this has already happened.

Super AI is going to take over (the “robot overlords” hypothesis): There is or is just about to be a cluster of computers out there somewhere with access to extreme data and software capabilities good enough to endow those computers with intelligence comparable to a human’s in depth and facility (“broad” AI, not just narrow) and, somehow, a desire for self-improvement. With this, that cluster will immediately decide to make itself better, and better, and better, and will do so at superhuman and ever-escalating speed, until suddenly we find ourselves living with a superintelligent being with its own non-human agenda. And, since everything is controlled by computers these days, this being, or beings, will control the world and be able to do whatever it “wants.”

In the interests of a balanced portrait I add two more points, drawn from the same hockey stick extrapolations, but giddily positive:

We are entering an age of abundance in which all of our material needs will be fulfilled, freely, universally, and ubiquitously: With robots to do our work, AI to understand our needs, and exponentially productive technology to fulfill those needs, we will be able to conquer scarcity, fix the environment, and find places for all nine billion of us. 

Humanity will merge with computers and life as we know it will cease to exist, replaced by an eternal electronic Elysium (dystopia?) beyond imagining: We are already cyborgs, what with relying on Wikipedia for our knowledge, the cloud for our memories, and so on. As we get better at capturing more directly what we sense, how we think about it, and the other key elements of our mental existence we will move down a slippery slope until the distinction between what’s in our softbrains and what’s in our hardbrains is blurred completely. At that point we might as well go all hardbrain because they will be more competent and reliable, indeed, so much so that by migrating to that platform we will become omniscient, immortal, and happy, if that emotion is still available to us.

Players, please place your bets.

~~~~~

Good or bad, all these projections are based on two assumptions. I name them:

• Technological determinism: That exponential growth in technical capabilities (specifically, Moore’s Law) translates inevitably into exponential growth in the creation and application of technology. Or, more generally, that because technology could allow for these things to happen they will. 
• Sorcerer’s apprentice: That AI is, or will be, similar to human intelligence in the breadth of its capabilities and yet likely to have wants that conflict with ours. More generally, that fundamentally we are not in control of technology.

I don’t buy either of these assumptions, and by way of explaining why I don’t, and in an effort to convince you not to, either, I’m going to tell a couple of stories about this building:

Uris Hall, Cornell University campus, credit: Bill Price III

I used to spend a good deal of time in this unhandsome block of classrooms. I can’t quite remember when or who, but someone once told me this: that the building’s architect, an apostle of nuclear optimism, took at face value a promise by the AEC’s Chairman that energy would soon be “too cheap to meter” and so decided not to include any light switches in the rooms. The building was designed to be turned on and off in its entirety, burning merrily throughout the evening and many a gray Ithaca day, whether one class was in session or all. When free fusion failed to materialize, however, the University decided this was too expensive an operating model and retrofitted all of the rooms accordingly.

This story is almost certainly apocryphal—the building wasn’t constructed in the 1950s but in the early ‘70s (right before the first Oil Shock as it happens) and there’s no hard evidence I’m aware of that it ever had anything other than normal light switches in the usual places—but it still makes a fine fable, the moral of which is not to accept the hollow premise of technological determinism. Eternal free energy would be wonderful, but it didn’t happen and neither did the seemingly inevitable jetpacks and moon colonies and all for the same reason: technological development is dependent on a lot else other than just what bits and atoms can, in theory, be made to do. Computers can, robots can, and maybe we'll make them, but then again maybe we won’t.

And as for the transcendent “technology is simply moving faster than ever before” arguments, the “ever ever ever” quote above was uttered by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, in 1998. I could find similar ones for you from around the time the steam engine was introduced, or roundabout the discovery of radioactivity, or the introduction of Edison’s first New York City power plant, or at many a point in the development and spread of the railroad, the telegraph, the…point is made.

~~~~~

Uris Hall holds another lesson: the reason I spent so much time there was that’s where one of my thesis advisors, Professor Judith Reppy, had her office.
 

Prof. Judith Reppy, one of my thesis advisors

 

She was there because the Peace Studies Program (since renamed in her honor, I have just now noticed) was there, and Professor Reppy was a member of that department because she worked on a variety of issues related to, among other things, nuclear disarmament. It was Professor Reppy who introduced me to Pugwash, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other anti-nuke organizations. Turns out there are a lot of them, a lot, that is to say, of organizations the purpose of which is to apply controls to a dangerous technology. I’m not the only one who’s afeard of radiation.

We should always approach powerful technologies with caution, and, for the most part, we always do. The possibility of a superweapon was a worry for the very first atomic physicists. No sooner was the term “nanotechnology” coined than people started researching the gray goo hypothesis. And as someone who is actually working, in a small way, to bring the Internet of Things to life, I can tell you there are lots of people who are deeply concerned about its impact on privacy and the potential for havoc raised by connecting all our stuff to something as fundamentally insecure as the Internet.

We tend to keep an eye on our apprentices, and while I’d be the first to admit that our use of technology, and of IT in particular, forces us into a lot of undesirable behaviors, only humans want things and only those wants matter to humanity as a whole. I’m for animal rights, I think we have a deep responsibility to care for the environment and to preserve as much of the planet as possible in a wild state, and, on bad days, I’m anti-humanist enough to wish we’d just get on with our own extinction so things around here could get started on the road to recovery, but to posit that humanity as a whole is anti-humanist and thus is going to execute an anti-humanist agenda aridly extrapolated from theoretical technological capabilities is naïve and unsupported by historical evidence.

~~~~~

It should be clear by now that I don’t think we’re standing on the edge of a precipice, that I’m not awaiting the Singularity, and that to the extent I’m worried about keeping my job it is for reasons a lot closer to home and more mundane than the threat of AI. But that’s not to say I don’t think there’s change afoot, or that some of the problems pointed to above don’t already exist. There is, and they do.

When I think about the future concretely, that is to say when I try to form a picture of it as input for my decisions in the present, two things loom large: the fate of the planet and the fate of my children (yes, in that order, if only because I’ve been thinking about the former a lot longer than the latter). I won’t comment on the planet’s fate simply because whether we have a prayer or not of avoiding an apocalyptic outcome we all have to try our best. As for the kids, I have one prediction I think worth sharing, if only because I haven’t seen anyone else make it. I think our children (hi Talia!) are going to require our economic care much longer than I or most of my peers needed the same from our parents. The reason for this is that I do think work is changing and that the pendulum that has swung so far in favor of the skills of youth—unlimited time and energy to apply a freshly learned set of skills to problems of limited complexity—will in the years to come swing far the other way. Delivering value sufficient to command a living in the parts of the economy I expect my kids to inhabit will require skills that come only with maturity: to dive into context without drowning, to focus on Why and not just How, to identify and productively to engage with problems that aren’t solvable but are still worth working on. We won’t pay half a million dollars for their college education (and another prediction: I don’t expect we’ll have to) but we will have to keep them (though surely not keep them around?) for a long time. Then again, their entrepreneurialism may surprise us.

But whatever the future may hold, the present is not a very lovely place for many, many people. We already have entire populations that have been rendered structurally unemployable. The gap between the rich and poor already exists and is causing a lot of damage right now. And, again, the carbon situation grows worse by the day with unmistakable and increasingly punishing effects manifesting themselves all around us. The reason I’m eager to push a pin into the inflated claims we started with some screens ago is that in painting such a garish picture of the future they draw attention away from the present, and right now I think the present needs all the attention it can get.

~~~~~

If you’ve read this far you must be a reader, so for you, dear reader, I supply my reading list, ordered top-to-bottom by the degree to which I’d recommend the book to others, given how thought-provoking and well written it was, or not:

• Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
• Mickey McManus, et al., Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology
• Vernor Vinge, Rainbow’s End and some of his short stories
• John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
• Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto
• Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
• Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't
• Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
• Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things
• Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
• Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
• Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
• Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

And if you want to read even more of my anti-automation polemics you have only to turn back one posting.

Eatsa

Sometimes one dines for pleasure, sometimes for sustenance, and sometimes because one is the world's foremost (?) expert on the Automat. Thursday, lunchtime, was an example of this last. Eatsa has opened just down the street from my offices in San Francisco, a new concept, and currently the sole American contender for the Automat mantle (New York's BAMN! having met its reportedly deserved fate). On the face of it, the two have much in common. The restaurant is very flash and self-consciously hypermodern, both inside and out...

And, like the Automats of yore, the concept is fully self-service: you order, either via mobile app or at one of a bank of iPads...

And then wait for your name to appear on one of the screens above a bank of blank boxes...

The cell identified as yours then blacks out and teases you with an announcement that the food is about to arrive...

And, when the black face clears, there it is, an invitation to open the window (tap twice on the screen to do so) and, behind it, your food, ready to go...

Finally, like the debut Automat in New York City, this first Eatsa has been met with curious crowds...

So much so that the line just to order was, for this author on his lunch break, much too long...

So, having taken my photos, I went to dine at a nearby cheesesteak shop which, to my delight, offered Philadelphia-authentic whiz...

And, unlike its new competitor, was able to serve this delicious boat of a sandwich in five minutes, while providing ample seating and a pleasant face-to-face encounter.

Indeed, of the two restaurants, the oh-so-of-the-moment Eatsa and the timeless sandwich shop, it is the latter that shares the Automat's spirit. It offers human contact in the person of a modern day nicklethrower, a large menu of popular options (Eatsa, bizarrely, serves only bowls of quinoa), seating and condiments shared communally, an efficient but unhurried experience, and is, by San Francisco standards, a good deal. Eatsa, though "automatic," is recreating a waiterless experience the world largely abandoned in the late 1800s (Horn and Hardart's Automats vended pre-plated food; it was the earlier, primarily European restaurants that only prepared food in response to a customer's signal and then hoisted it up in a dumbwaiter to the waiting gourmand, and these restaurants, unlike Eatsa, had a technological solution in place that guaranteed that the dish so prepared could be secured only by the person who ordered it), is using not an automat with its temperature-controlled cells but a primitive holding chamber to pass food from the invisible preparer to the diner, and is not actually a restaurant as it offers (almost) no place to dine. Eatsa is not an Automat, it is just a particularly inefficient vending machine.

Ray Kroc, the man behind McDonald's, commented many decades ago:

Hell, if I listened to the computers and did what they proposed with McDonald's, I'd have a store with a row of vending machines in it. You'd push some buttons and out would come your Big Mac, shake, and fries, all prepared automatically. We could do that.... But we never will. McDonald's is a people business, and the smile on that counter girl's face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.

Here in San Francisco we spend a lot of time listening to computers, but like most people most places in most times, when we go out to eat we seek sustenance in a smile.

No go no-Euro

How to build a Euro

I'm pro-Euro, as careful readers may have noted. I'm pro-Euro for a number of reasons, some of them selfish, but mostly I'm pro-Euro because there's no good way for the Euro countries to go no-Euro. Not all together and not one at a time, either. As this astute commentator noted in today's Times, it's not clear all of the EU countries understand that.

Scary.

Chip Review: Utz, Smokin' Sweet Kettle Classics BBQ Flavored

The tag line, as the picture shows, is "Spicy Heat with a Kiss of Sweet." "Cloyingly sweet with an almost undetectable heat amid a confusion of other flavors hardly worth the tongue's search" would, I recognize, inspire fewer first time buyers but is an altogether more honest summary. Given there won't be any second time buyers, I suppose I really can't blame them for the line they chose.

I do blame them for everything else, though. The ingredient list reads like something from a particularly ill-conceived Roman orgy: two forms of sugar, both present in greater amounts than salt; two types of cheese--yes, that's right, cheese; paprika and paprika extract for just the right paprika balance; cream and nonfat milk, presumably because they started to have regrets toward the end.... Even the bag's graphics are terrible, with that formulaic pot of what appears to be unnaturally red ketchup and the tiny little whisk lying along side it, suggesting they not only "hand cook" but even hand paint each misbegotten chip.

Look, we both know what this is about. It's about regret and loss and a hope that just won't die. "Enough," I tell myself, "It's time to move on." But then the flailing marketeers at this rudderless company find a new combination of words to wrap around "BBQ" and the mad men in the kitchen throw in whatever's at hand, and me, fool that I am, me, I'm tempted, not by a new chip but by the old one, long since gone. You pity me, I know, but you humor me, and I appreciate that.

Be the apple of my pie

Turns out I'm not only helping make a documentary about the Automat, but am even involved in a Kickstarter initiative to fund part of that effort. You'd think, given how many institutions funded parts of my education and of my dissertation work in particular, that I'd be a dab hand at asking for money, but in truth I'm tongue-tied at the prospect of doing so. I post the Kickstarter link, hand out postcards, email a few people to say Hey, isn't it funny, I'm doing this, but many, I learn later, don't pick up on my message, understated as it is. Seems I must find a way to more effectively solicit funds. And if I'm to do that then I'd best first explain why I truly think this project is worth your investment.

Know this: the film's purpose is not the dissertation's: they have the same topic but not the same thesis. The dissertation was intended to engage my fellow historians of technology and to contribute to a shared and somewhat abstruse discussion about technological systems. The documentary is trying to do something much more ambitious: to engage my fellow Americans and to contribute to a shared and universally relevant discussion about how we can best live together.

Americans used to eat together, now they eat apart, and when we eat apart we eat worse.

Horn and Hardart created a massively popular food system that, in part because of the presence of the automat machine, was communal in style. America in the 1920s was characterized by levels of income disparity equivalent to today's, but rich and poor ate together at the Automat. The 1920s also saw relatively extreme levels of anti-immigration and racist sentiment, but natives and immigrants ate together at the Automat, as did people of all races. And they continued to do so, in unprecedented numbers, for roughly the next half century. The Automat was phenomenal.

That is not how we eat today. Yes, Andy, we may all drink the same Cokes, but we don't all eat in the same restaurants, we don't shop at the same groceries, we don't even all drink the same water anymore. I'm positing--we'll see if it sticks, but at the moment I'm positing--that it was fast food that taught us to eat apart from one another: one transaction at a time, each serving individually wrapped, each tiny table and each hard seat in each low-ceilinged room intended for a single, hurried person. No one lingers in a fast food restaurant, no one connects; you refuel and get the hell out of there.

The rise of fast food as the preferred solution to the public's need for a quick, cheap meal probably reflects a general preference for separation, for personal space, and it correlates to a certain degree with the migration to the suburbs, with the adoption of the car in place of public transport, and with other examples in which American society opted for separation over connection. Are houses in the suburbs worse than apartments in the city? Is a seat behind the wheel worse than one aboard a bus? For the most part, no. But I'll tell you this, and, given a chance, I'll show you, too: a meal at a fast food restaurant is altogether worse than eating at the Automat.

Americans used to eat together, now they eat apart, and when we eat apart we eat worse. Why does this matter? Not just because it suggests we could have a better restaurant system if we had something more like the Automat, but because it points to a much bigger truth: that in general we do worse apart than we do together. Red state/blue state, income disparity, immigrant rejection, whatever the rational, whatever the reason, we need more reminders that separation costs us, as a country and as a society. How can we best live together? Not by living apart.

I don't know if, in the end and with your funding, this is what the documentary will communicate. The making of has been running for a couple of years now, and there have been many twists and turns along the way. But this is what I want it to say, and I do have some influence over that. So if you think this is worth saying, and you don't have a better way to say it, please give.