technology – Page 17 – Militant Futurist

July 7, 2017

Ray Kurzweil on the future of capitalism and the boring world of 2027

Futurist, transhumanist, and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil just did a short interview regarding his views on the future of jobs and some other topics. You can see it here:

My thoughts:

0:12 – Kurzweil nods to the Boring Truth of our age: The clash of ideologies ended in the 20th century (except for the ongoing sideshow that is non-viable Islamism vs. everyone else), and there’s consensus among academics and leaders in the industrialized world that having a mixed economy and some social welfare programs is close to the optimal setup for a country. In the West, conservatives and liberals push and pull, but within narrow boundaries. Similarly, the new political faultlines pit “nationalists” against “globalists,” but no one in the former camp wants to completely forsake trade. There really is a lot less drama today than the news media makes you think.

1:50 – The reasons for the rise of welfare states in the early 20th century are more complex than that, but Kurzweil makes a good point that they wouldn’t have been sustainable had there not been the economic surpluses made possible by Industrialization. If you take the long view like Kurzweil does, and you assume that technology keeps improving, the concomitant economic surpluses keep growing, and social welfare programs grow in an intelligent manner, then a future where all humans are on the dole and few if any people work is indeed the logical endpoint.

3:06 – Uh-oh. Kurzweil makes predictions that will be true in “a decade.” So by 2027, 3D printers will be able to make “at low cost, all of the physical things we need,” including large Lego-like pieces of building materials that you will be able to “snap together” to make your own house. Vertical farms will also be making “very high-quality” food at “very low prices” by 2027. Yikes. I’m skeptical of the 3D printed house prediction because the construction industry and consumers have failed to even embrace modular buildings (there’s a great report on this here: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-a-productivity-revolution). The notion that something even more radical like 3D printed Lego houses will become common in just ten years bucks the trend way too much. Also, I don’t see how an average person in 2027 will be able to assemble his or her house from giant Legos considering: 1) the need to pour solid concrete foundations will still exist, 2) local governments are highly unlikely to relax building codes to allow unlicensed, inexperienced people to build houses, and 3) few people have the skills to even put such Lego pieces together, particularly with enough accuracy to ensure the surfaces are truly level and plumb. Maybe what Kurzweil is trying to say is that, in 2027, there will be some construction companies that will specialize in building cheap, prefabricated houses comprised partly of 3D printed components. Plausible, but only a tiny bit different from how things are today. As for vertical farms, they’ve proven to be much more expensive to run than normal “flat” farms and haven’t caught on thanks to basic economics. If Kurzweil knows of some way that they can make food at “very low prices” in just ten years, then he should quit his job at Google and pursue it full-time since it will be worth billions of dollars. And he should also ask himself whether it would be more efficient and profitable to use that secret method to improve “flat” farms. For example, if Kurzweil thinks vertical farm costs will drop thanks to cheap, 3D printed building techniques, then won’t the same techniques also make it possible to cheaply build greenhouses over standard cropfields? If farm robots will eliminate labor costs at vertical farms, won’t they do the same at flat farms? Why would the vertical farms benefit more?

4:09 – Kurzweil observes (as he has in the past) that most of the Earth’s surface is sparsely populated, meaning there is ample room for humans to spread out. While true, it’s important to remember the reasons why: Beachfront property in Florida is more aesthetically appealing and provides more opportunities for recreation than a plot of land in the middle of Nebraska. The climate in San Francisco is more conducive to human life than that of Minot, North Dakota. Humans are also social animals (particularly when young), meaning they like to live in places where there are other people. The high (and still rising) rates of suicide and substance abuse in rural America attest to the ill effects of isolation and lack of varied things to do. He doesn’t say it in this interview, but I know from his books that his response would be something like “future technologies will substitute for all that,” meaning virtual reality will be as real as The Matrix someday, so hanging out on virtual reality Miami Beach while you’re actually lying in a VR pod in your living room will feel as real as hanging out on the real Miami Beach with your actual body. Whether or not sufficiently advanced brain-computer interfaces can be made to do that is an open question, but for sure, I doubt the technology will exist by 2027, or even 2057.

5:00 – Kurzweil predicts that, by 2027, virtual reality and “virtual avatars” will be so good that many people won’t need to live in cities anymore, and he seems to suggest there will be a detectable change to the global urbanization trend. Thanks to virtual reality, people will be able to work and play from anywhere, so they’ll choose to live outside of cities to save money. I think this is a prime example of a prediction that Kurzweil can’t possibly get wrong, and that is also almost useless. As he admits around this part of the interview, many of his colleagues at Google already work remotely, and most of us know someone who works from home. It doesn’t take a futurist or economist to see that the practice is getting more popular, so it’s a simple assumption that it will be more common by, say, 2027. Technologies related to computing, videoconferencing, and virtual reality are all obviously improving, and it’s just common sense that they will make it easier for people to work remotely. And while the number of people living in cities is growing, so is the number of people living outside of them in the suburbs and exurbs. By 2027, the suburban/exurban population could be growing faster than the truly urban population, which Kurzweil could cite as proof his prediction was right. So on close analysis, Kurzweil’s prediction is nothing more than a simple synthesis of three long-running trends in America that most adults are already aware of through direct experience. It will be almost impossible for him to be wrong, but the prediction about the future is so general and so incrementally different from today that it has no real value.

6:35 – He says we will use 3D printers to make clothes, without giving a date for when the prediction will come to pass (by 2027?). Regardless of when or if it happens, this has always struck me as a useless application of 3D printers. Today, I can buy a pack of six new cotton undershirts from Wal-Mart for $15, and they will last for years before falling apart. I can go to a local thrift store and buy durable, surprisingly good-looking used clothes that are 75% discounted from their original prices, and which will also last me many years. I can go on Craigslist right now and find people in my area who are giving away clothes for free. There is no evidence at all that our existing textile technology is deficient making clothes, or that our “standards of living” will meaningfully improve if we started making clothes with futuristic 3D printers. Even if we assume 3D printers are so superior at making clothes that they’re (almost) “free,” how much better is that than the present condition? Clothes are already free or trivially cheap. Lowering the price farther might free up enough money for you to buy a slightly bigger morning coffee at Starbucks, but that’s it. The only real beneficiaries would be fashion-obsessed people who shudder at the thought of wearing the same outfit twice and want their 3D printer to spit out some zany new creation each morning. Yay for the coming empowerment of vain people.

8:10 – Kurzweil cites changes to the nature of jobs over the last 100 years (workforce transformed from hard labor on the farm and factory to doing computer stuff in office buildings) as proof that there will always be jobs for humans in the future. While humans have always managed to move up the skills ladder and create new, gainful work for themselves as machines took over the less skilled jobs, there’s no reason to think the trend will continue forever. His argument also gets muddled when he equates people in college with people who have jobs. Studying poetry or art in college isn’t the same thing as being gainfully employed. Moreover, its a common fate for such students to have problems finding employment after college, and for them to settle for jobs that are unsatisfactory because they pay little, or because they have nothing to do with what they studied (think of the waitress with the Literature B.A.). I think it’s much safer to predict that “Humans in the future will be able to find things to do with their days but they won’t necessarily get paid much money or any money at all for what they do, and automation will be good overall for humans since it will eliminate unpleasant drudge work.”

July 6, 2017July 6, 2017

Battlestar Galactica nitpick: 2D radar screens to depict 3D space

I’ve been a huge science fiction fan since childhood, but one franchise that has oddly not attracted my interest until now is Battlestar Galactica. Specifically, I’m talking about the series that aired from 2003-09.

When that series was ongoing, I tried watching a few episodes but just couldn’t get into it. For some reason, the quasi-documentary nature of how the show was filmed put me off. I also didn’t watch the show from the first episode onward, so each time I sat down and gave it a try, I had no clue who the characters were or what the plot arc was about.

Last night I had nothing to do and discovered Battlestar Galactica was available to me through Hulu. I watched the very first episode, and this time around was gripped.

For those of you who don’t know, Battlestar Galactica is about a space war between humans and their robots, called “Cylons” (SAI-lahns). The technology depicted in the show is much more advanced than our own (i.e. – there are giant spaceships, faster than light travel, and bipedal robots), and the events take place in a different part of our galaxy. The humans are descended from people who came from Earth, but for some reason, Earth’s location has been lost to history. Forty years before the events depicted in the series, the Cylons–who were servant robots–violently revolted against their human masters and flew away in space ships to found their own worlds. During the first episode of the series, the Cylons return for unexplained reasons and stage a massive sneak attack (meaning this is the Second Human-Cylon war) that destroys the human planets and the human space fleet. Of the handful of surviving human space ships, the most powerful is an aircraft carrier called the Battlestar Galactica, commanded by an older man named “Adama.” Disorganized, demoralized and grievously wounded, the remaining humans have to find a way to survive against overwhelming odds.

For reasons I’ll describe in much greater detail in future blog posts, I think the vision of a future where humans explore the galaxy in faster-than-light space ships and still do tasks like flying fighter planes and fixing plumbing leaks with wrenches will never come to pass. So at the most basic level, I think Battlestar Galactica is an inaccurate depiction of what our future might look like. But one thing that really stuck out to me as silly was the use of old-fashioned radar screens on the bridge of the Battlestar Galactica. Here’s a screenshot of the bridge:

And a tight shot of one of the “radar screens” (and yes, before anyone complains, I’m sure they’re actually making use of more advanced sensor technology than solely radar):

There’s a basic problem here: 2-dimensional screen displays are terrible at depicting 3-dimensional space. 2D displays are fine when you’re dealing with 2D environments, such as in naval warfare, where your surface ship is in the middle of a basically flat, featureless plain and uses its radar to locate other surface ships also on the plain. But in space, the ships are free to move in any direction and to approach each other from any vector, making useless any conceptualization of space as being planar, or of there being an “up” or “down.” Trying to “square the circle” by thinking like that will just get you into trouble, particularly if you’re in a fast-paced space battle with a smart enemy that has figured out what your spatial-thinking biases and limitations are (“Battlestar Galactica returns fire fast when we attack it from the front, back, left, and right, but it returns fire slowly and misses a lot when we attack from the top or bottom.”). The time spent looking at a flattened visual depiction of the space around you and then mentally calculating what the elevations and depressions of other ships are and then trying to synthesize it all into some global picture of where everything is and how it’s all moving around will cost you dearly in an actual space battle.

The best approach will instead be to show space ship commanders accurate, 3D representations of their surroundings. I’ve seen this depicted well in other sci-fi. For example, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebel command ship’s bridge had a hologram of the Death Star, which the commanders presumably used for real-time monitoring of that vessel and their own fighters that were attacking it. Using a more zoomed-out view, the Rebel commander could have used holograms to track the progress of the broader space battle and to see the locations of all ships, in 3D space.

Babylon 5 and Ender’s Game also depicted another approach: Making the bridge’s interior one, giant, 360 degree wraparound screen that displayed live video footage from outside the ship.

And Star Trek Deep Space Nine depicted the same visioning capabilities for ship commanders, but delivered via augmented reality glasses instead of wall screens (a smart use of a limited TV show budget).

All of these visioning technologies are hands-down better than using 2D radar screens to try and see what’s happening outside your space ship. And considering the overall level of technology present in the Battlestar Galactica (Faster than light engine? Enough said.), I don’t see why the ship couldn’t have also had one or all of these other devices on its bridge. Maybe someone on the show’s creative team just didn’t think things through enough, maybe they did but didn’t have the budget for anything but small computer screens, or maybe they were deliberately trying to make the ship look old-fashioned (but again, the result is nonsensical).

This silliness gets taken a step farther when Adama announces that he’s taking the Battlestar Galactica to a remote outpost to regroup against the Cylons, and to chart a course there, he unrolls a paper star map on the big table in the middle of the bridge and starts drawing on it with rulers and crayons. Sigh. I realize Adama’s “thing” is that he’s a grizzled old guy who doesn’t like technology, but this is taking it too far. Typing the desired coordinates into the ship’s computer would instantly spit out a more efficient and accurate course than he ever plot using old-time mariner’s tools.

I think that whenever we actually do have space ships of similar size and sophistication to the Battlestar Galactica, their bridges won’t look anything like they do on the TV show. Just for the sake of redundancy, I think there might be small, 2D sensor screens and even paper star maps shoved off to the side somewhere, but they’ll only be used in emergency situations where all the better technology has broken. The notion of a space battle being managed by an old human man who likes to look at screens and draw lines on paper will be laughable. In reality, the ship’s systems–including its weapons systems–would probably be entirely automated, and the best captains and fighter pilots would all be machines. The old guys would die fast.

July 5, 2017July 6, 2017

The religious qualities of Singularitarianism

Aeon has a good article about the religious undertones to Singularitarianism. (FYI, “Singularitarianism” is the belief that the Technological Singularity will happen in the future. While Singularitarians can’t agree if it will be good or bad for humans, they do agree that we should do whatever we can until then to nudge it towards a positive outcome.) This passage sums up the article’s key points:

‘A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or ‘end of days’ (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it’s an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI.’

Having spent years reading futurist books, interacting with futurists on social media, and even going to futurist conferences, I’ve come to view Singularitarians as a subcategory of futurists, who are defined by their belief in the coming Singularity and by the religious qualities of their beliefs. Not only do they indulge in fantastical ruminations about what the future will be like thanks to the Singularity, but they use rhetorical hand-waving–usually by invoking “exponential acceleration of technology” or something like that–to explain how we’ll get there from our present state. This sharply contrasts with other futurists who are rigidly scientific and make predictions by carefully identifying and extrapolating existing trends, which in turn almost always results in slower growth future scenarios.

A sizable minority of Singularitarians I’ve encountered also seem to be mentally ill and/or poor, and the thought of an upending of daily life and of the existing socioeconomic order, and the thought of an end to human suffering thanks to advanced technologies appeal to them for obvious reasons. Their belief in the Singularity truly is like the psychological salve of religion, so challenge them at your own risk.

Singularitarians could also be thought of as a subcategory of Transhumanists, the latter being people who believe in using technology to upgrade human beings past their natural limitations (such as intelligence, lifespan, physical strength, etc.). If you believe that the Singularity will bring with it the ability for humans to upload their minds into computers and live forever, then you are by default a Transhumanist. And you’re a doubleplus Transhumanist if you go a step farther and make a value judgement that such an “upgrade” will be good for humans.

With those distinctions made clear, let me say that I am a futurist and a Transhumanist, but I am not a Singularitarian. I plan to explain my reasons in depth in a future blog post, but for now let me summarize by saying I don’t see evidence of exponential improvement in artificial intelligence or nanomachines, which are the two pillars upon which the Singularity hypothesis rests. And even if an artificial intelligence became smarter than humans and gained the ability to rapidly improve itself, something called the “complexity brake” would slow its progress enough for humans to have some control over it or to at least comprehend what it was doing. Many Singularitarians believe in scenarios where the Singularity unfolds over the course of literally a few days, with a machine exceeding human intelligence at the beginning, and all of planet Earth being transformed into a wonderland of carbon nanotube structures, robots, humans sleeping in Matrix pods, and perhaps some kind of weird spiritual transcendence by the end. The transformation is predicted to be so abrupt that humans will have no time to react or to even fully understand what’s happening around them.

Links

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism

July 3, 2017July 13, 2017

The scary future of fake news: Perfect-quality CGI audio and video

The Economist has a rather disturbing article about how advances in “generative adversarial networks” will soon make it possible to create computer-generated audio and video footage that is indistinguishable from the real thing. The potential for spreading misinformation is obvious. The article offers some ways that such fakes could be spotted:

‘Yet even as technology drives new forms of artifice, it also offers new ways to combat it. One form of verification is to demand that recordings come with their metadata, which show when, where and how they were captured. Knowing such things makes it possible to eliminate a photograph as a fake on the basis, for example, of a mismatch with known local conditions at the time.

…Amnesty International is already grappling with some of these issues. Its Citizen Evidence Lab verifies videos and images of alleged human-rights abuses. It uses Google Earth to examine background landscapes and to test whether a video or image was captured when and where it claims. It uses Wolfram Alpha, a search engine, to cross-reference historical weather conditions against those claimed in the video. Amnesty’s work mostly catches old videos that are being labelled as a new atrocity, but it will have to watch out for generated video, too. Cryptography could also help to verify that content has come from a trusted organisation. Media could be signed with a unique key that only the signing organisation—or the originating device—possesses.’

However, it would be naive to think that these methods couldn’t be defeated with better CGI algorithms and through hacking file metadata and cryptographic keys.

And even if the “good guys” manage to forever stay one step ahead, we’re still rapidly approaching an era where the forgeries will be so good that unaided human eyesight and hearing won’t be sensitive enough to detect them, and humans will have to rely on machines to tell them what is real and what is fake (which is itself an interesting state of affairs from a philosophical standpoint, but that’s a talk for a different time). Something like a few fragments of aberrant computer code embedded in an otherwise perfect-looking fake video might be the only thing that reveals the lie. Considering the short attention span and low level of scientific and technological literacy in most countries, how could the computer forensic findings in such a case ever be explained to average people?

They couldn’t, which means belief or disbelief in accusations of forgery will twist in the winds of whatever preexisting biases each person has, which is how it is now. Americans will believe it when their government tells them a video originating in Russia is fake, and Russians who mistrust America will reflexively disagree and believe their own government’s claims it is genuine. The truth will of course be out in the open, but so abstruse that only a small minority will be able to see it clearly on their own.

Moreover, the ability to make perfect computer generated audio and video imitations of people could lead to disaster in crisis situations where the intended target lacks either the ability or the time to verify their authenticity using their own technology: Imagine a military battle where one side transmits false orders to the other, in the voice of the latter’s commander, or a situation where a hacker posing as a rich investor calls his stock broker and insistently tells him to trade some massive number of shares.

*Update (7/13/2017): Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed a way to merge audio recordings of someone speaking with video footage of them, so their mouth appears to be moving in sync with the words, even though the audio and video are from two different sources. Here’s a sample of them manipulating a speech by Barack Obama:

Links

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724370-generating-convincing-audio-and-video-fake-events-fake-news-you-aint-seen

July 3, 2017July 3, 2017

The iPhone is 10 years old

The iPhone made its debut exactly 10 years ago. Here’s how the original model compares to the 2017 “Blu R1 Plus,” perhaps the cheapest new-manufactured smartphone available in America today:

Screen size: 1) iPhone 3.5″ 2) Blu R1 5.5″
Screen resolution: 1) iPhone 320×480 2) Blu R1 720×1280
RAM: 1) iPhone 128 MB 2) Blu R1 3 GB
Storage: 1) iPhone 4 GB 2) Blu R1 32 GB
Camera: 1) iPhone 2 MP (only has one camera) 2) Blu R1 13 MP (main camera) and 5 MP (secondary camera)
Price: 1) iPhone $586 (inflation adjusted) 2) Blu R1 $160

I know it’s impossible to do a true quality comparison (i.e. – How much “better” is a phone with two cameras vs. a phone with only one?), but I’d approximate that today you could buy a smartphone that is five times “better” than the original iPhone overall, but it would cost you 75% less money than the iPhone cost ten years ago. That’s an overall cost-performance increase of 20x.

We take rapid advances in computing devices for granted, but this iPhone anniversary might be a good occasion to to put it into perspective. The peculiarity of this rate of improvement–which is made possible by Moore’s Law–is clear if we imagine it applied to other types of technology and other sectors of industry. For example, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year at the time the iPhone 1 went on sale was the 2007 Toyota Camry. At the time, a fully-loaded car of that type had an MSRP of $25,435. If Moore’s Law applied to cars, such a vehicle would be sold new today for $1,272–the same amount that someone getting paid the federal minimum wage earns in a month. (Note: In reality, the average price for a used 2007 Camry with typical mileage is $7,000)

Alternatively, we could imagine improvements happening in the inverse manner, with the Camry’s price staying fixed (perhaps increasing only with monetary inflation), but its performance specs improving by a factor of 20 (prepare for Tongue-In-Cheek Mode). In that case, a 2017 Camry would cost $29,876, get 5,360 horsepower (equivalent to a larger-than-average turboprop airplane engine), have a max speed of Mach 3.64, and get 440 – 620 mpg (depending on your driving habits, of course). Getting into accidents at Mach speeds would be devastating, though if a way were found to also make the Camry 20 times safer, it might even out.

And there are other possibilities still. What if the cost of building structures today were 1/20th what it was in 2007? How many more skyscrapers and mansions would there be? What if the cost of clean energy had declined by the same? What if planes had gotten 20 times faster? What if the cost of sending humans into space had tanked?

The iPhone and smartphones more broadly speaking have been one of the most important technologies of the last 50 years, and they have massively improved over the last ten. These thought experiments are meant to illustrate the magnitude of that improvement, but to also show that–however great they were–there any number of ways the world would have been better off had that same rate of cost-performance increase happened to other technologies. You may love your iPhone, but would you be better off with a 2006 clamshell phone plus a mansion, or plus almost free ground transportation, or plus the ability to fly anywhere on Earth in less than an hour?

Links

http://www.pwc.ca/en/engines/pw100-pw150
http://www.techradar.com/news/iphone-1-vs-iphone-7-plus-this-is-how-far-weve-come-in-10-years