Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 19, 2015

KFI is weird.  They say you can listen on the Internet, but all I get is ads. Then they thank me for listening to KFI.  There are other stations that think the on air ads arte enough, but not KFI.  They make it difficult to listen, so I don’t bother. Pity

Well they sent me an email that makes it easier, but they still make you listen/watch an extra add, and wait for it to complete before the station starts.

Yes, but we give you so much more, you can listen to many other place.  Sure I can.  Don’t want to.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-solidifies-foothold-in-libya-to-expand-reach-1431989697

Islamic State Solidifies Foothold in Libya to Expand Reach

Extremist group has sent money, trainers and fighters

By

Dion Nissenbaum and

Maria Abi-Habib

Updated May 18, 2015 7:20 p.m. ET

Islamic State leaders in Syria have sent money, trainers and fighters to Libya in increasing numbers, raising new concerns for the U.S. that the militant group is gaining traction in its attempts to broaden its reach and expand its influence.

In recent months, U.S. military officials said, Islamic State has solidified its foothold in Libya as it searches for ways to capitalize on rising popularity among extremist groups around the world.

“ISIL now has an operational presence in Libya, and they have aspirations to make Libya their African hub,” said one U.S. military official, using an acronym for the group. “Libya is part of their terror map now.”

And every advance ISIS makes strengthens the Caliphate’s claim to be the true legitimate rulers of the Moslem world. Interestingly, their own logic says that if they can be defeated and have no territory to rule that are not legitimate and it is not the Will of Allah that they rule. Give me the 101^st Airborne and the Warthogs and I will put paid to their claims. And no, I have no particular claim to that post; I do mean that giving the right orders would do the job.

The Caliphate does not quite yet pose an existential threat to the US, but they are approaching it.

From the commencement address given by Garry Kasparov, the Russian opposition figure and former world chess champion, at Saint Louis University, May 16:

Every day we make choices large or small: individuals, companies, entire nations. Are those choices guided by the values we treasure? Are we loyal to the principles of individual freedom, of faith, of excellence, of compassion, of the value of human life? Or do we trade them away, bit by bit, for material goods, for a quiet life, and to pass the problems of today on to the next generation?

These moral values are also the values of innovation and the free market, by the way. It is no coincidence that these founding American values created the greatest democracy in the world and also the greatest economy in the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urged his believers to be a “City on a Hill,” a shining example to the world, a phrase used to describe America by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. I saw that America from the other side of the Iron Curtain and I can tell you that it mattered. And it matters still.

If America is to continue as a “light of the world” it will be up to you and to your generation to hold fast to these values and not to trade them away for a safe and stagnant status quo. Risk is not only for entrepreneurs. Risk is for anyone who will fight for these values in their lives and in the world every day.

We met Garry in Moscow in 1989, and had a pleasant dinner; it was still the USSR at the time.

Jerry:

Bremer obviously was not perfect. However; the analogy of retaining the cadre of experienced civil servants and technicians that maintained the infrastructure in post war Germany to retaining the Baathists in post invasion Iraq is fundamentally flawed. While not all Germans were Nazis, almost all Nazis in Germany were German. Most became Nazis in order to keep their job. There was little resentment from the general population towards the former Nazis. The situation in post invasion Iraq was more analogous to liberating German occupied Russia, then retaining the German occupiers to provide security. The analogy of retaining Nazis to administer a liberated Israel

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

The Baathists in Iraq were overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims who had recently waged a vicious, almost genocidal campaign to suppress uprisings by the Shia and Kurds.

James Crawford=

All that should have been obvious before we went in: which means either we ought not to have gone in, or realized that a “democratic Iraq” was not achievable. Our options were dismemberment of the country into Kurds, Shia, and Sunni; or restoration of a minority that would protect the factions from each other; probably a Baath dictatorship. If none of that acceptable, don’t go in at all. When you win a battle or a war you should know what to do next. We had no clue.

Agreed Mr. Obama had an impossible assignment. He had no good options, so he chose —

Automation Replacing People

Jerry,

“…

This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry.

…”

This is part of an ongoing process that has spanned decades and started with the aircraft navigators.  When I was a Navy C-130F navigator, 1982 through 1985 inclusive, we had six crewmen; pilot, copilot, flight engineer, navigator, radioman, and loadmaster.

The current C-130J has a crew of three; pilot,  copilot, and flight engineer/loadmaster.

Indeed, the Navy and the Air Force stopped teaching celestial navigation back about the year 2003.

The opening salvo of the “Rise of the Machines” and the displacement of the navigators came with the introduction and widespread deployment of compact aircraft inertial navigation systems (INS) and  Global Positioning System (GPS) in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.  At first, the INS took 15 minutes to initialize the mechanical gyroscopes and would be thrown off by a gust of wind that rocked the wings of the aircraft, necessitating a further 15 minutes to re-initialize..

I remember sitting at Naval Air Station Keflavik, Iceland for the better part of two hours whilst the palletized INS we were using to ferry a short range T-39 Sabreliner executive transport jet re-initialized again and again as gusts of wind shook the aircraft.  It was maddening to get to 14 minutes and 39 seconds into the 15 minute initialization process, only to have to start again when a particularly strong gust of wind shook the aircraft.

Once the ring laser gyro system and its roughly 5 second initialization process entered the scene, we overwater navigators became much less necessary.  This led apace to the elimination of in-flight navigators.

The wisdom of eliminating us navigators in peacetime was beyond question as both a matter of economy and efficiency.  How the U.S. military will cope in a war against a near peer adversary who can destroy a major portion of our GPS satellite constellation and fry the majority of our electronics, including navigation systems, remains to be seen.

I went on to become an Information Technology Specialist in the federal civil service for 24 years before retiring at the end of August 2013; “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

😉

I hope this perspective from a skilled professional who was displaced by emerging technologies adds a worthwhile perspective to the discussion at hand.

Best,

Rodger

My sentiments. How will anyone navigate if an Argus attack takes out GPS? The military has not yet taken away the bayonet, nor should they.

I once took a artificial horizon Polaris observation – as a lark, for I was merely an observer in the KC-135 headed for Thule – and I fear I ended up telling the pilot we was 200 miles from where we really were. Fortunately he laughed.

http://polymatharchives.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-inappropriately-excluded.html

Greetings and blessings to you Jerry

I suspect you have seen this; if not, it is worth at least a scan. 

I now (last 5 years or so) realize what happened to me in my past career of special agent.  I am the cybercrimes agent that you and Miss Roberta had lunch with in December of 2010.  That 3 hours with you is still on my mind often, and you encouraged me in the pursuits of my EMP protection start-up. 

You and your health are in my prayers.  Thanks for continuing to do what you do.

—

James F. Ponder

“We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between … so that the world remains intelligible.”

Mathematician Vernor Vinge, in Omni magazine, January 1983

I remember well.

Self-driving big rigs

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/12/8592639/self-driving-truck-daimler-freightliner
Having driven Freightliners, I’m impressed but not overly so. There are still enough places it can’t handle driving that you still need someone in the cab, ready to take over when the computer can’t handle the job. (And I’m not sure how much confidence to place in its own judgment about that question.)
Still, the turnover rate for drivers is quite high, mostly due to stress; the year I lasted doing it is about the average. And most wrecks are due to driver fatigue. So I can easily believe these things will soon be safer drivers than the people who now have the job. And if they are, they will proliferate as fast as they can be built.

John David Galt

The transition will be rough but it is inevitable.

Dr. Pournelle,
Save the eels: give the cocaine to moths: http://www.popsci.com/colombia-plans-fight-cocaine-hungry-moths
-d

Measuring the temperature

Hi Dr Pournelle,
I have seen your comments on the difficulty of accurately measuring the temperature, and I completely agree with them. However Randall Monroe posits a surprisingly simple and elegant method for this in one of his xkcd’s What If columns:
“For the most part, the temperature of groundwater in an area is equal to the year-round average air temperature of the surface. Water is a terrific absorber of energy, requiring huge amounts of it to change temperature.[1] Underground reservoirs of water tend to warm up and cool down too sluggishly to respond to the comparatively brief winter-summer temperature swings.[2]
This property makes springs a useful “thermometer” for an area. Instead of spending a year measuring the temperature each day and night, and then calculating the average, you can just stick a thermometer in a spring any time of year.
If you look at a map of groundwater temperatures, you’ll see it closely resembles a map of year-round average air temperatures (PDF, see page 6).
However, this rule only holds true in places where the main energy source heating the groundwater is the same one heating the air—sunlight. “
https://what-if.xkcd.com/132/
Of course this doesn’t help with measuring the temperature in deserts or the poles, but I think it would be very interesting to see some historical plots of springwater temperatures (but there probably aren’t any).
Regards,
Dave Checkley

I find the idea interesting, since nature will have done most of the averaging in a way that can’t be altered, making it more likely to be repeatable without adjustment. I am of course no climate scientist; my experience with temperature measurement and its difficulties comes fro measurement of human temperatures; my environmental temperatures in the experiments were in the hundreds of degrees, and accuracy to the nearest decimal point were not required. It was, however, required to have human skin temperatures to a tenth of a degree since to point was to see changes and predict other changes. We solved the “average temperature” problem by using an anal probe: the astronaut’s body did the averaging. This proposal seems similar. Of course it would not seem to be universally obtainable, so how would you treat such cases as deserts and such? Would those temperatures average with the ground water data?

Gee, is it time to end the war on Drugs as a total defeat now?

It seems genetic engineers are closing in on making yeast that grows Morphine.

Once they are made, no matter where, they will escape. They will find their way to illegal and malign hands. The Morphine will be made. From the morphine, Heroin will be made.

If this is possible with Heroin, it will be possible with almost anything organic. If little Johnny with his Gilbert Junior Gene Splicing Kit can put together fancy new yeast strains that grow fancy new drugs the Great War on the American People by its Government er the War on Drugs is once and for all truly and completely lost.

Genetically Engineered Yeast Makes It Possible To Brew Morphine http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/05/18/1636257/genetically-engineered-yeast-makes-it-possible-to-brew-morphine

Sleep well. We have a wonderful new world in front of us.

{^_^}

I have long thought the war on drugs lost. We tried an experiment with liquor and the result was disastrous; the drug war seems moreso; and the DEA seems unconstitutional: the states may prohibit drugs, but if liquor required the 18^th amendment to make the Volstead Act constitutional, where in the constitution does it allow the feds to prohibit marijuana? Or heroin for that matter. They can be forbidden in interstate commerce, but if grown in the state?

But leaving the constitution aside – which we seem increasingly to do when it comes to federal power – have we not learned that prohibition of self indulgences leads to problems? I can argue that a society without marijuana is a better society, but it is pretty clear that the result of trying to make it so leads to very bad consequences.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Monday, May 18, 2015

ISIS has taken another large city. The Caliphate grows, and each success is seen as a confirmation of its right to rule. The latest conquest should be good for another 50,000 recruits who see it as a sign: this is a legitimate state. When I first wrote about this, I said that we could end the Caliphate with an infantry division and the remaining Warthogs. It would be messy, but it could be done quickly. We could give the conquests in the Kurdish districts to the Kurds, who would be loyal allies; and doing so would be a salutary lesson to the corrupt rulership in Baghdad.

Now it becomes more difficult. The problem is not defeating the Caliphate, it is governing the conquered territory. It is not yet too late: there are Sunni and Shia Iraqi enough to form a federation. And it is our responsibility. We broke it. We threw out Saddam Hussein, and we sent in – Bremer, who managed to set a much worse record than the worst of the Roman pro-consuls.

Obama did not start this, and Bremer was not his man; but his haste to get us out of Iraq, while understandable, showed his deep misunderstanding of Middle East affairs.

The Caliphate is not yet an existential threat to the West, but at it’s present rate of success, it will be. War feeds war.

More pictures from Niven’s birthday party

7

That’s Larry in the top picture. Jim Ransom in the next along with some of the waiters. This in in the entryway of Niven’s house…

From the blog of Fredrik deBoer, an academic in rhetoric and composition, May 13:

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. We celebrate grassroots activist movements like Black Lives Matter, but we insult them by treating them as the same thing as hashtag campaigns, and we don’t build a broader left-wing political movement that could increase their likelihood of success. We spend all day, every day, luxuriating in how much better we are than other people, having convinced ourselves that the work of politics is always external, never internal. We have made politics synonymous with social competition. We’re a mess.

So, apparently, I am not the only one to discover that America is losing its mind. We sowed the wind for generations; I said so at the time, and often for decades. I suppose it should be no surprise to discover we are reaping the whirlwind.

Dear Jerry:
You wrote in View for 5/17/2015:

I’ve been a bit depressed all week, not because of this place, but another forum which I had thought was still rational, but which has turned poisonous, everyone looking for verbal errors so they can charge racism or sexism or check your privilege, thus winning whatever they thought was a contest, and ending all discussion before it starts.

Immediately I was reminded that your experience is nothing new, that Paul wrote to Timothy about this phenomenon 2000 years ago:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,  and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

2 Timothy 4:3-4 ESV

When entering the kind of forum you described I also thought how Jesus advised his disciples to enter a new town:

And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it.  And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town.

Matthew 10:11-14 ESV

You and I are of an age when we should not be bothered by the turmoil of internet forums and the shifting notions and passions of the day as nations rage and people plot in vain. I am reminded of what Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams:

1812 January 21. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.”

You can find this quote in many reliable sources including

http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-reading

http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/280

and in context at

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl213.php

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16784/16784-h/16784-h.htm#link2H_4_0099

Peace, and best regards,
–Harry M.

Unregulated capitalism in Nigeria

Jerry:

Your recurring comment regarding unregulated capitalism has happened in Nigeria:

Nigerian restaurant shut down for serving HUMAN FLESH – and had bags in kitchen containing heads that were still bleeding
Police raided the restaurant after locals reported it was selling human meat
They discovered human heads which were still dripping blood into plastic bags
Weapons including grenades also found during the raid in Anambra region
Ten people have so far been arrested in connection to the various crimes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3084326/Nigerian-restaurant-shut-serving-HUMAN-flesh-bags-containing-human-heads-bleeding.html

Sorry if I spoiled your lunch–

Doug Ely

We have not yet seen full decivilization, but this approaches it. Unregulated laissez faire leads to human flesh in the market place. Unrestrained government leads to the Nomenklatura and the ossified communist state. We have run that experiment; how many repetitions do we need?

“I did not know I had been served human meat, and it was that expensive.”

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/11610908/Nigerian-restaurant-shut-down-for-serving-human-flesh.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Peer review, evolution/devolution and sci-fi

Hello, Jerry Pournelle! I have been thinking about the fact that in real life, progress towards more unified theories in physics stagnated as soon as peer review journals gained access to the tools to enforce their policy against redundant publication. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert published the same theory independently without being stopped.
In the last decades, the only progress have been in fine-tuning of preexisting theories and in increased technical application of the same theories. General theories makes many unique predictions, increasing the chances of some of them being cheaply testable. Fine-tuning of existing theories, on the other hand, makes much fewer predictions and increases the risk of them all being expensive to test. So if the stagnation was due to increased research costs (e.g. Pareto principle), it would have struck fine-tuning of existing theories even more severely than breakthrough generalized theories. Ergo, it cannot be costs but must be something else.
I think it is due part to arbitrary divisions into “fields” in academia preventing ideas and falsifications from spreading, and part due to peer review no redundant publication policies scaring people with theories into not expressing them. This has given me a plot idea that can be applied into science fiction: that the road to a theory of everything allowing modified space-time goes by using the no redundant publication policy against itself so it ceases to work.
The entire idea behind peer review, claiming humans to be unreliable yet relying on rules written by humans and controls enforced by humans, is self-defeating. It is like when Epemenedos said that all Creteans are lying, despite being Cretean himself (the origin of the “all that is written at this paper is a lie” paradox). Psychologists do the same self-defeating thing when they claim all humans to be unreliable despite being human themselves. This also applies to other types of “control”, see 2 or more sections below. It does not, however, contradict evolution: while the existence of science requires the existence of science-capable beings today, it does not require the ancestors of science-capable beings to always have been science-capable. So evolution, including evolution of science-capable beings from ancestors that were not science-capable, is science. Psychology with it’s claims of “cognitive bias” today, however, is not a science and by the Epemenedos principle can never become one.
This also means that cognitive bias theories can be used to deny anything that conspiracy theories can be used to deny, without technically being conspiracy theories. Just like cognitive bias theorists claim all humans to share cognitive biases behind common mythological elements, they may just as well use the same type of arguments to claim that all agreement on, say, the moon landings or the holocaust is also due to panhuman cognitive biases. They may say that all observations of things left on the moon by the astronauts is also made by humans or by human-made instruments. When it comes to genocides, the cognitive bias theorists may state that since the testimonies agree regardless of the ethnicity of the witnesses, it shows that they are all fully human and that their denial is therefore not a hate ideology at all (repeating common claims of panhuman biases not being malicious). They may explain away the number of people disappeared by claiming a panhuman glitch in mathematical ability.
Which brings us to the next level of cognitive bias theory, things that conspiracy theories cannot do. Obviously, any cognitive bias theory is a more efficient denial tool than the equivalent conspiracy theory: cognitive bias theories rely on “selfish genes” just being there and not having to conspire, eliminating leak risks. Then cognitive bias theories can be used to deny not only historical events but also obvious things that no conspiracy could fake, like 1+1=2 and things fall down not up. They can even say that the assumption that you would leave the Earth if things fell up is also a genetic delusion not objective fact. Summary: cognitive bias theory is incompatible with science and thus not scientific theories.
I have also thought about that if cavemen specifically punished individuals with more Homo sapiens characteristics and “excused” the others by “they cannot help” their actions, that would have bred against Homo sapiens characteristics so that modern humans would never have existed. That made me think about some scifi possibilities too: maybe space archaeologists discovering ruins of civilizations that destroyed themselves by psychologistic morality somewhat similar to today’s Earth values breeding themselves into stupidity. Maybe the Fermi paradox being solved by all other proto-intelligent species thwarting their own evolution and humanity being extremely lucky to be so late in creating psychologistic morality. Maybe creation of intelligence-positive societies totally devoid of psychologistic morality, cultures in which the same action is never considered any worse just because it was conscious.
This must NOT be conflated with any kind of forcible eugenism against different behaviors. On the contrary, it is a rejection of the entire classification of certain behaviors/preferences as “sick”. Obviously, since considering the same behavior to be cool in an insect or reptile yet “sick” in a person is “intelligent guilt” psychologistic morality, and the intelligence-positive view rejects all “intelligent guilt” morals.
The intelligence-positive view is applicable without biologism too: forcing people to pretend stupidity is disastrous. It is possible to write stories wherein “justice” causes civilizations to self-destruct by forcing its members to “fake” lack of conscious choice. For maximum effect, they may be contrasted to other, intelligence-positive civilizations that faces peril yet survives precisely because they do not have “intelligent guilt” morality and thus do not force their members into malingering. Whether the civilizations are from different home worlds or instead offshoots of a single spacefaring civilization’s colonization that diverged into different societies is not really important to the case.
I would like to hear your replies as to these ideas.
Greetings,
Martin J Sallberg

I think you have stated your case very well indeed. Any time there is no possibility of dissent from a theory, you will get epicycles: in cosmology we have dark energy, dark matter, and none of it in our local area. So it goes.

I have long said that a reasonable percentage of research grants should go to the opposition, for crucial experiments: most will confirm existing belief, but not all; some will insert worms of doubt. And of course those results must be published. Peer review guarantees they will not be.

Yes, we need mechanisms to weed out barking madness, but even there we need caution. I am not worried about suppression of theories; but suppression of data, case histories, impossible experimental results: that is dangerous.

We are at present running a social science experiment on this; the results are not encouraging. We still sow the wind.

‘Rise of the Robots’ and ‘Shadow Work’

By BARBARA EHRENREICHMAY 11, 2015       nyt

In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.

But, as Martin Ford documents in “Rise of the Robots,” the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-­generated.

It’s impossible to read “Rise of the Robots” — for review anyway — without thinking about how the business of book reviewing could itself be automated and possibly improved by computers. First, the job of “close reading,” now commonly undertaken with Post-its and a felt-tip red pen, will be handed off to a scanner that will instantly note all recurring words, phrases and themes. Next, where a human reviewer racks her brain for social and historical context, the review-bot will send algorithms out into the ether to scan every other book by the author as well as every other book or article on the subject. Finally, all this information will be synthesized with more fairness and erudition than any wet, carbon-based thinking apparatus could muster. Most of this could be achieved today, though, as Ford notes, if you want more creativity and self-­reflexivity from your review-bot, you may have to wait until 2050.

This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin. But “Rise of the Robots” doesn’t need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here. Although the unemployment rate has fallen to officially acceptable levels, long-term unemployment persists, and underemployment — part-time jobs when full-time jobs are needed, or jobs that do not reflect a worker’s education — is on the rise. College-educated people often flounder for years after graduation, finding temp jobs and permanent roommates. Adults of both sexes are drifting out of the work force in despair. All of this has happened by choice, though not the choice of the average citizen and worker. In the wake of the recession, Ford writes, many companies decided that “ever-advancing information technology” allows them to operate successfully without rehiring the people they had laid off. And there should be no doubt that technology is advancing in the direction of full unemployment. Ford quotes the co-founder of a start-up dedicated to the automation of gourmet hamburger production: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Ford offers little hope that emerging technologies will eventually generate new forms of employment, in the way that blacksmiths yielded to autoworkers in the early 20th century. He predicts that new industries will “rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive,” pointing to companies like YouTube and Instagram, which are characterized by “tiny workforces and huge valuations and revenues.” On another front, 3-D printing is poised to make a mockery of manufacturing as we knew it. Truck driving may survive for a while — at least until self-driving vehicles start rolling out of Detroit or, perhaps, San Jose.

The disappearance of jobs has not ushered in a new age of leisure, as social theorists predicted uneasily in the 1950s. Would the masses utilize their freedom from labor in productive ways, such as civic participation and the arts, or would they die of boredom in their ranch houses? Somehow, it was usually assumed, they would still manage to eat.

Come to find out, there’s still plenty of work to do, even if no one is willing to pay for it. This is the “shadow work” that Craig Lambert appealingly brings to light in his new book on “the unpaid, unseen jobs that fill your day.” We take it for granted that we’ll have to pump our own gas and bus our own dishes at Panera Bread. Booking travel reservations is now a D.I.Y. task; the travel agents have disappeared. As corporations cut their workforces, managers have to take on the work of support staff (remember secretaries?), and customers can expect to spend many hours of their lives working their way through menus and recorded advertisements in search of “customer service.” At the same time, our underfunded and understaffed schools seem to demand ever more parental participation. Ambitious parents are often expected not only to drive their children to and from school, but to spend hours carrying out science projects and poring over fifth-grade math — although, as Lambert points out, parental involvement in homework has not been shown to improve children’s grades or test scores.

“Shadow Work” is generally a smooth ride, but there are bumps along the way. The definition of the subject sometimes seems to embrace every kind of unpaid work — from the exploitative, as in the use of unpaid interns, to the kind that is freely undertaken, like caring for one’s own family. At times the book gets weighed down by an unwarranted nostalgia for the old days, when most transactions involved human interactions. For example, Lambert grants that home pregnancy tests offer women “more privacy and more control,” while also lamenting — as no woman ever has — that they cut out the doctor and thus transform “what can be a memorable shared event into a solitary encounter with a plastic stick.”

Lambert, formerly an editor at Harvard Magazine, is on firmer ground when he explores all the ways corporations and new technologies fiendishly generate new tasks for us — each of them seemingly insignificant but amounting to many hours of annoyance. Examples include deleting spam from our inboxes, installing software upgrades, creating passwords for every website we seek to enter, and periodically updating those passwords. If nothing else, he gives new meaning to the word “distraction” as an explanation for civic inaction. As the seas rise and the air condenses into toxic smog, many of us will be bent over our laptops, filling out forms and attempting to wade through the “terms and conditions.”

Lambert falls short of calling for the shadow workers of the world to go out on strike. But that’s what it might take to give us the time and the mental bandwidth to confront the dystopian possibilities being unleashed by technology. If middle-class jobs keep disappearing as wealth piles up at the top, Martin Ford predicts, economic mobility will “become nonexistent”: “The plutocracy would shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones.” We have seen this movie; in fact, in one form or another — from “Elysium” to “The Hunger Games” — we’ve been seeing it again and again.

In “Rise of the Robots,” Ford argues that a society based on luxury consumption by a tiny elite is not economically viable. More to the point, it is not biologically viable. Humans, unlike robots, need food, health care and the sense of usefulness often supplied by jobs or other forms of work. His solution is blindingly obvious: As both conservatives and liberals have proposed over the years, we need to institute a guaranteed annual minimum income, which he suggests should be set at $10,000 a year. This is probably not enough, and of course no amount of money can compensate for the loss of meaningful engagement. But as a first step toward a solution, Ford’s may be the best that the feeble human mind can come up with at the moment.

RISE OF THE ROBOTS

Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

By Martin Ford

334 pp. Basic Books. $28.99.

SHADOW WORK

The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day

By Craig Lambert

277 pp. Counterpoint. $26.

Soon They’ll Be Driving It, Too       (journal)

Intelligent machines are ousting low-skilled workers now. Next they’ll start encroaching on white-collar livelihoods.

By

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

May 15, 2015 4:53 p.m. ET

Should you be worried by the emergence of intelligent machines? To some the answer is clear. “Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warned recently. Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots” offers a more prosaic reason for concern: Partially intelligent machines might render humans not so much extinct as redundant. “No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend specific sectors of the economy and job market,” writes Mr. Ford, a Silicon Valley software developer turned futurist. Will machine intelligence, tackling tasks once thought of as humanity’s exclusive preserve, “disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?”

Mr. Ford invokes Norbert Wiener, who in 1949 prophesied an “industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty” in which machines would outstrip humans in routine work “at any price.” In Mr. Ford’s view, just such a revolution is under way in blue-collar work. Robots are ousting low-skilled workers everywhere, from fast-food joints to factory floors—a trend that Mr. Ford argues is central to the puzzling “jobless recovery” of the past decade as well as to other anomalous trends in pay and employment.

Now the machines are encroaching on white-collar livelihoods, which is why the intelligentsia have begun to wake up to their advance. To date, most automation has been of routine tasks that are relatively easy to describe in terms of simple instructions. But the combination of ever faster processors, ever smarter algorithms and ever bigger data is yielding supercomputers that are ever more capable of tackling complex challenges. IBM ’s Watson, having triumphed over human champion Ken Jennings at “Jeopardy!,” is now turning to medicine and cookery. Other machines are proving their mettle in fields ranging from scientific research to the stock market. Creativity no longer seems an insurmountable obstacle: Computers are starting to compose music or create paintings that could pass for the work of humans.

We are still a long way from all-round human intelligence—smart machines are becoming more flexible but still tend to excel in only a specific area—but Mr. Ford lucidly sets out myriad examples of how focused applications of versatile machines (coupled with human helpers where necessary) could displace or de-skill many jobs. If you are of the professional classes, you will likely read with mounting dismay Mr. Ford’s compelling explanation of how tools that encapsulate “analytic intelligence and institutional knowledge” will enable less qualified rivals to carry out your job proficiently, quite possibly from another country. An intelligent system might mine huge corporate data sets to distill years of experience into simple instructions for an overseas worker—who can then use translation and telepresence to overcome linguistic and geographical barriers. When the tools systems have become smart enough, those offshore workers may in turn be deemed surplus: In a particularly dastardly move, computers may even acquire those smarts by spying on their human users.

The author is persuasive in his discussion of the business logic that makes this process seem all but inevitable. Machines may be less accomplished than humans, but they are often cheaper, more dependable and more docile. While you might worry about their growing abilities, it is the economic incentives that seem truly problematic. Mr. Ford worries that if this trend runs away it will prove bad for all but the ultra-wealthy capitalists who own the machines. Because workers are consumers too, a declining workforce translates into declining demand, and that threatens the entire edifice of modern capitalism. Continue as we are, he suggests, and we may return to feudalism.

Will we? Why should this time be any different from previous waves of automation, in which displaced workers have moved, after some initial disorientation, to satisfactory new jobs? Machine intelligence, says Mr. Ford, is a general-purpose technology with broad applications: There will be few untouched fields to which workers can turn in their search for employment. Still, his copious examples, striking though they are, add up to no more than strong circumstantial evidence for that claim.

We should always be skeptical about the difficulty of transferring polished theories into unruly reality. And for the moment, there will remain bastions of human exceptionalism. One recent analysis suggests that “highly creative” work (including architecture, design and entertainment), which accounts for around a fifth of U.S. jobs, will prove intransigent. Mr. Ford also dedicates chapters to the ways in which the health-care and educational sectors have resisted automation.

Could we find new jobs in these areas for those put out of work by automation? The author’s short answer is that we can’t. Those at the bottom of the labor pyramid aren’t capable of doing jobs higher up it, and there wouldn’t be enough of those jobs anyway. Rather surprisingly, he gives only passing treatment to the potential deployment of intelligent machines to up-skill workers. “For the majority of people who lose middle-class jobs, access to a smart phone may offer little beyond the ability to play Angry Birds while waiting in the unemployment line,” he writes. Today’s smartphones, yes; but tomorrow’s smarter phones may enhance their owners’ reach and abilities in more productive ways.

The author’s apparent reluctance to engage with technological solutions to a technological problem perhaps reveals where his true object lies. His answer to a sharp decline in employment is a guaranteed basic income, a safety net that he suggests would both cushion the effect on the newly unemployable and encourage entrepreneurship among those creative enough to make a new way for themselves. This is a drastic prescription for the ills of modern industrialization—ills whose severity and very existence are hotly contested. “Rise of the Robots” provides a compelling case that they are real, even if its more dire predictions are harder to accept.

Rise of the Robots

By Martin Ford
Basic, 334 pages, $28.99

— Mr. Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist.

I have said often: by 2020, half of the jobs of those presently employed can be done by a robot whose cost is not much more than the annual wage paid to the current job-holder. Maintenance and supervision of the robot will be no more that 10% of the robot’s cost. The robot will need neither health care, family leave, vacation, nor a pension. Employers and investors will have decisions to make.

I see no reason to change that observation.

In 1982 I stated that by the year 2000, anyone in the Free World would be able in a timely manner to get the answer to any question that has an answer. The Internet made that happen well before the year 2000.

It is not too early to begin considering what happens to Democracy when half the population can cannot find employment that cannot be done cheaper by a robot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ready-to-lend-a-hand-or-3-in-the-next-disaster/2015/05/16/2ea78a16-fa6c-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html?hpid=z1

Military push for emergency robots worries skeptics about lethal uses (WP)

By Christian Davenport May 16 at 10:18 PM

It’s 6-foot-2, with laser eyes and vise-grip hands. It can walk over a mess of jagged cinder blocks, cut a hole in a wall, even drive a car. And soon, Leo, Lockheed Martin’s humanoid robot, will move from the development lab to a boot camp for robots, where a platoon’s worth of the semiautonomous mechanical species will be tested to see if they can be all they can be.

Next month, the Pentagon is hosting a $3.5 million, international competition that will pit robot against robot in an obstacle course designed to test their physical prowess, agility, and even their awareness and cognition.

Galvanized by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster in 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s band of mad scientists that have developed the “artificial spleen,” bullets that can change course midair and the Internet — has invested nearly $100 million into developing robots that could head into disaster zones off limits to humans.

“We don’t know what the next disaster will be, but we know we have to develop the technology to help us to address these kinds of disaster,” Gill Pratt, DARPA’s program manager, said in a recent call with reporters.

There’s more but you get the idea.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/dont-think-that-you-can-become-free-or-the-master-of-your-life-through-knowledge

Through Flaws in the Machine, Robots May Develop “Souls”: An Interview with John Gray

Photo via Flickr user Tom Simpson

It wasn’t until after I interviewed John Gray, major British philosopher, public intellectual, and the author, most recently, of The Soul of the Marionette, that I realized he was—in the words of a British friend—”a total hero.” Gray, who recently retired from a storied professorship at the London School of Economics, was not only blazingly smart, with a cracking wit; he also came across as down-to-earth, considerate, and rather even-keeled. Considering that his book makes a fairly damning case against the techno-utopian logic of Silicon Valley and cuts straight into our “self-flattering” ideas of freedom, Gray’s moderate tone was a surprise. Our conversation ranged from ancient Greek warfare to cryogenically-frozen tech tycoons, from the state of the humanities to the works of Philip K. Dick, from robotic souls to the UK’s astonishing general election results earlier this month. Much like Gray’s book, our 75-minute chat flew by and left me electrified.

The Soul of the Marionette offers a mini-education over the span of 20 short chapters, which romp through major and minor works of philosophy, art, history, and science fiction. The book can be disorienting—each of the chapters can be read on its own, Gray notes—but it’s never dull. Gray likens the style of this book to Pascal’s Penseés. (“Though, of course, I’m no Pascal!” Gray laughed, perhaps underselling himself.)

Gray’s ideal reader, in his words, is “a person who is curious, who thinks that there might be something wrong with our modern world, the world in which we expect human progress from science and technology.” If that sounds like you, check out The Soul of the Marionettewhen it’s released on May 19th in the US from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

VICE: The Soul of the Marionette addresses the fundamental question of whether or not human beings have freedom. You seem to say that we don’t.
John Gray: I guess a different way of posing the question that the book asks is, “What kind of freedom do we think we want, and do we really want it?” The book is not really addressed to traditional philosophical issues of free will and metaphysics. We all think we want to be free. We all feel frustrated and thwarted and powerless when we think we’re not free. But what is it that we want from freedom? Do we really want what we think we want?

Your book also discusses how torture and “hyper-modern techniques of control” are being used today, in the name of human rights and freedom. Do you see this situation improving, or worsening, over the coming decades?
All of these technologies, they’re ambiguous. What they humanly mean, their human values, is always ambiguous. I’m old enough to remember when photocopiers and video machines were thought as bound to bring down tyrannies, back in the 70s and 80s. People said things like, “Well, if massacres can be videoed, no country would dare to commit a massacre!” It happens every day now. It happened with Tiananmen Square. They possibly even use that movie to show other people, in other parts of China, what might happen to them if they rebel.

There is considerably more relevant to this discussion.

And now for the burning question:

What happens when you give eels cocaine?

<http://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/dr-eelgood>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

‘We are convinced the machine can do better than human anesthesiologists’ (WP)

By Todd C. Frankel May 15

I wrote recently about Sedasys, a machine that automates anesthesia. It’s a first-of-its-kind device in the United States. Only four hospitals use it for now. It’s restricted to colonoscopies in healthy patients.

[New machine could one day replace anesthesiologists]

But Sedasys, in development for 15 years, is no longer on the true cutting edge of what’s possible with automated anesthesia.

A machine with the clunky name of iControl-RP is. It’s an experimental device that pushes the boundaries of how much responsibility is turned over to technology. It monitors brain wave activity. And it’s even been tested on children.

One of the reasons that Sedasys was approved by U.S. health regulators is that it’s a conservative leap forward. The device is innovative, but it doesn’t decide alone how much anesthesia to give to a patient.

It’s an open-loop system. The initial dose is pre-determined based on a patient’s weight and age. And Sedasys only reduces or stops drug delivery if it detects problems. Only a doctor or nurse can up the dose. That gave regulators a level of comfort.

But the iControl-RP makes its own decisions. It is a closed-loop system.

This new device, being tested by University of British Columbia researchers, monitors a patient’s brain wave activity along with traditional health markers, such as blood oxygen levels, to determine how much anesthesia to deliver.

“We are convinced the machine can do better than human anesthesiologists,” said Mark Ansermino, one of the machine’s co-developers, who works as director of pediatric anesthesia research at the university’s medical school in Vancouver.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326592

Is D-Wave a Quantum Computer? (EE Times)

R. Colin Johnson

5/14/2015 08:52 PM EDT

Critics charge its not a “real” QC
PORTLAND, Ore.—Recently I had to explain to a reader why critics say that D-Wave’s so-called quantum computer was not a “real” quantum computer, the answer for which he accepted on my authority. However, the question kept nagging me in the back on my mind “why” D-Wave markets what it calls a quantum computer if it is not for real. To get to the bottom of it, I asked Jeremy Hilton, vice president of processor development of D-Wave Systems, Inc. (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) about why critics keep saying its quantum computer is not for real. He also revealed details about D-Wave’s next generation quantum computer.

“The Holy Grail of quantum computing to build a ‘universal’ quantum computer—one that can solve any computational problem—but at a vastly higher speed that today’s computers,” Hilton told EE Times. “That’s the reason some people say we don’t have a ‘real’ quantum computer—because D-Wave’s is not a ‘universal’ computer.”

D-Wave’s quantum computer, rather, only solves optimization problems, that is ones that can be expressed in a linear equation with lots of variables each with its own weight (the number that is multiplied times each variable). Normally, such linear equations are very difficult to solve for a conventional ‘universal’ computer, taking lots of iterations to find the optimal set of values for the variables. However, with D-Wave’s application-specific quantum computer, such problems can be solved in a single cycle.

“We believe that starting with an application-specific quantum processor is the right way to go—as a stepping stone to the Holy Grail—a universal quantum computer,” Hilton told us. “And that’s what D-Wave does—we just to optimization problems using qubits.”

There is considerably more detail.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, May 17, 2015

PLEDGE DRIVE OVER. If you forgot to subscribe or renew renew this is a great time to do it.

Sunday afternoon: I’ve just returned from Larry Niven’s birthday party. It was a great party, lots of old friends I don’t see often enough, and many of Larry’s relatives whom I don’t see at all except at his parties. I had discussions with people I’ve known a long time, and it was bracing: the world hasn’t all descended into madness where rational discussion is abandoned for Social Justice, whatever that means. I’d like to send you pix, but I can’t figure out how to get them off mi iPhone and it’s dinner time.  Or maybe I did.

Yep, here’s Roberta.  More later.

I’ve been a bit depressed all week, not because of this place, but another forum which I had thought was still rational, but which has turned poisonous, everyone looking for verbal errors so they can charge racism or sexism or check your privilege, thus winning whatever they thought was a contest, and ending all discussion before it starts. The obvious solution to that is to avoid such paces and only go where rational people of any persuasion make rational statements about what you’re talking about: who might and often do say You’re dead wrong! And here’s why, followed by some relevant statement, not an accusation of an “ism”., or a complaint that you have triggered some bad emotion, or offended someone, and thus you can’t say that.

And alas, finding rational discussion is rare now. It used to be that you could discuss such things as the size of the gay population – a question of fact, after all. Or what percentage of murders are committed by what minority populations, this preliminary to a discussion of educational policy and the point of education. Or – but you get the idea. If the data themselves have become too offensive to talk about, there is no point in the discussion.

So that’s one more place I won’t be going, and I am relieved because when Mr. Heinlein told me there was no way I could pay him back, I should pay forward, I thought participation in certain places where my experience might be helpful to younger people just getting started. I am sure that’s true, but hanging around in a toxic place infested with people of whose goal is to shout epithets at anyone they perceive as saying something that is offensive to some class, race, culture, or other collectivity – staying in that atmosphere is too high a price.

So if anyone wants advice from me, they’ll have to come to a less vicious discussion, and also understand that while I try to print all rational disagreements I simply ignore poisoning the well and proof by repeated assertion. Ah Well.

And I have to go now. I had one desert too many: my blood sugar is 156, which is quite high for me, and calls for some vigorous exercises as well as a protein dinner. I’ll be back later tonight or more probably tomorrow, with, I hope more time for here since I won’t be spending it elsewhere.

The pledge drive ends.   I was absent for most of the week, for which I apologize.  I’m pleased to announce we’ll still be here a while. 

How self-driving tractor-trailers may reinvent what it means to be a truck driver (WP)

Jerry,

    As you may remember, my career in computers ended for reasons seemingly beyond my control. I obtained my CDL and have been an Over The Road (OTR) driver for two years.

A couple comments on the article. Ultimately, this will not be good for drivers. Drivers are not well treated by most trucking companies. We work long and odd hours, often seven days a week, and are often away from home for weeks or months at a time. We generally only get paid when the ‘the wheels are turning’ and some companies don’t pay actual miles, but zip code to zip code or air miles. We often are involved in loading or unloading trucks, inspections, cleaning or maintaining equipment for which we get little or no pay. If we are stopped because of weather we get no pay and very little pay if the truck breaks down. Additionally, the Department of Transportation seems to delight in making life difficult for drivers through overly strict interpretation of regulations. A driver can be put ‘ out of service’ or even lose their license for a slight infraction, and it is often up to the officer at the scene’s interpretation with no recourse.

There are more examples but the picture I’m trying to paint is that most trucking companies consider drivers a necessary evil, not an asset and would like nothing more than to get them out of the cab. I’m sure that is why all the money and effort is going into the autonomous truck effort.

Now, I do want to say that some companies treat their drivers well. Mine does, giving me three pay raises this year, treating me like a valued member of the company and working with me when I need home time.

  There is currently an extreme shortage of drivers, and that may drive some of the research, but I believe the lure of not having to pay the three and a half million truck drivers currently on the road is a large part of it.

This is probably going to happen, but not for years. They will still need local delivery drivers for a long time. But I believe that truck driving is a profession on its way out.

I’m glad to answer any questions you may have.

Tracy

I probably will but not tonight. The subject is important, of course

Subject: Other items of interest (probably old hat to you)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/politics/pentagon-announces-new-cyberwarfare-strategy.html

http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/advanced-persistent-threat/understand-the-threat/

http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302026p.pdf

Our friend Fred Reed is sounding off on the subject of, well a lot of things including Presidential IQs.  He makes an unsourced assertion that the IQ of the 44th President is in the high 120s.  Which got me thinking about Chaos Manor, of which I’ve been an electronic neighbor for I-don’t-know-how-many-years.

Someone a couple of decades ago released the results of JFK’s IQ test, which came out at 117.  To my knowledge there has been no response from the Kennedy family nor the Kennedy Library.  Now consider one of your assertions of many years ago that an IQ of 115’s needed to benefit from college.  Based on the public record, therefore, you may justifiably say that Governor Palin’s as smart as JFK.

There are people who are rendered speechless by this announcement, but I’ve never had anyone gainsay me, certainly not by presenting proof that I’m wrong. 

And, yes, I say this when it renders people speechless who are much pleasanter to be around when speechless!

Yours Aye!

Rod McFadden

I owe you an essay on the uses of IQ, but alas I attempted to discuss elementals elsewhere, and discovered that bring up the data long agreed upon is no longer allowed: you must start over, first abasing yourself properly. So I shall write a summary here, Real Soon Now or preferably sooner; if there are new data I am not aware of, I will appreciate being informed along with the source. Thank you for the kind words.

For the few of you unaware of Fred Reed, you will find him at www.fredoneverything.net/ . Fred’s style is not mine, but he has reasons for the things he says.

NASA propulsion test media interview

Jerry,

Here is a link to a summary of the latest media interview following the strange propulsion test results.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3732

Sean

Insecure medical device

https://securityledger.com/2015/05/researcher-drug-pump-the-least-secure-ip-device-ive-ever-seen/?utm_content=buffera00bb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Adult supervision of the programmers needed?

Chris Barker

Quite possibly

Xinhua Insight: Robot factories China’s answer to labor shortage – Xinhua |

Jerry

Robot factories China’s answer to labor shortage:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-05/08/c_134221655.htm

Labor shortage?

I have seen this posted ass news in several places. This is from Xinhua, a mouthpiece of the Chinese government.

OK. The main point is that their coastal factories are sucking up labor, and that labor is pricing itself up high enough that the factories are looking to replace their human labor. But if you can use a robot to make things in China, you should be able to do it anywhere.

Limits to robo-factories: NIMBY regs that make it difficult to build any factory; and lack of engineers trained to build factories that make things.

The key is now that skilled labor in traditionally low-wage places is not so low-wage any more, either the factories move to low-wage places like Viet Nam and (ho ho) Africa — as low-wage work moved from Japan to China in the last century – or factories could move to be in the markets where their products are sold. An example of the latter is Japanese car factories in the US.

An Apple iPhone built in the US? Could happen . . .

Ed

But robots are cheaper and more powerful every year; while our schools are probably not better year by year…

There will always be a large island off the west coast of France…

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sword_in_the_stone.png

> A bit of ‘adult’ language in this post – but entirely justified, IMHO.

Surely this is a hoax?

<http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terrorism-bill-extremism-disruption-orders-david-cameron>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/04/military-eyeing-former-cold-war-mountain-bunker-as-shield-against-emp-attack/

NASA Announces Bold Plan To Still Exist By 2045

Hi Jerry,
I for one am shocked — shocked I say — to learn that NASA is now fully committed to the Iron Law.
http://www.theonion.com/article/nasa-announces-bold-plan-still-exist-2045-50398
—
Anthony DiSante

Yes, of course you are.

Dear Jerry –

Aaaand I do believe we have an Ig-Nobel finalist:

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-bugs-penis-shorter-reproduction-chances.html

“A small team of researchers from the University of St Andrews and one from the University of Bristol, both in the UK has found, not surprisingly, that snipping a certain bugs’ penis caused it to have less success in producing offspring. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Liam Dougherty, Imran Rahman, Emily Burdfield-Steel, E. V. Greenway and David Shuker describe their experiments with Lygaeus simulans bugs and what they learned through their efforts.”

Apparently, size does matter.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Here is a review of Scientific American’s “50” trends from 2005. Now ten years later, most of these breakthroughs are “still working on it” or have been superseded by something else. It is difficult to make predictions, it’s been said, especially about the future.
http://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-from-10-years-ago-1701106456/+mattnovak
Mike

While many of us have probably thought about donut shaped planets, Anders Sandberg has actually done the math, here:
http://io9.com/what-would-the-earth-be-like-if-it-was-the-shape-of-a-d-1515700296

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/11605127/325-for-a-cup-of-coffee-has-the-world-gone-mad.html

Much forecasting turns out to be wrong, especially the type which simply extrapolates from the past. Yet there is one such forecast, subsequently dubbed “Moore’s Law”, which has proved spectacularly correct. In 1975, Gordon Moore, then head of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, predicted that the number of semi-conductors that could fit on to a single computer chip would roughly double every year. Fifty years later, his prediction still holds true. Computing power doubles annually. This extraordinary, wealth-enhancing advance was driven not by starry eyed utopianism, but by the profit motive, the desire for improvement, and by viciously competitive commercial endeavour.

Mr Moore was interviewed recently by the New York Times. In all respects he sounded a wise and decent man. Yet his most perceptive observation was perhaps a social one. There are two societies, he said, divided by education. The worry about the modern world is not the rise of the super rich, or its manifestation in the extraordinary prices being paid for art. Inequality doesn’t matter if most people are getting richer. What matters is that the world is fast dividing into those with skills, and those without them. Attacking and undermining wealth creation won’t address this problem, but likely only make it even worse.

Asteroid?

Hi Jerry,

Here’s the actual data from NASA on 1999 FN53:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO;hmax=all;sort=date;sdir=ASC;tlim=current;dmax=0.1AU;max_rows=20;action=Display%20Table;show=1&from=40

It doesn’t even make the SpaceWeather.com NEO list at all. I guess I trust their judgment about what’s important a lot more than a hyperventilating journalist!

Cheers,

Doug

Well, yes, I trust that was plenty clear.

: Re: My guess is that the train engineer was texting/IMing or doing something else with his phone, and wasn’t paying attention until it was too late.

On 15 May 2015, at 0:42, Jerry Pournelle wrote:

> That would be my surmise

. . . or, maybe he decided to make his points about train safety with a bit more *emphasis*:

<http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/engineer-derailed-train-ranted-safety-article-1.2222338>

Something’s wrong, here.

Your impressions are worth following up. And some fired at the train preceding him

Iran and “There Will Be War” Vol 1

Dr. Pournelle,
Just finished TWBW v1, and enjoyed it. You mentioned at the time of its re-release that you thought the stories in the anthology still held up today. In light of the Iran nuclear treaty and ISIS, I’d have to say “Diaspora: A Prologue” by W.R. Yates is perfectly pertinent and by itself justifies the new printing. This was a new story to me and very timely.
I’d seen about a third of the content before, and you’ve described about as much in other writing, but much was completely new. It was good to have it all in one spot, and I read all but the Phillip K. Dick piece “The Defenders” (I had just completed a PKD collection, and had seen it too recently).
I also found a piece of your introduction pertinent: “…when soldiers have succeeded in eliminating war, or at least in keeping the battles far from home…it is then that their masters generally despise them.” Seems to me to be true of the conflicts since the original publication.
I am looking forward to Volume 2. Thanks
-d

Buffynomics

Dr. Pournelle,
What we have here, with discussion of Buffy’s billing cycle, is a failure of disbelief: few chronicles exist describing the income tax returns of Roland or Galahad (or Jesus, for that matter). We sometimes hear of rewards from those rescued who are both rich and grateful, and certainly expect that St. George or Bilbo get to keep at least some of the dragon’s spoils, but modern accounting was really invented during the renaissance, and is not an interesting part of the epic cycle.
I expect Buffy should be able to keep the spoils: hock the valuables of those dispatched. She’s in it for the bling. Don’t tell the IRS – I don’t know if she declared any of it.
Of course, at any scale of production, this model would mean that the richest dragons and vampires would become the highest priority targets, and become more rare over time. Like soaking the rich, eventually one just runs out of high-value targets and it doesn’t pay to go after the remaining population. We will eventually be at least knee deep in poor vampires and dragons requiring government assistance.
-d

Navy Robots Test the Limits of Autonomy

By THE NEW YORK TIMESMAY 6, 2015     nyt

Navy robotics engineers are working to develop autonomous tools that can integrate with other technologies. But in field tests, the autonomous future still seems far away.

By Zackary Canepari, Drea Cooper and Emma Cott on Publish Date May 6, 2015.

This is the second episode in a Bits video series, called Robotica, examining how robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives.

At a naval research facility along a stretch of the Pacific Coast in San Diego, civilian engineers work alongside active-duty troops to develop and test the next generation of military robots.

The engineers are members of the Unmanned Systems Group at Spawar, or Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, a research and operations arm of the Navy. Their mandate is simple: Take the soldier out of the minefield.

When autonomous systems are deployed, engineers at the center say they will revolutionize the way the military fights. They envision a day when one soldier will control an entire fleet of driverless trucks, or a driverless vehicle will make a road safe for a Humvee full of troops. They could also assist in detecting and combatting chemical or biological warfare.

Chris Scrapper is leading a team of engineers who envision an autonomous future. On a recent afternoon, they were tapping away at computers to analyze data from a failed run with RaDer (it stands for reconnaissance and detection expendable rover), the boxy black vehicle they’re trying to make drive on its own.

It’s hard to say when autonomous technologies will be ready for use in combat, Mr. Scrapper said, adding, “It depends on the threat level.”

Remote-controlled unmanned robots have been in use by the military for over a decade. IRobot’s Pakbot defuses bombs, armed drones track and strike their targets and the MK-18, an underwater torpedo-shaped vehicle, mimics a dolphin’s sonar to locate mines on the ocean floor. What these robots have in common is that there is one person directly controlling them.

Mr. Scrapper and his colleagues see the future of combat as using fewer humans to control more machines. While there will always be a human operator involved, they say, that operator may be in touch with several autonomous devices at a time.

Mr. Scrapper says that the technology they have developed is “mission-agnostic and platform-agnostic,” meaning that the same technology that makes a Humvee autonomous could be incorporated into a boat or a bomb-defusing robot.

So while he says his engineers are not working on weaponizing autonomous robots, their technology could be used for that purpose in the future.

His goal, and the one funded by the Office of Naval Research, is to make a tool that keeps troops out of harm’s way and frees them up for tasks that require human ingenuity and imagination.— Emma Cott

: Iran vs U.S Navy

We have a piece of possible — and I use the term “possible”

charitably — propaganda from Iran:

<.>

A U.S. warship and several planes reportedly “changed their direction”

on Monday after encountering an Iranian naval fleet during a patrol in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen, Iranian state media revealed.

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http://freebeacon.com/national-security/report-iranian-navy-chases-after-u-s-warships/

However, this is more interesting:

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The Pentagon says that U.S. Navy warships are no longer accompanying American and British-flagged commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

</>

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_GULF_INCIDENT_WARSHIPS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-05-06-13-53-58

This after the attack on the Marshall Islands ship, which is tantamount to an attack on U.S. flagged vessel. I have nothing constructive to say at this point.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Niven and Barnes were here all morning and we had a highly successful story conference, then an excellent lunch at Hugo’s on Riverside at Coldwater. If you live around here you will either like Hugo’s or find it weird; my wife and Niven love it, and I find it better than acceptable, but it does have an unusual cuisine.

We continue toward a nuclear Iran, but no one talks about it. By the time Presidential debates begin, it will truly be too late.

Is President Obama not aware of this? How can he not be? And if so, what is the goal?

And what will Israel do? Do they have truly survivable second strike capability? Since the only value is as deterrent, and a secret deterrent is unrealistic – probably useless – this seems unlikely. If the White House has a secret strategic purpose here, I cannot discern it; and Iran goes closer to possession of a nuke every day.

Meanwhile, Russia experiments. Estonia is a NATO member, meaning that the US nuclear umbrella is already in place. An attack on Estonia, up at the east end of the Baltic, is an attack on us. When Iran has the bomb and Russia is restraining the Revolutionary Guard, what is NATO to do if green men cross into Estonia?

`

May 12th View

Thank Roland for me, please, for picking up that asteroid story.
I have bookmarked it as a perfect exemplar of the modern “Progressive.”
The supposedly intelligent and educated person that looks out of their Manhattan apartment window (or London flat, in this case) and thinks that the whole world is just like what they see.
Who thinks that the technology we have today has always existed – so, of course, the Black Death should have been easily controllable with streptomycin and pesticides.
Who believes that whatever his own little circle of friends tells him is, of course, the gospel truth (although not having anything to do with a purely imaginary God). So the Death must have been spread by something that caused a “mal aria” – not the onset of the Little Ice Age (with the accompanying bad weather and malnutrition from crop failures) that the AGW “scientists” have airbrushed out of the climate record.

Richard

The Theology of Climate Change.

<http://takimag.com/article/the_theology_of_climate_change_theodore_dalrymple/print>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

The paragraph I have quoted was truly representative of the intellectual quality and honesty of what followed. ‘Climate change,’ say the authors, ‘is the largest global health threat of the 21st century and, despite limited empirical evidence, it is expected directly and indirectly to harm communities’ psychosocial well-being.’ This is not so much science as it is religion, in which the god worshipped is the bringer-bout of future catastrophe, a kind of Kali, whose destructiveness must be appeased by word, puja and sacrifice.

In Defense of Pamela Geller – WSJ

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-pamela-geller-1431386626

Robert

In Defense of Pamela Geller

A society that rejects the notion of a heckler’s veto cannot accept the idea of a murderer’s veto.

I note that Freeman Dyson has repeatedly said that we do not know enough to be Climate Change Believers. We simply have not the data.

Firefox 38 asks ‘would you like DRM with that?’ (ZD)

Summary:A year since Mozilla announced it was adopting digital rights management in Firefox to allow streaming from services such as Netflix, the first release with DRM enabled has appeared.

By Chris Duckett | May 13, 2015 — 06:26 GMT (23:26 PDT)

Firefox users now have a choice with the release of version 38 of the web browser: To have DRM, or not to have DRM.

With the latest release of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox now arrives with Adobe’s Content Decryption Module (CDM) to allow playback of DRM content on services such as Netflix.

Mozilla senior vice president of business and legal affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, said in a blog post that the CDM will be downloaded from Adobe shortly after installing or upgrading to Firefox 38, and will be activated the first time a user interacts with a site needing CRM.

“We don’t believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it’s currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content,” Dixon-Thayer said.

Users will have the ability to disable or uninstall the CDM from within the browser, and for users that are determined to be without any DRM technology, Mozilla is also offering a version of Firefox without Adobe’s CDM.

“Because DRM is a ‘black-box’ technology that isn’t open source, we have designed a security sandbox that sits around the CDM,” Dixon-Thayer said. “We can’t be sure how other browsers have handled the ‘black-box’ issue but a sandbox provides a necessary layer of security.”

I have not given this sufficient thought

How a $9 computer could change the way we think about computing (WP)

By Dominic Basulto May 13 at 7:00 AM

For $9, you will soon be able to buy an insanely cheap computer the size of a credit card that runs Linux and comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB storage, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. While that’s enough computing power to surf the Web, play video games, check e-mail and use word processing software, the real potential is what DIY innovators, hackers and inventors will do with this cheap computing platform once they integrate it into other projects.

The world’s first $9 computer — known as C.H.I.P. — won’t be available for shipping until early 2016. For now, it’s still only a Kickstarter project with nearly a month to go – but the promise and potential of a crazy cheap computer is so alluring that the Oakland, Calif. company behind the project – Next Thing Co. – has already raised more than $925,000 from more than 18,000 backers in just a few days, easily blowing past the $50,000 they had hoped to raise via Kickstarter.

C.H.I.P. comes from the same innovation oeuvre as the $35 Raspberry Pi — a credit-card size computer that is cheap, portable, highly programmable and highly connectable. So if Raspberry Pi has managed to attract a worldwide user community at a price point of $35, you can just imagine what the lower-cost, more powerful C.H.I.P. might be able to do once it attracts a critical mass of users.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.