Whoever's right on the state of play in the drones vs. tanks arms race, in one sense this isn't a paradigm shift. The drones being used in Nagorno-Karabakh weren't autonomous, but remotely controlled by humans. In that sense they're just another incremental step in a process of humans being able to kill other humans ever more remotely. The process had already gone far enough for George Orwell to comment on how far we as a species had anonymised killing through technology eighty years ago:
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
To quote again that old passage from Ecclesiastes, which was a favourite of Orwell's for its simple, resonant language:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Except, maybe there is a new thing under the sun. Remote killing where no human directly identifies a target and an algorithm decides who's friend or foe, who lives and who dies. Concerned AI researchers have been making a noise about this possibility for some time. The recent sci fi short film Slaughterbots highlighted the danger. Slaughterbots is fiction, but according to a UN report cited by Ed Nash, a Slaughterbot-style autonomous drone may have already killed without any human being directly involved in the target selection. Last year.
If you didn't already think 2020 was unsettling enough, this five minute video might change your mind:
I just had a reminder of this photo, which I took in Brighton over a decade ago. A few things have changed since then. My son, who was just about the right size to captain this hobbit-scale sub is now as tall as me (give or take; it's hard to tell when his default posture's the stereotypical teenage slouch).
But I'm still coming across subs out there which look like takes on Jules Verne's fictional Nautilus. A more or less unrelated search recently came back with this:
Although it dates from the around same era when I took my picture, this is no cartoonishly cute sculpture, or theme park attraction, but an attempt at an actual working submarine (well, a semi-submersible, anyway), designed and built with deadly purpose by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, in the closing days of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Like the sculpture, this is on a far smaller scale than Nemo's Nautilus (it's a midget semi-sub, probably only around a 10th of the length of the fictional 70 metre Nautilus). Interestingly, Hutton also compares it to a Nineteenth Century submersible, but a real one. That's because, like the Confederate Civil War-era sub the Huntley, the Tamil Tigers' vessel looks as if it was designed to attack ships by ramming them with a spar torpedo attached to the pole sticking out of its bow.
It wasn't a search for this iconic proto-steampunk design which originally led me to Hutton's blog, though. I was initially looking for information on another a piece of retro futurism from a later era, namely this sleek deco-looking experimental helicopter design from the 1930s:
Like the Tamil Tigers' mini-Nautilus, the Dorand G20 Gyroplane looks like something that's sprung out of the pages of vintage Science Fiction into real life. In this case, if you ever had a mental picture of the ubiquitous helicopters which flitted around the art deco skyscrapers in Huxley's Brave New World, carrying the Alphas and Betas to and from their places of work, consumption or leisure, it probably looked like something like this.
Like the Tamil mini sub, though, this helicopter was orignally built with more aggressive intentions - there was an idea that the Dorand would replace the spotter plane which was kept on board France's massive inter-war Surcouf cruiser submarine (that's the link which originally brought me to the Covert Shores blog).
The Dorand Gyroplane isn't quite as insanely art deco as the never-flown Bugatti racing plane from the same era, but it comes pretty damn close.
Definitely at the more elegant end of the very wide spectrum of French aircraft designs from the 1930s. As somone once said:
I've been watching the old BBC series, Quatermass and the Pit on BBC iPlayer recently, and enjoying it a lot. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend it (or the film version), especially if you're planning to read the rest of this post (spoilers ahoy!).
I was struck was how unexpectedly similar some of the underlying ideas, themes and major plot elements were to a very different Sci Fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Namely:
Both involve the discovery and excavation of an ancient alien artifact: the Martian spacecraft buried under London in Quatermass, the lunar monolith in 2001.
In both stories, the authorities try to keep the discovery a secret with cover stories. In Quatermass, the alien spacecraft is explained away as an unidentified German V weapon that had fallen on London in World War 2. In 2001, the moon base is quarantined on the pretext of an outbreak of some unidentified disease.
In both cases, the aliens who left the artifact behind altered the minds of our ancient hominid ancestors, pushing them towards greater intelligence and putting them on to the path to being human.
In both cases the seemingly inert alien artifact is activated by being exposed to a power source, leading to the climax of the story.
The human propensity for violence and its origin hangs over both stories. The Quatermass Martians bequeath intelligence to the hominids, but also their own propensity for violence, which we are told, stems form the insect-like Martians' instinct carry out periodic eugenic purges of their hives, in order to exterminate the unfit. In 2001, the aliens are presented as inscrutable, rather than evil, but it's also clear that, along with the gift of intelligence, their intervention also gifted our ancestors with the weapons, and perhaps the desire, to kill one another.
Quatemass and the Pit ends with a warning that the human race may destroy itself if it fails to curb the drive towards violence and weapon-making abilities that came, along with our intelligence from the aliens. This theme isn't made so explicit in the film version of 2001, (in the famous jump cut from bone club to orbiting satellite, it's never made clear that the first few spacecraft are orbiting weapons of mass destruction) but the novel is a lot less coy about the continuity of human violence.
At first sight, it seems as if Clarke might have been, perhaps unconsciously, influenced by this 1950s TV series. But, despite the striking similarities, it's probably not that simple. Quatermass and the Pit was first broadcast on the BBC in the winter of 1958-9, after Arthur C Clarke had moved permanently to Sri Lanka, and the film version didn't come out until 1967, (filming of 2001had already started in 1965).
Also, the two elements (the discovery of an ancient alien artifact and aliens encountering ancient humans) had been explored in two of Arthur C Clarke's earlier short stories, The Sentinel (1951) and Encounter in the Dawn (1953), so it could even be that Nigel Kneale was influenced by Clarke's short stories when writing this Quatermass tale, rather than the other way round. Or maybe the parallels are just coincidence, but they've intriguing enough to be worth a bit more digging when I've got the time/inclination. Who knows what I might uncover...
Oh, I do like to be beside the brutalist architecture beside the seaside. The looming concrete bulk of Torquay's Riviera Centre, doing a fair impression of an angular space cruiser in low orbit around a blue planet (possibly Earth).
'I don’t believe in science.' Man who thinks Earth is flat plans to launch self on a rocket
...“I don’t believe in science,” said Hughes, whose main sponsor for the rocket is Research Flat Earth. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”
Klingons and Romulans and Vulcans, oh my! Except, when you see what the scientists' speculations/educated guesses actually were, you begin to wonder whether the folks at Newsweek, the Indy and BGR even bothered to read what the boffins wrote:
The piece is helpfully illustrated with pictures of imagined aliens which look, respectively, like some kind of tentacled polyp surmounted by a tiny umbrella and a giant mutant tardigrade.
*Even the UFO-believers-style aliens at the top of the article in The Conversation look several times more human than anything the article is actually suggesting.
________
Update - while it's easy to sum up what these scientists weren't claiming (that aliens will look anything like humans or, for that matter, like anything else on earth), it's harder to make out what specific claim they were making. You only need to read the title of P. Z. Myers' post on the subject ("We can predict that aliens exist, if aliens exist") to tell that at least one biologist is completely unimpressed by the alleged specificity of these "predictions" about alien biology.
Aidan Powlesland, who is standing for parliament in the rural seat of South Suffolk, told BuzzFeed News he wants to set aside £100 million for "an interstellar colony ship design" and £30 million for an "interstellar nano-probe fleet design" designed to attract the attention of Russian investor Yuri Milner, and will provide a £1 billion prize to any private company that can mine the asteroid belt by 2026.
Asked whether asteroid mining was a priority for most UKIP voters – compared to issues such as immigration controls – Powlesland replied: "I suppose the absence of the centrality of a proposition within a general dialogue doesn’t necessarily mean that the dialogue is heading in the correct direction."
...Powlesland's election leaflet also includes a pledge to cut the welfare cap from £20,000 per household to £10,500, abolishing all residential planning legislation to encourage housebuilding, repealing employment laws that entrench "political correctness" so companies can "hire and fire at will", and stopping road construction – because we will soon all be travelling by flying cars.
Other flagship policies include buying "ten flying aircraft carriers" for the armed forces – apparently reviving the large-scale zeppelin programmes of the 1930s – and investing in electromagnetic-pulse submarines. He would deploy 15,000 British troops close to the Russia's border, although in a symbolic gesture of friendship he would also make it easier for Russian tourists to travel to the UK.
In an age when entertainment value trumps sane policymaking every time, ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.
Vote Powlesland. You know it makes sense. Especially if they give all the Ukippers a one-way ticket on the interstellar colony ship,
Golgafrinchan B Ark-style.
That old popcorn blockbuster Independence Day was was an unoriginal, but popular, take on a well-worn Sci-Fi trope where squabbling humanity finally learns how to work together and forget its differences in the face of a looming alien menace. And just in time for Independence Day 2017, somebody's noticed an inhuman menace that makes me want to make common cause with humans everywhere - even the person leading the charge, a self-proclaimed American neocon:
...a phenomenon that’s grown more and more frequent over time: the stupendously annoying coercive forced-choice. It is presented by the pop-up window that offers you something you don’t want and didn’t ask for—be it an update or a service or a product or a website link—and then gives you a choice of responses. But the responses aren’t a simple “yes” or “no.” And definitely you never get to choose “go away and leave me alone forever.”
Instead, you get a variant of something snide and sarcastic, where the supposed “no” response reads something like “I don’t want this wonderful free service because I’m a moron.” Or you get a response that isn’t “no” at all but “later.”
I'm a liberal-minded lefty and even I approve this message.
If you really want to unite all humanity, harnessing our shared hatred of patronising nagware is clearly the way to go.
Whoa ... "No thanks, I'm not interested in saving money" it says here. Right, that does it. I am so going to nuke you, you condescending assholes ...*
*Spoiler alert- if you've not already read H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, do so immediately, or read on at your own peril...*
I've just been re-reading the first alien invasion novel, H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, and I can see again why it created a genre all of its own and why it immediately grabbed me as a child. Mainly because it's such a cracking yarn - the alien visitation starts off as an intriguing curiosity, but escalates to being, ominous, threatening, awe-inspiring and terrifying at an unstoppable pace that mirrors the relentless advance of Well's iconic Martian tripods, seen here in one of the novel's big reveals:
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand... Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about.
That's a fantastic piece of writing and there are lots more like it. The book also has its expository digressions, where the action stops and Wells explains things rather than just showing you awesome stuff, but these aren't too long (at least by the standards of the time when Wells was writing) and by this stage he's already created enough momentum to keep you gripped and reading on. Compare and contrast with that other piece of proto-sci-fi, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which also starts with strange, ominous events, building up to an exciting reveal and some great set pieces, but is so weighted down with the ballast of endless pages of over-long explanation that Verne almost sinks the cracking yarn he created.*
If the The War of the Worlds looks forward to every alien invasion yarn that followed, it also looks back to an aesthetic trope that's probably been around for ever, but was largely formalised in the Eighteenth Century and peaked with early Nineteenth Century Romanticism - the sublime. That's the idea that humans don't just appreciate things which are beautiful in an ordered, harmonious way, but also dig stuff that's wild, inhuman in scale and frankly terrifying - as the Tate Britain put it, in the blurb to an exhibition dedicated to "Art and the Sublime":
The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757). Burke’s definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as
darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and
suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of
pleasurable terror.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was
associated in particular with the immensity or turbulence of Nature and
human responses to it. Consequently, in Western art, ‘sublime’
landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period,
often represent towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms
and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually
experienced, would be life threatening.
Compare Wells's description of the towering Martian tripod with William Wordsworth describing his youthful memory of stealing a boat and rowing out onto Ullswater at night, in The Prelude. As young Wordsworth looks back guiltily at a peak overlooking the lake, the huge, shadowy, inhuman form seems, by an unsettling trick of perspective, to be pursuing his boat:
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me...
Wordsworth's looming peak only looked threatening, but extreme fans of the sublime had access to far more hardcore material than that. Wells's Martians may have wreaked terrible destruction on the South East of England, but even they would have had a hard time competing with acts of God. The Almighty's awesome destructive capacity was given the sublime treatment by popular Nineteenth Century painter John Martin, in a series of massive, full-frontal disaster porn canvasses like The Great Day of His Wrath:
It's the end of the World as we know it (and I feel fine).
Sublimely terrifying and imaginative though Well's Martian tripods are, it's probably best not to think too hard about how they work. According to Wells's description, the unearthly three-legged machines move like "a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground" and elsewhere he writes of their swiftness and "rolling" motion, which is vivid enough.
But if the whole machine is whirling around to pivot from one leg to the next, surely the Martian pilot within is also being whirled around, unable to stay facing the machine's direction of travel (or any other fixed direction) and getting horribly dizzy, (assuming that the Martian vestibular system can suffer from dizziness).
Maybe the tripod legs whirl around, but the cowl housing the Martian pilot doesn't. But that would imply that controlling part of the machine is mounted on some sort of axle or pivot, which, according to Wells, isn't the way the Martians, with their biomimetic technology, do things:
And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion...
...And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained.
Of course, this might just be one of the singularly rare occasions when the Martians did make use of the fixed pivot, but it definitely goes against the Martians' overriding design ethos. Or maybe the cowl isn't on a pivot, just hyper-mobile, like an owl's head:
But this would present difficulties of its own - if the tripod rolled around in only one direction, the head would eventually have to snap back round, even if it could stay pointing in one direction for a while. If the tripod alternated its direction of roll, a hyper-mobile head would work, but the change from whirling in one direction to another would would be inefficient, robbing the machine of momentum, just as it was getting onto a roll.
Movie versions of the novel have struggled (or not tried) to reproduce the motion of the Martian tripods, as described by Wells. In the 1953 film adaptation, the special effects people decided that they just wouldn't be able to create a convincing walking tripod and opted to redesign the Martian fighting machines as floating manta ray-shaped craft, topped with a heat ray on a flexible mounting that looked like a striking cobra. In a nod to the original novel, the film's hero scientist explains that the seemingly unsupported Martian craft are actually held up in mid air and moved by means of three invisible "electromagnetic legs."
With the advent of CGI, a later generation of special effects wizards
were finally able to produce a plausible-looking version of the Wellsian
tripods for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation - sort of. In some
ways the CGI works well and the tripod machines have some of the
Wellsian details right. For example, the limbs are flexible, just as
Wells described, looking more like a supple living thing than a stiff,
jointed mechanism
.
But the motion is distinctly un-Wellsian - Spielberg's tripods don't whirl forwards with an unstoppable rolling gait, but pick their three-legged way through the ruins like a dog with an injured paw, or a human walking with one good leg, a plaster cast and a crutch. I don't think this really catches the essence of Wells's vision, where the tripods signified two things. First, alienness - no creature on our planet has evolved to walk on three legs. Second, implacable swiftness - it's clear from the original novel that the Martian machines move fast and efficiently on their three legs, bearing down like express trains on the puny humans in their path, pursuing and outflanking them with ease.
To date, nobody (AFAIK) has been able to represent, or reproduce the sort of tripod locomotion Wells described so vividly. Whether this is a failure of imagination, technical skill, or just a reflection of the fact that it's impossible to translate Wells's vision into actual engineering, I don't know (although the fact that terrestrial biology has taken millions of years not to come up with a working three-legged creature might point to three legs just being an inefficient number for a walker).
An impossible form of locomotion, or just one nobody's figured out yet? You decide.
*To be fair, I've only read it in translation and it probably sounds better in French, but the endless pauses in the action when Verne just stops everything to list species of fish, or whatever, must be just as boring in any language.
... a T. Rex that lived 65 million years ago is closer to seeing a live Miley Cyrus concert than to seeing a live Stegosaurus.
Fellow dinosaurs who are old enough to remember Marc Bolan can insert their own jokes here.
This public information announcement was brought to you via the short animation The History andFuture of Everything - Time, on the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt.
Is the end of the labour market's race to the bottom in sight? At the moment it's a global fact of life - corporations get their manufacturing (and sometimes call centre work, data entry and programming) done wherever local wages are cheapest. And if the cheapest country does well and local wages go up, well there's always an even poorer country somewhere to move operations to, and so on, until, one day in the future, we'll finally reach the bedrock of the very poorest country with the requisite skills and infrastructure becoming the workshop / call centre of the world.
But some recent headlines suggested to me that we might not see many more iterations of this process. Adidas is opening a new factory where shoes will be made, not by low-wage people in Asia, but by high-tech robots in Germany. If robots can make trainers more cost-effectively than people in the Global South, that's a lot of potential work that won't be going to the lowest bidder. And if they have a robo-cobbler next year, what might happen to the global garment trade, if a viable robo-tailor comes along the year after that?
In other news, McDonald's has denied that it has any plans to replace people currently doing minimum-wage McJobs with robots. This one looks less like a serious suggestion than the usual corporate sob story about how being obliged to pay the very lowest earners a little extra might force put-upon bosses to do something terrible.
But although it may be an empty threat this time around, you can see how an environment where cooking has been replaced by the production-line assembly and heating of standardised food product elements could be very robot-friendly. Just as they might delete the competitive advantage of low-wage economies globally, robots might also terminate the employability of many minimum-wage humans locally.
And if this does come to pass? Well, I guess we're looking at big changes from business as usual. The changes might be Utopian - redistribution of wealth globally and in-country, Universal Basic Incomes, Keynes's 15 hour working week and so forth. Or they might be dystopian - the sci-fi libertarians' nightmarish vision of a society divided between a few fabulously wealthy technocratic capital owners living in climate-controlled domes, being waited on by their robo-butlers (when they're not off cruising the Solar System in their gold-plated space yachts), versus an obsolete underclass, which has degenerated into a workless, hopeless, brutish unnecessariat, milling menacingly outside the gilded elite's gated compounds.
Given the low levels of political clout the have-nots can deploy, maybe our best hope for avoiding the dystopian outcome is if the robots come for the high-status jobs first. Influential people may see the displacement of a fast-food employee by a McBot as something regrettable happening to an undeserving nobody they don't know or care about, but when robo-lawyer starts terminating a few high-status jobs, done by Nice People Like Us, then the movers and shakers might discover that we are all in this together and that Something Must Be Done.
Of course, as you’re reading this, you’re experiencing a ‘now’. But consider: from your great-grandmother’s perspective, your nows exist in her future and her great-grandmother’s nows exist in her past. The words ‘past’ and ‘future’ are just ideas relative to each individual observer.
So what happened to your great-grandmother after she died? To start with – since time doesn’t exist – there is no ‘after death’, except the death of her physical body in your now. Since everything is just nows, there is no absolute space/time matrix for her energy to dissipate – it’s simply impossible for her to have ‘gone’ anywhere.
Think of it like one of those old phonographs. The information on the record is turned into a three-dimensional reality that we can experience a moment at a time. All the other information on the record exists as potential. Any causal history leading up to the ‘now’ being experienced can be thought of as the ‘past’ (ie, the songs that played before wherever the needle is), and any events that follow occur in the ‘future’; these parallel nows are said to be in superposition. Likewise, the before-death state, including your current life with its memories, goes back into superposition, into the part of the record that represents just information.
In short, death does not actually exist.
It's a startling theory - or rather it would be to anybody who's never read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five:
That was science fiction, not science, and there are plenty of physicists who'd argue with Berman and Lanza's view of the nature of time and reality, but it's an interesting idea. Even if it is true, I wouldn't necessarily go along with Berman and Lanza's cheery assertion that their view of time and mortality is less troubling than the idea of past time just disappearing and oblivion being real:
...let’s recap the scientific view of death: essentially, you drop dead and that’s the end of everything. This is the view favoured by intellectuals who pride themselves on being stoic and realistic enough to avoid cowardly refuge in Karl Marx’s spiritual ‘opium’ – the belief in an afterlife. This modern view is not a cheerful one.
But the fact that moments are eternal might be irrelevant if it's only the ordering of events by the passage of time that makes us conscious that anything's happening at all. The moments might be eternal, but our consciousness might only exist in time, leaving us as unaware of the "eternal" moments of our lives as if we'd been snuffed out. And even if events are permanent in some way that makes a difference to us, it might still take a lot of stoicism to face the fact that every moment of our lives is eternal - the worst moment of your life as much as the best, and every point in between. Eternal joy and eternal suffering.
When it comes down to the most fundamental level of reality, nobody (yet) knows what's true. And, since there's no particular reason to expect the Universe to be constructed in accordance with our fondest wishes, that might be just as well. But, whatever the truth, reality is whatever it is, so you might as well roll with it. Or, to quote another Sci Fi classic "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so" and, more importantly, "DON'T PANIC!"
I can't help thinking that the Carmagnolle brothers deserved an Oscar for costume design when they created this nightmarish entity out of a sci-fi horror movie:
But they never got one, because:
a) they created this in 1878, when moving pictures weren't yet a gleam in the Lumière brothers' eyes
and
b) they weren't really trying to design a horrific cybernetic monster with freakish multiple eyes - just a diving suit.
But that's still the most frightening thing I've seen in a long time.
But change the question slightly, to "Can a robot do your job?" and I reckon the answer could be "yes", at least if your job is big and important enough to require your presence at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Because, heaven help me, I've just spent about three irreplaceable minutes of my time on this good earth reading the " best" quotes from the thought leaders present at Davos 2016 and am now totally convinced that every line could have been generated, without human intervention, by something like this, or this, or this.
The human race is probably decades away from creating a robo-tailor or a robo-plumber, but we could probably replace Christine Lagarde with a cybernetic substitute tomorrow and not notice any difference. Although she may be part way there already - judging by the black Sci-fi villain outfit she seems to be wearing in the first quote, she's already putting the Davros into Davos, or morphing from an organic entity into the Borg Queen - which would sort of make sense of her quote - "Resistance is futile, sisters, you will be assimilated into the Internet of Women!"
... or PAS for short, should come in as a handy filler if they're stuck for yet another new disorder to pad out DSM-6, the next milestone in the ongoing Let's Medicalise Every Human Personality Trait project. Here's a case study for some enterprising psychiatrist eager to spot and classify the next big thing in personality disorders:
An IT help desk staffer at New York City's Health Department is facing his second suspension for answering customer calls in a robot voice.
Ronald Dillon has worked for the Health Department since 1976, and holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics as well as an MBA.
He was once a project manager and supervisor at the Health Department, but three years ago was transferred to the help desk job, reported DNAinfo...
...[Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings Judge Ingrid] Addison stated that Dillon seemed to have a chip on his shoulder regarding his position at the Health Department.
"What was apparent from his rambling explanation and his general testimony was that he felt his skills and education to be superior to the requirements of his current job, especially given the kinds of projects to which he had been previously assigned," she said...
Marvin was, of course, the result of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation's ill-advised attempt to build robots with Genuine People Personalities, although in our enlightened time, all non-standard personality traits have been reclassified as disorders, because 'the subject meets the diagnostic criteria for PAS' makes you sound way smarter than 'that guy was acting like a jerk.'
The latest batch of Pluto images downloaded from the New Horizons probe look alien and stunning, sure enough. But to me, they also look both unreal and strangely familiar. They remind me of the artwork from some vintage science fiction film, an alien world as imagined by a visual effects artist from the 1950s.
To see what I mean, compare Pluto with the planet Altair IV, as visualised for the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet - the desolate plains, punctuated by towering mountain ranges, the hazy, layered atmosphere. The only thing missing from the New Horizons download is Louis and Bebe Barron's unearthly electronic film score.
Science fact is finally starting to look like science fiction.
The Forbidden Planet image was nicked from NZ Pete's Matte Shot blog, a highly-recommended wunderkammer of cinematic visual effects artistry, in what I hope is an act of fair use.
...it is rather more the concern of the poor to stand up for the laws than of the rich; for it is the law which defends the weak against the strong, the humble against the powerful, the little against the great; and weak and strong, humble and powerful, little and great there would be, even were there no laws whatever. Beside; what after all is the mischief? The owner of a great estate does not eat or drink more than the owner of a small one. His fields do not produce worse crops, nor does the produce maintain fewer mouths. If estates were more equally divided, would greater numbers be fed, or clothed, or employed? Either therefore large fortunes are not a public evil, or, if they be in any degree an evil, it is to be borne with for the sake of those fixed and general rules concerning property, in the preservation and steadiness of which all are interested.
If there are still black-coated clergy preaching the virtues of political disengagement and knowing your place to the lower orders, their message isn't getting through to a generation that mostly spends its Sundays in debt-fuelled retail therapy, rather than mandatory contemplation of the divine. These days, elites need different mouthpieces to propagate norms of proper deference and passive conformity. How many people could even name the present Archdeacon of Carlisle? My guess is not many. Who has taken his place in our culture?
Who indeed? Anna Chen identifies one candidate - 'Doctor Who was always a bastion of establishment values when it was created
just as the Sixties began to swing, but there was something innocent
about it, and you could filter out the stories from the residual
politics.' But not any more, she reckons in a blog post which challenges the oft-repeated assertion that that bastion of the establishment, the BBC, is somehow riddled with subversive left-wing bias:
The great thing about David Graeber and his article Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit is that he makes you notice the bugs where the sales executives for our dominant ideology want you to see only features.
Look! More competition! More efficiency!
The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things:
Work smarter, not harder, with IT!
Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone.
Honey, we shrunk Big Government! Just ignore that colossal, camouflaged, government-issue blimp we built out of several million tons of pork...
In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic, government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns ... One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.
The Bonfire of the Red Tape, or Human Potential Unchained! A modern fairy tale:
And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications.
What Graeber's demolishing here isn't some complex and abstruse economic theory, accessible only to experts, but the current iteration of the same dumb old Panglossian lie that's comforted the already comfortable and afflicted everybody else for centuries:
I don't think Graeber gets it right all the time; some of the constraints on innovation really are are technical, not ideological. Why don't we have a Lunar colony, giant wheel-shaped space stations and manned, nuclear interplanetary spaceships, like the ones in 2001 - A Space Odyssey? Arthur C Clarke himself lived long enough to give a more plausible account of why the real 21st Century looks different from the lots-of-people-in-space version he'd imagined.
Clarke's version is that, in the 1940s, when he was working on airfield landing approach radar and dreaming of geosynchronous communication satellites, he assumed that those satellites would have to be crewed. As, among other things, a technician working with cutting-edge, high-maintenance vacuum tube technology, he thought that you'd always need a human on site to fix, tweak and maintain the complicated, expensive kit he imagined people sending into space.
So his stories were filled with people who needed to be in space to get useful jobs of work done, from the everyday running and maintaining of communication networks to boldly exploring the final frontier. What he didn't anticipate was how quickly reliable, miniaturised electronics would replace the electronic Bertie Woosters of his youth, which couldn't get through the day without the intervention of some human Jeeves bearing a screwdriver (an actual one, not a reviving cocktail) to keep everything running smoothly.
In Clarke's imagined future and in his science fiction, most mindless human drudge work has been automated, leaving humans, (or at least ones with technocratic skillz), to do cool, fulfilling jobs, like being astronauts.
In the real Twenty First Century, there are plenty of humans doing machine-related drudge work, from assembling iThings in Chinese factories to data entry but, thanks to ultra-reliable miniaturised electronics, the vast majority of astronaut jobs have been automated. Which means that lots of things get done in space, but without the immense cool factor of humans actually being in those awesomely alien places.
Just keep banging the rocks together and you, too, could aspire to one of these!
Here's a bit from the novel version of 2001, where the last human survivor of the spaceship Discovery is about to become the first person to land on one of the moons of Saturn:*
The sun was now an object that no man would have recognised. It was far too bright to be a star, but one could look directly at its tiny disc without discomfort. It gave no heat at all; when Bowman held his ungloved hands in its rays, as they streamed through the space-pod's window, he could feel nothing upon his skin. He might have been trying to warm himself by the light of the Moon; not even the alien landscape fifty miles below reminded him more vividly of his remoteness from Earth.
That sent shivers down my spine as a kid.
And here's how the real first landing on one of Saturn's moons happened, back in 2005. After travelling for over six years and two billion miles, an automated spacecraft was in orbit around Saturn. Human technicians kept it going, but they were sitting in front of screens on Earth, communicating over a data link with a one-and-half hour time lag. The mother ship released a probe, which landed on Saturn's largest moon and relayed pictures and other data back to waiting techies back in places like Pasedena and Darmstadt.
Or Milton Keynes, where the Open University team behind the probe's Surface Science Package was based. I remember my wife, who's an OU administrator, telling me that, on the day of the landing, the team put on an audio visual presentation in the lecture theatre, so that OU employees could see the fruits of their decade and a half of work.
It was a fantastic achievement and I'm full of admiration for everybody involved, but there's a huge dramatic gulf between the stark sci fi vision of the lone astronaut, floating in the black void a billion miles from home, looking back towards a tiny, shrunken sun and forward to the looming landscape of a frozen, alien world and a university administrator in a bland English new town, known chiefly for its concrete cows and traffic roundabouts, taking forty minutes away from thinking about tenders for photographic services at degree ceremonies to grab a coffee and catch up on the latest discoveries from the Saturn system.
It's less dramatic than sci fi, but maybe it's not lack of progress, just progress by less dramatic means. Although even 'less dramatic' is a relative term when you get an eyeful of this view of the Saturn system which I've shared before, but is well worth a second look (embiggen to full screen for enhanced awesomeness):
Speaking of administrators, I don't wholly take on board Graeber's anarchist view that all bureaucracy is a Bad Thing, or that all administrative jobs are necessarily bullshit jobs. I find it this bit too close to the prevailing right wing/libertarian orthodoxy that the human resources struggling to make large and complex organisations work smoothly must be mere dead weight, which needs shedding so that front-line staff can be "empowered" to break free from the bondage of red tape.
At least that's the theory. But when you get rid of all those terrible bureaucrats, somebody still ends up having to do the all boring admin - often those very front-line staff whose time could be far better spent doing other things:
...a study by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) which found the amount of time nurses spent away from patients, on non-essential paperwork, has doubled, with 2.5 million hours lost a week...
...Dr Peter Carter, General Secretary of the RCN said it was “vital” for the NHS to tackle duplication and free up staff so they could devote more time to patient care.
He said: “Tackling this burden requires smarter systems, proper admin support, well designed technology and better data sharing. [my bold]
And some of Graeber's other thoughts sound, on first reading, like paranoid conspiracy theories 'There are many forms of privatisation, up to and including the simple buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many synthetic fuel formulae have been bought up and placed in the vaults of oil companies, but it’s hard to imagine nothing like this happens.)'
But, even though he's not on the money every time, he probably has more of a point when he's sounding most paranoid. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The Phoebus Cartel was an actual thing and everyday scandals like Libor-rigging remind us that massive conspiracies against the laity are still being perpetrated whenever people think nobody's looking.
Sometimes it really is vested interests and power structures holding things back, rather than the inherent limitations and attributes of different technologies. The hard part is understanding when our failure to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and re-mould it nearer to the heart's desire stems from the laws of nature, against which there really is no appeal process, and when we're only being held back by human cussedness, connivance and coercion. It's the grain of truth at the heart of that most clichéd prayer:
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
