People are always joking about our robot overlords, but before robots become the world’s rulers, they’re probably going to be our bosses at work first. Either way, it’s important to know how pliable we humans are going to be.
Researchers at the University of Manitoba were curious about how far people would go in obeying the commands of a robot, so they designed an experiment that echoes Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience studies, in which many participants obeyed an authority figure who told them to administer painful electrical shocks to strangers.
Substitute a small but slightly evil-sounding humanoid robot for the lab-coated researcher, and give the participants a really, really boring task rather than a morally fraught one, and you have the set up below. It’s actually a little uncomfortable to watch.
On September 16, 2008, Carl Pike, the deputy head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, watched live video feeds from a command center outside Washington, D.C., as federal agents fanned out across dozens of U.S. cities. In Dallas, a team in SWAT gear tossed a flash-bang grenade into a suburban home and, once inside, discovered six pounds of cocaine behind a stove, and a stockpile of guns. At a used-car dealer’s house in Carmel, Indiana, agents pulled bricks of cocaine from a secret compartment in his Audi sedan, while state troopers dragged a stove-size safe onto the lawn and went at it with a sledgehammer.
In the coming weeks, the net widened to include caches of assault rifles, a Mexico-bound 18-wheeler with drug money hidden in fresh produce, and a crooked Texas sheriff who helped traffic narcotics through his county. In Mexico City, a financier was arrested for laundering drug money through a minor-league soccer team named the Raccoons (and an avocado farm). After one especially large bust, when it came time for a “dope on the table” photo, there was in fact no table big enough to support the thousands of tightly bundled kilos of confiscated cocaine. They had to be stacked in the back parking lot of a police station.
The raids and arrests were the final stage of a DEA-led investigation called Project Reckoning—18 months, 64 cities, 200 agencies—intended to cripple Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. Over the past two decades, the organization had built a drug empire that spanned across Mexico and into the U.S. It had become pervasive, hyper-violent, brazen. Cartel operatives had smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics into the U.S. They had assassinated Mexican politicians and corrupted entire police departments. One of the organization’s leaders had famously brandished a gold-plated .45 at two agents from the DEA and FBI traveling through northeastern Mexico. The cartel had even formed its own paramilitary unit, a band of former Mexican police and special-forces soldiers called the Zetas, to seize territory and dispatch rivals. The notorious syndicate became known as La Compañia, or The Company.
Who is more “luddite”: the individual or the state?
In a recent TED talk, an individual – the robot body of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden speaking in Vancouver – said he beat the state. He argued that, while the internet enabled states with unprecedented powers to spy, it has also provided individuals with the ability to singlehandedly “win” against the state by exposing such abuse to the public. Snowden’s statement highlights the way in which the internet, along with other emerging technologies that promise similar decentralization and power to the individual, could be called a double-edged sword.
The capacity of democratized technology to either free people or control them often seems balanced in such a way that new technologies can be validly heralded as liberators or as enslavers, depending on one’s own personal experience with them. However, in spite of this duality, the overwhelming direction does seem to go towards empowering the individual rather than the state. After all, as Snowden so succinctly put it, he did “win”. We know the era of powerful states and monolithic corporations dictating the capabilities of the individual is coming to an end, as what could be called a libertarian or DIY culture is taking hold instead. As Kevin Kelly has put it, technology possesses its own will, and a specific preference for greater freedom.
The fear that advanced technology plays only into the hands of elites to the disadvantage of most of the world is quite common among progressives, as has been described by the IEET’s James Hughes. In reality, the alarmists who signal dangers and negative political outcomes from emerging technologies are missing a big piece of the puzzle. This piece is already forcing itself on us increasingly in the headlines, showing that our era’s defining technologies actually have far more potential to empower and liberate the masses of people now than ever before in history.
Further, the liberation is much more likely to ensue if technologies can advance in a maximally unregulated and un-policed manner. A democratic explosion of liberating technology is possible in the lives of the voiceless and worst-off people in the world, and several emerging technologies could feature significantly in that explosion.
To understand this possibility, it is important to direct our attention to two different kinds of disparity in the world. The first is the inequality that makes the citizens of a country voiceless and powerless in the face of the power of a strong state and massive corporations. The second is the inequality between the weak states or regions and the strong states or regions of the world-economy.
Both of the two arenas suggested above appear to be related. Strong states and corporations benefit exclusively from the system, and find the justification for their power in a global division of labor that says a cherished few can produce things of more value than the other countries. This division of labor exploits the weaker peripheral majority of the world as unrewarded instruments in the global production process, while the high-tech sophisticated work that is maximally profitable remains in the rich minority spaces of strong states and firms. With the club of powerful states and firms essential to the functioning of the world-system, trends that weaken the traditional power of the nation-state or cause rewards to be more equitably distributed are direct threats to the survival of the current global mode of production.
Already, the state is threatened by its inability to control the world of information, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel was mocked for calling “neuland” or “virgin territory.” As idiosyncratic as her choice of words may have seemed, it reflects the attitude of many heads of state. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had already used almost exactly the same meaning when describing the internet. The ongoing digitization of politics may appear to be unrelated to the world-economy, but it is relevant, because it betrays the worsening ability of powerful states to stay in control of decisive technologies in the long term, as we shall see.
Many progressives and critics of modern society see advanced and emerging technologies as inherently benefiting only powerful and elitist goals. However, as James Hughes argues in Citizen Cyborg, much of this view is simply not rational and leans towards a primitivist stance on modern industrial developments. It also adheres to an old-fashioned way of thinking that was true in a time when all the decisive technologies were unwieldy and had to be rigidly controlled or sanctioned by governments and powerful monopolistic firms to even be operated with any efficacy.
In attempting to rein in technology now, states and corporations will increasingly find themselves having to appeal to emotional or outright fabricated security concerns to maintain their profits. As patents and other forms of protection are increasingly circumvented by the geeks, pirates, cyber-idealists, Assanges and Snowdens being created by the internet culture, the only defense for statist and corporate interests will be to call these troublesome individuals security threats. By saying a radical new technology could become a threat, e.g. it could be used by terrorists, it could be hacked, there could be an accident, etc. powerful regimes and firms give themselves a convenient mandate to keep their technologies in their own hands, behind their walls, and prevent them from getting out to empower the public or weaker regimes such as those in the Global South. Regimes in the Global South must be weak for the present world-economy to function, so painting an empowered Global South as a deadly and irresponsible threat is probably going to be increasingly necessary for the Global North to maintain its privileges. By appealing to this narrative, the dominant states and firms will become true “luddites”: they are going to smash (discredit) the technologies they don’t like, so they get to keep their job (dominating the profitable production processes).
Increased numbers of progressives do overwhelmingly recognize the powerful potential of the internet to empower the public and traditionally weaker sections of global society. In fact, the internet has made a huge impact on the history of protest and the history of dissent, making it indispensable to progressive causes and the alternate media endorsed by progressives. However, progressive support for other areas of the democratization of technology and freedom of world-liberating technologies from regulation and authoritarian policing is very thin (just consider their responses to GM technology).
Reservations held by progressives about emerging technologies are not very consistent with the view of the internet as a useful political instrument. Many lack the understanding that the internet is not a fluke in technology, but part of a larger trend. Progressives would do best to learn the trend set by the internet, and adopt an anarchic view of technology as something that is becoming overwhelmingly liberating and increasingly easy for the common people to conquer and use for themselves.
A number of emerging technologies have high democratic value, being set to liberate and empower people more rapidly than ever in history. From personal computers to 3D printers, nanotechnologyand perhaps the salient breakthroughs of synthetic biology, the one thing all the big advancements in emerging technologies today have in common is that they do not have any great need to be monopolized by governments and corporations. Possibly the most important observation of their democratic potential is that these devices all seem to have the potential to copy themselves. Synthetic organisms may be the first man-made products to have this ability, while other man-made things do not. They may not need to be supplied or replaced by any authority or special provider. In theory, such devices could be leaked once and become rapidly available everywhere, just as information can be rapidly pirated and circulated on the internet every day.
The global division of labor, and by extension the massive inequality in terms of rewards in the present world-system, would face an existential threat from the leaking of decisive emerging technologies. World inequality, if it is a product of a large division of labor, would not survive the leaking and decentralization of a generation of advanced self-replicating, redundant manufacturing technologies into the poorer parts of the world-economy.
The last line of defense available to states and massive corporations, to protect against their privileged economic and political positions being damaged by the circulation of self-sustaining technologies, would be for them to rant about security and try to whip up paranoia. If they do so, then the security concerns about emerging technologies will come to be seen by many as the discourse to create authoritarian controls over who can and who can’t have something. At that time, there would be no doubt that the true luddites interfering in the inevitable course of technology are the rich and powerful – not the poor and disenfranchised.
To sum up, there is a trend of techno-liberation set to break a number of emerging technologies free. Many remain the apparent trademarks of powerful companies at present, but still they carry powerful democratic potential even as they remain locked in the Pandora’s Box of security arguments and fears. People who care about subverting global inequality should not be deterred by such rhetoric.
They should covet emerging technologies, such as synthetic organisms, as a gift and a perfect means of liberation for the poorer parts of the world-economy. This should be pursued without hesitation, in the hope that yet more democratic opportunities like the internet will surface and become available to the world’s marginal and oppressed people.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: What happens to life imprisonment — for murder and other heinous crimes — if the human lifespan is increased? If we live until 150 or 250 or 350 (which is very possible, given the direction of recent efforts into life extension) how many more prisons will we have to build to hold all of those murderers and rapists who just won’t die? Even if we can build enough prisons to hold them, will it be economically viable to do so? What about parole? Right now, many life sentences are up for parole after 15 or 20 years — but if we live for 350 years, doesn’t a 15-year incarceration seem a little bit on the lenient side for a serious crime?
Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub Carl June and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have been making waves since they published some successes fighting leukemia with a revolutionary new method. They removed patients’ T cells and genetically modified them to target and kill the cancer. When the T cells were reintroduced into the patients’ bloodstreams, their cancer was often sent into complete remission.
Could similar modifications to the immune system’s fighter pilots provide revolutionary cures for other cancers and even other diseases?
The U. Penn researchers are applying a similar technique to that other hardest-to-treat disease, HIV/AIDS. They recently completed a Phase 1 clinical trial in which they removed HIV-positive patients’ T cells and genetically modified a portion of them to include a rare HIV-resistant genetic mutation of the CCR5 gene (called delta 32).
Jason Dorrier — Jason Dorrier It’s easy to praise robots and automation when it isn’t your ass on the line. I’ve done it lots. But I may have to eat my own Cheerios soon enough.
Software is writing news stories with increasing frequency. In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event. The LA Times claims they were first to publish anything on the quake, and outside the USGS, they probably were.
The LA Times example isn’t special because it’s the first algorithm to write a story on a major news site. With the help of Chicago startup and robot writing firm, Narrative Science, algorithms have basically been passing the Turing test online for the last few years.
The promise of bitcoin is a universal currency free from the control of any nation or government. But a new generation of cryptocurrencies are focusing on the opposite goal: building money to solve problems specific to one country.
On midnight Monday, Auroracoin, a bitcoin clone which is the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency being traded today, entered the second phase of its life, with a “helicopter drop” of 30 auroracoins to every citizen of Iceland.
Planet Earth, Zemlia, di qiu, Avani, la monde, la tierra, der erde — each of these names, in their respective language, puts significance on the physical stuff held together by gravity beneath our feet, the foundation upon which we’ve built our ever expanding civilization.
We did not fully understand that stuff to be a planet until a few hundred years ago.
How quaint. How archaic.
How utterly primitive to think that in our ongoing effort to categorize and name the stars, planets, galaxies, and other celestial objects around us, we fail in the most basic sense to understand our own place in grander scheme of nature.
Discovery, science, and exploration missions from a variety of countries continue to elevate our understanding of nature into a clearer context. With each discovery, there seems to be a clearer need to name our home planet.
The globally diverse make-up of some of the more advanced technical and scientific institutions like NASA, ESA, Caltech, and MIT, show that there already exists a self-selecting intellectual elite shining a widening light into our understanding of the natural world beyond our planetary confines.
Our curiosity knows only temporary bounds. In time, even the most complicated mysteries become science, fact, human history.
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, observing nearby stars, has shown us that the presence of planets around stars is more common than not. There are estimated to be between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.
Kepler turned up some very interested potential destinations. What we call exoplanet Gliese 581 g, might already be populated with life and if that life is advanced enough, that exoplanet might already have a name.
A senior astronomer at SETI recently stated publicly that the research center expects advances in computing to discover evidence of life on another planet in the next twenty years. Space archaeologist Alice Gorman is looking in a slightly different direction, toward the structures, orbital debris, and other related relics that an extraterrestrial civilization may have left behind.
Beyond the extra-stellar destinations of worlds we have yet to closely explore, there are also existential threats, like the possibility of near Earth objects colliding with our home planet, which should compel us toward a stronger sense of planetary awareness.
Until Elon Musk and SpaceX solve the transportation challenge to take humans to Mars, we should regard our home planet as singular and worthy of a name that all of humanity understands, supports, and ideally can pronounce in roughly the same way.
While the name Gaia, from Greek mythology is occasionally used to describe “mother Earth,” the truth is that such a name is far too Western-centric to resonate globally.
There is no urgent need to continue the tradition of naming planets after Greco-Roman gods and goddesses.
Ours is an era of distinctly connected global culture. The fidelity, speed, and reach of that connection grows daily, linking not just the developed world, but emerging cultures, further afield.
The name could be a symbol, a phrase, a proper name, or a single sound. In a perfect world, a vote would be taken, providing consideration by countries around the entire world.
Currently, the International Astronomical Union governs the process of naming newly discovered exoplanets and would likely be the leading candidate to manage or oversee such an effort.
The need to name our planet is not merely some sugar-coated idealism, but a legitimate, concrete gesture toward recognizing a single human identity. It would demonstrate that our planet, despite nuanced cultural and genetic diversity remains ultimately unified. The differences that appear to separate the citizens of each country are far outweighed by the many similarities we share.
Following World War II, the United Nations organized and assembled to prevent the unchecked atrocities that brought the deaths of tens of millions humans during the war. That effort fell short of its originally intended charter, largely due to the concentration of veto power of a few influential nations (China, Russia, France, the UK and the US, all permanent members of the UN’s Security Council).
By concentrating power among a few elite nations, the democratic power of the UN was reduced to yet another forum for potentially divisive geopolitics.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the World Wide Web offered a different kind of global democracy, facilitated largely by the sharing of knowledge, information, and technology.
Either by commerce or by charity, countries whose governments and business built-out the Web have an obligation to continue that infrastructure development in such a way that will bring the Web to a truly global audience.
When that future day arrives when a lucky few on our home planet are able to communicate in meaningful dialogue with intelligent life from another planet, we will naturally want to compare our understanding of the natural world, on both a scientific as well as a cultural level.
We’re going to want to know what they call their planet and they will likely want to know what we call ours.
Should the possibility exist that space archaeologist Alice Gorman, or someone like her, happens upon the remains of such a civilization, so too will we seek to unearth the details of their understanding of their particular corner of nature.
If they were advanced enough to escape the gravity well of their home planet and make it into interplanetary space, we will expect that they have hammered down and fleshed out some of the same fundamental physical laws that first bedeviled and later empowered humanity over the centuries.
In preparation for that eventual contact, we’ll need to first foster better awareness of our own planetary identity, if only for the sake of more clearly and succinctly articulating the shared genetic heritage that evolved and spread across our particular globe.
There will come a day, when entirety of human civilization looks back with a knowing smile at how simple we once were, how blindly unaware of our position in nature we seemed to be.
Naturally, of course, once we name our planet, the need shall also arise to name our only moon and our parent star.
Alas, one step at a time.
A concerted global effort like naming the planet might very well be the best anti-war cocktail this planet ever imbibed or an answer to the most important question we’ve ever been asked.
In one sweeping gesture we can think and act, both locally and globally, and thus solidify humanity’s future history.
Crimea, it’s the most serious crisis in relations between the West and Russia since the Cold War. And until it’s over, risk aversion should remain the play of the day, analysts say. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101498478
Nanobionic superplants. Nanotechnology + synthetic biology creates plants capable of supercharged energy production or as sensors for explosives. http://www.kurzweilai.net/nanobionic-superplants
The Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman reports Andreessen Horowitz plans to invest “hundreds of millions” more dollars in Bitcoin-related businesses, on top of the $50 million they have already dropped, mostly on Coinbase.
Bitcoin prices have lost nearly 50% of their value over the past four months or so, and now trade at around $570. Analysts from Goldman Sachs recently cast doubt on the viability of the digital currency itself, though added its underlying technology may yet prove useful.
