Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.”
“He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.”
Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone (right) and historian Peter Kuznick
According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. “That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication.”
RT’s Abby Martin in the program Breaking the Set discusses the Showtime film series and book titled The Untold History of the United States co-authored by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.
“Obama was a great hope for change”
RT:It took both of you almost five years to produce this series. And in it you have a chapter called Obama: Management of a Wounded Empire. You give a harsh critique of the Obama administration. What in your eyes has been the most troubling aspect of his presidency, Oliver?
Oliver Stone: I think under the disguise of sheep’s clothing he has been a wolf. That because of the nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him, people forgave him a lot. He was a great hope for change. The color of his skin, the upbringing, the internationalism, the globalism, seemed all evident. And he is an intelligent man. He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them. That is what is sad. So we are going into the second administration that is living outside the law and does not respect the law and foundations of our system and he is a constitutional lawyer, you know. Without the law, it is the law of the jungle. Nuremburg existed for a reason and there was a reason to have trials, there is a reason for due process – ‘habeas corpus’ as they call it in the United States.
RT:Do you agree Peter?
Peter Kuznick: I agree, if you look at his domestic policy, he did not break with the Bush administration’s policies. If you look at his transparency – he claimed to be the transparency president when he was running for office. There has not been transparency. We have been actually classifying more documents under Obama than we did under Bush. All previous presidents between 1970 and 2008 indicted three people total under Espionage Act. Obama has already indicted six people under the Espionage Act. The surveillance has not stopped, the incarceration without bringing people to trial has not stopped. So those policies have continued.
Then there are war policies, militarization policies. We are maintaining that. We are fighting wars now in Yemen, Afghanistan, we are keeping troops in Afghanistan. We have not cut back the things that we all found so odious about the Bush administration and Obama added some of his own. The drones policy – Obama had more drone attack in the first eight months than Bush had his entire presidency. And these have very dubious international legality.
OS: Peter was hopeful that the in the second term there will be some more flexibility, we hope so. But, there is a system in place, which is enormous – the Pentagon system.
RT:It almost seems that they took the odious CIA policies and just branded them, so it is now acceptable – the assassinations, the extrajudicial executioner without the due process. It is fascinating.
“We are all ultimately watching ourselves”
PK: We complained during Bush years that Bush was actually conducting surveillance without judiciary review. Obama is killing people, targeted assassinations without judiciary review. That to us is obviously much more serious.
RT:You also cover Pearl Harbor, which of course led to the internment of Japanese American citizens. I do not think a lot of people acknowledge that once again underreported aspect of really what that meant. When you look at the surveillance grid in America today it almost seems like it is an open-air internment camp, where they do not need to intern people anymore because we have this grid set up in place. What do you guys think about that?
PK: The US government now intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day from American citizens. That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication. Can you imagine: 1.7 billion? We’ve got this apparatus set up now with hundreds of thousands of people, over a million of people with top security clearances in this kind of nightmarish state, this 1984 kind of state.
OS: One million top security clearances. That is a pretty heavy number. In other words, we are living in a fish pond and I think the sad part is that the younger people accept that. They are used to the invasion. And that is true, how can we follow the lives of everybody? But the truth is that we are all ultimately watching ourselves. It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.
“US fears things,we fear the rest of the world”
PK: And it can be oppressive on the surface. One of the things we feared after 9/11 was that if there was a second serious attack like 9/11 then the constitution would be gone. The crackdown would be so outrageous at that point. And there is still this obsessive fear. The US fears things, we fear the rest of the world. We spend as much money on our military security intelligence as the rest of the world combined. Do we have enemies that we feel so threatened by? Do we really need this anymore? Is this what our priorities should be? No we think not, we want to turn that around.
RT:The evisceration of the rule of law, especially the National Defense Authorization Act, which eradicates due process – our basic fundamental freedom in this country. I wanted to bring up another interesting point that really struck me in the film series, which are the kamikaze pilots. They were brave, that was the bravest act that you could do and then I can’t help but think of suicide bombers today and Bill Maher, he goes out and loses his show for saying these people are brave. And you have people like Ron Paul get up there and talk about blowback as a reality and he is ridiculed. How did we get here, where the discourse is just so tongued down when we can’t even acknowledge the truths such as that?
OS: Primitive of course. There has been a blind worship of the military and patriotism. I strongly believe in the strong military, but to defend our country, not to invade other countries and to conquer the world. I think there is a huge difference that has been forgotten: morality. Once you take the laws away, as Einstein once said famously, the country does not obey its laws, the laws would be disrespected. So it seems that the fundamental morality has been lost on us somewhere on the way recently and now it is what is effective. Can we kill Bin Laden without having to bring him to trial, can we just get it done? And that ‘get it down’ mentality justifies the ends and that is where countries go wrong, and people go wrong. All of our lives are moral equations. Does the end justify the means? No, it never did.
PK: And the other side of what you are asking is about the constraints upon political discourse in this country. Why are people so uninformed? That is what we are to deal with in the series. If people don’t understand their history, then they don’t have any vision of the future and what is possible. If they think what exists now – the tyranny of now – is all that is possible, then they can’t dream about the future. They can’t imagine the future that is different from the present. That is what I am saying – people have to understand the past because if you study the past then you can envision a future that is very different.
We came really close on many occasions to going into very different direction in the future. We came very close in 1944-1945 to avoiding atomic bombing and potentially not having the kind of Cold War that we had. We came very close in 1953 upon Stalin’s death to ending the Cold War. We came close in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated to ending the war in Vietnam, to ending the Cold War, to heading into a very different direction. Then there were the Carter years, again a possibility of a different direction. And at the end of the Cold War in 1989 Gorbachev was reaching out to Bush. Did Bush take that olive branch that Gorbachev was giving him? No, very much different. What did we do instead? We applaud the Soviets for not invading when countries were liberating themselves from the Soviet Union and then we immediately go and invade Panama and then we invade Iraq.
So we are saying that “it is great that you are showing restraint, but we are not going to because we are the hegemon.” As Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under [Bill] Clinton, says “if the US uses force it’s because we are the United States of America; we are the indispensable nation. We see further and stand taller than other nations.” That is the attitude that Oliver and I are challenging. This sense of American exceptionalism that the US is a city on the hill, God’s gift to humanity, if we do it, it is right. And that is not acceptable.
“We want the country to begin thinking about the big questions again”
OS: It is very funny because the book has been out a few weeks, series have been playing for the fifth week now. We go to TV shows, we sit in these beautiful sets and they are always rushing and rushing. They got news in Gaza, they got Obama. And they ask us what are you talking about? History? What does it have to do with today? What is your point? We sit there very patiently and it is very bizarre to me that they say the past is prologue, that is all happened before and if we are smart you will see it more calmly and won’t overreact. We also argue that this kind of media is driven by dollars, the greed. You have a show and it is really not a news show, it is about rating and how you can get that – with a lot of speed, a lot of zoom and a lot of fancy sets and people watch. Goal is to keep it moving, don’t think, just keep it moving.
PK: A show like this, we can actually discuss the issues at a little more depth, a little more critically.
RT: If both of you are to make a film about this generation right now, what is one facet that you think is the most underreported or misrepresented?
OS: I don’t know about the younger generation, I have three children. I think it is an eternal story in some degree. People no matter what have a similar morality and consciousness, patterns re-emerge again and again. The young men and young women want to make their way into the world. And it is not that far off from what we went through. So I believe in cyclical history and I think my children are going through what I and my father and mother went through. I always look for those patterns first beyond the superficiality.
PK: I find that my students care very passionately about what is going on in the world. They are all doing lots of volunteer work. But what I find in this generation, like Oliver’s and my generation, is that they treat the symptoms. They are not asking the questions about the root cause of all of these problems. They care, they try to change things, but it is more superficial.
What we are challenging them to do is look at the patterns. Look at what has happened from the 1890s all the way through to today. Look at the consistency of the wars, interventions, the military expenditures, the paranoia, they fear of outsiders, the oppression. And get it to the root, what is making the system as a whole sick in a certain ways and how can we root out those deeper causes.
Now that we understand that, we can begin to change that. The Occupy movement did some of that there have been times in the 1930s, 1970-80s, 1960s when people were challenging on that scale. We want the country to begin thinking about these big questions again. What is our past, how did we get here, what are the possibilities for the future, what have we done wrong and what can we get right?
RT:Do you think these superficialities in the conventional wisdom that we hear are perpetuated to keep us in a perpetual state of war?
PK: I don’t know if it is quite so deliberate, but that seems to be the effect – dumbing down the population to the point where they cannot think critically and then you can pull anything over their eyes. They have a five-minute attention span and a five-minute memory of what happened in the past. We are saying learn your history, study it and think about what the alternatives are, think in utopian ways how different the world could be, how better it could be if we start to organize it rationally in the interest of people, not in the interest of profit, not in the interest of Wall Street, not in the interest of military, in the interest of our common humanity, the six billion of us who occupy this planet.
OS: The model of the series of The World at War, which was made by the BBC in the 1970s about WWII. Ours are 10 feature films, cut with care, an hour each, pure narration, music, and sometimes clips of films that make our point or don’t make our point. Either way we try to keep it flowing like a young person could enjoy it like a movie, I am glad you did.
Milioane de femei din Europa si din SUA au fost diagnosticate în ultimii douazeci de ani cu cancer al sân si au fost operate chirurgical de tumori maligne la sân, au fost supuse unor tratamente medicale cu costuri exorbitante, au fost supuse iradierii ori chimioterapiei si în cele din urma "au reusit sa învinga boala".
Ceea ce nu vor sti ele niciodata si nici familiile lor este ca toate aceste paciente nu au avut cancer, diagnosticul a fost unul pus intentionat, mutilarea lor chirurgicala a fost inutila si tratamentul a fost o farsa sinistra al carei scop a fost acela de a le stoarce de bani. În afara acestor pierderi banesti, uriasul stres si traumatismele psihice prin care milioane de femei si familiile lor au fost silite sa treaca sunt crime care nu se vor putea prescrie niciodata. Acesta este secretul murdar care face ca industria cancerului sa intre pe profit si oncologia sa înregistreze "beneficii financiare" atât în spitale cât si în farmacii. Cu ajutorul televiziunilor, medicii oncologi sperie femeile cu amenintarea cancerului la sân si le supun unor tratamente exorbitante si unor operatii chirurgicale care în realitate nu sunt decât niste farse.
Mai mult de 93% dintre femeile care au fost diagnosticate "precoce" cu cancer la sân prin examene mamografice nu au avut niciodata cancer. Aceasta este concluzia studiului publicat recent în New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) de catre o echipa de medici americani condusa de dr. Gilbert Welch si E. Komen.
Publicitatea gretoasa si agresiva prin care femeile sunt îndemnate sa-si faca controlul mamografic spunându-li-se ca 93% dintre femeile depistate cu cancer incipient la sân sunt salvate nu este nimic altceva decât metoda prin care milioane de femei sunt mânate de la spate catre abatoarele chirurgiei oncologice moderne si operate la sâni fara sa fie nevoie de acest lucru, pentru ca în realitate nu sunt bolnave de cancer. Se exploateaza în acest fel teama femeilor cu profituri fabuloase pentru buzunarele farmacistilor si chirurgilor.
De obicei femeile sunt speriate de medici cu urmatorul prognostic: "Daca nu faci operatia si nu urmezi tratamentul de chimioterapie în sase luni esti moarta. Dar totul este o minciuna. Femeile nu au nimic sau în cel mai rau caz au tulburari hormonale sau noduli benigni la sâni. Spitalele oncologice obtin profituri fabuloase prin vânzarea de medicamente si servicii chirurgicale si de terapie unor femei depistate cu noduli la sâni la controlul oncologic si mamografic. În realitate aceste diagnostice sunt false, femeile nu au cancer si ceea ce li se vinde sunt droguri si servicii medicale inutile. Nici un alt test medical nu a fost promovat cu mai multa asiduitate si agresivitate ca mamografia. S-a mers pâna acolo încât chiar si femeile sanatoase sunt obligate sa se supuna controlului mamografic si sa-l faca periodic."(Dr Gilbert Welch – New York Times)
Totul se rezuma la o escrocherie pura, la o înselatorie al carei scop este obtinerea de bani. Cancerul al sân, ca si cancerul de col uterin au devenit sperietori cu care sarlatanii oncologi ameninta femeile presându-le sa scoata sume imense de bani pentru cumparare de vaccinuri contra cancerului de col uterin sau pentru tratamente contra cancerului la sân. "Depistarea precoce a cancerului la sân" a devenit un cult modern care implica ritualuri aproape mistice.
Televiziunile sunt parte activa a acestei sarlatanii oncologice si îsi încaseaza si ele partea lor de profit emitând zilnic în eter îndemnuri ca femeile sa-si faca mamografii sau sa se vaccineze contra cancerului de col uterin.
Femeile care cad în aceasta cursa a mortii încep o lunga si înspaimântatoare cura cu tratamente chirurgicale, de chimioterapie si radioterapie care le otraveste corpurile si din care ies mutilate si distruse psihic. Cele care nu mor si reusesc sa supravietuiasca se considera ca "au învins boala". In realitate nu au învins nimic, pentru ca nu au avut niciodata cancer. Diagnosticul de cancer care li s-a pus a fost unul fals.
Finally, that leaves us with quadrant D, the jobs that only humans can do—at first. The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do. This is not a trivial trick; our desires are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular question.
When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.
This postindustrial economy will keep expanding, even though most of the work is done by bots, because part of your task tomorrow will be to find, make, and complete new things to do, new things that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robo-surgery will necessitate the new skills of keeping machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data. And of course we will need a whole army of robot nannies, dedicated to keeping your personal bots up and running. Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by robots later.
The real revolution erupts when everyone has personal workbots, the descendants of Baxter, at their beck and call. Imagine you run a small organic farm. Your fleet of worker bots do all the weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce, as directed by an overseer bot, embodied by a mesh of probes in the soil. One day your task might be to research which variety of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day it might be to update your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can be measured.
Right now it seems unthinkable: We can’t imagine a bot that can assemble a stack of ingredients into a gift or manufacture spare parts for our lawn mower or fabricate materials for our new kitchen. We can’t imagine our nephews and nieces running a dozen workbots in their garage, churning out inverters for their friend’s electric-vehicle startup. We can’t imagine our children becoming appliance designers, making custom batches of liquid-nitrogen dessert machines to sell to the millionaires in China. But that’s what personal robot automation will enable.
Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go to those who innovate in the organization, optimization, and customization of the process of getting work done with bots and machines. Geographical clusters of production will matter, not for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential in human expertise. It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at least that one “job.”
In the coming years our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through these Seven Stages of Robot Replacement, again and again:
1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.
[Later.]
2. OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.
[Later.]
3. OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
[Later.]
4. OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.
[Later.]
5. OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.
[Later.]
6. Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!
[Later.]
7. I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.
This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.
We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.
Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.
THE END.
Source: wired.com - Author: Kevin Kelly (kk.org) is senior maverick of Wired and the author, most recently, of What Technology Wants.
Baxter was invented in a century-old brick building near the Charles River in Boston. In 1895 the building was a manufacturing marvel in the very center of the new manufacturing world. It even generated its own electricity. For a hundred years the factories inside its walls changed the world around us. Now the capabilities of Baxter and the approaching cascade of superior robot workers spur Brooks to speculate on how these robots will shift manufacturing in a disruption greater than the last revolution. Looking out his office window at the former industrial neighborhood, he says, “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.”
That may be true of making stuff, but a lot of jobs left in the world for humans are service jobs. I ask Brooks to walk with me through a local McDonald’s and point out the jobs that his kind of robots can replace. He demurs and suggests it might be 30 years before robots will cook for us. “In a fast food place you’re not doing the same task very long. You’re always changing things on the fly, so you need special solutions. We are not trying to sell a specific solution. We are building a general-purpose machine that other workers can set up themselves and work alongside.” And once we can cowork with robots right next to us, it’s inevitable that our tasks will bleed together, and soon our old work will become theirs—and our new work will become something we can hardly imagine.
To understand how robot replacement will happen, it’s useful to break down our relationship with robots into four categories, as summed up in this chart:
The rows indicate whether robots will take over existing jobs or make new ones, and the columns indicate whether these jobs seem (at first) like jobs for humans or for machines.
Let’s begin with quadrant A: jobs humans can do but robots can do even better. Humans can weave cotton cloth with great effort, but automated looms make perfect cloth, by the mile, for a few cents. The only reason to buy handmade cloth today is because you want the imperfections humans introduce. We no longer value irregularities while traveling 70 miles per hour, though—so the fewer humans who touch our car as it is being made, the better.
And yet for more complicated chores, we still tend to believe computers and robots can’t be trusted. That’s why we’ve been slow to acknowledge how they’ve mastered some conceptual routines, in some cases even surpassing their mastery of physical routines. A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot “just in case.” In the 1990s, computerized mortgage appraisals replaced human appraisers wholesale. Much tax preparation has gone to computers, as well as routine x-ray analysis and pretrial evidence-gathering—all once done by highly paid smart people. We’ve accepted utter reliability in robot manufacturing; soon we’ll accept it in robotic intelligence and service.
Next is quadrant B: jobs that humans can’t do but robots can. A trivial example: Humans have trouble making a single brass screw unassisted, but automation can produce a thousand exact ones per hour. Without automation, we could not make a single computer chip—a job that requires degrees of precision, control, and unwavering attention that our animal bodies don’t possess. Likewise no human, indeed no group of humans, no matter their education, can quickly search through all the web pages in the world to uncover the one page revealing the price of eggs in Katmandu yesterday. Every time you click on the search button you are employing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to do alone.
While the displacement of formerly human jobs gets all the headlines, the greatest benefits bestowed by robots and automation come from their occupation of jobs we are unable to do. We don’t have the attention span to inspect every square millimeter of every CAT scan looking for cancer cells. We don’t have the millisecond reflexes needed to inflate molten glass into the shape of a bottle. We don’t have an infallible memory to keep track of every pitch in Major League Baseball and calculate the probability of the next pitch in real time.
We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone.
Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by automation—including the jobs that we did not know we wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.
Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.
To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thousand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is? Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, piling up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.
It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.
It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.
It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.
First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.
All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just don’t call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’ stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.
And it has already begun.
Here’s why we’re at the inflection point: Machines are acquiring smarts.
We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots will think different. To see how far artificial intelligence has penetrated our lives, we need to shed the idea that they will be humanlike.
Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink Robotics. Designed by Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor who invented the best-selling Roomba vacuum cleaner and its descendants, Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans. Baxter does not look impressive. It’s got big strong arms and a flatscreen display like many industrial bots. And Baxter’s hands perform repetitive manual tasks, just as factory robots do. But it’s different in three significant ways.
First, it can look around and indicate where it is looking by shifting the cartoon eyes on its head. It can perceive humans working near it and avoid injuring them. And workers can see whether it sees them. Previous industrial robots couldn’t do this, which means that working robots have to be physically segregated from humans. The typical factory robot is imprisoned within a chain-link fence or caged in a glass case. They are simply too dangerous to be around, because they are oblivious to others. This isolation prevents such robots from working in a small shop, where isolation is not practical. Optimally, workers should be able to get materials to and from the robot or to tweak its controls by hand throughout the workday; isolation makes that difficult. Baxter, however, is aware. Using force-feedback technology to feel if it is colliding with a person or another bot, it is courteous. You can plug it into a wall socket in your garage and easily work right next to it.
Second, anyone can train Baxter. It is not as fast, strong, or precise as other industrial robots, but it is smarter. To train the bot you simply grab its arms and guide them in the correct motions and sequence. It’s a kind of “watch me do this” routine. Baxter learns the procedure and then repeats it. Any worker is capable of this show-and-tell; you don’t even have to be literate. Previous workbots required highly educated engineers and crack programmers to write thousands of lines of code (and then debug them) in order to instruct the robot in the simplest change of task. The code has to be loaded in batch mode, i.e., in large, infrequent batches, because the robot cannot be reprogrammed while it is being used. Turns out the real cost of the typical industrial robot is not its hardware but its operation. Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus to purchase but can require four times that amount over a lifespan to program, train, and maintain. The costs pile up until the average lifetime bill for an industrial robot is half a million dollars or more.
The third difference, then, is that Baxter is cheap. Priced at $22,000, it’s in a different league compared with the $500,000 total bill of its predecessors. It is as if those established robots, with their batch-mode programming, are the mainframe computers of the robot world, and Baxter is the first PC robot. It is likely to be dismissed as a hobbyist toy, missing key features like sub-millimeter precision, and not serious enough. But as with the PC, and unlike the mainframe, the user can interact with it directly, immediately, without waiting for experts to mediate—and use it for nonserious, even frivolous things. It’s cheap enough that small-time manufacturers can afford one to package up their wares or custom paint their product or run their 3-D printing machine. Or you could staff up a factory that makes iPhones.
Resembling little more than a credit card-sized scrap of exposed circuit board, the RPi is a fully programmable PC that runs a free, open-source Linux operating system, plugs into any TV, can power 3D graphics, connects to the Internet and, with a little ingenuity, be used to create your own personalized robot slave.
The computer's miniature frame is crowded with two USB ports, an SD card slot, an Ethernet connection and microchip in the middle -- all powered by a universal USB mobile charger.
Not only is it the world's smallest personal computer but, perhaps most importantly of all, at just $25 the RPi is also the world's cheapest.
Eben Upton, the UK-based University of Cambridge professor and inventor behind the wallet-friendly PC, says he set out to create a computer so affordable that every child in Britain could have one.
With its rough-around-the-edges aesthetic, however, he didn't expect it to catch on very fast and, in the early days of development, set a sales target of 10,000 units within his lifetime.
But when the RPi launched in February of this year, demand far outran supply, and all 10,000 sold out immediately -- crashing the distributing websites in the process.
It turned out there was a voracious appetite -- particularly among a growing class of DIY geeks -- for a cheap, easily-programmable, open-source piece of hardware that would allow them to let their imaginations run wild.
Now, far exceeding its inventor's original estimates, the RPi is set to sell as a million units within its first year of availability.
In a revealing interview with CNN, Upton tells all about why everyone wants a slice of Raspberry Pi.
CNN: What inspired you to invent the Raspberry Pi?
Eben Upton: A group of us here at the University of Cambridge were involved in trying to find 17, 18-year-olds to come and study computer science and what we found every year was a reduction in the numbers.
We went from 500 people in the 1990s applying for our 80 places, down to under 250 and, worse than that, the sorts of things those children knew how to do when they came in the door were much less impressive.
Really Raspberry Pi is an attempt to try and reboot some of that 1980s computer industry feel that had been responsible for giving us this stream of very talented students.
CNN: What in your view are the Pi's most distinguishing qualities?
EU: I think we really have to say the big, distinct feature about Raspberry Pi is the cost. This is a device that comes in two variants, one that cost $25 and one that costs $35.
These are designed to be the same price as a textbook; they're designed to be cheap enough that a child can buy on with their pocket money. They're designed to be cheap enough that you could equip a whole classroom for under a $1000. So, really the cheapness.
Almost everything you can do with a Raspberry Pi, you can do with a conventional PC, but you'd be doing it at 10 times the cost.
CNN: Did you have any idea what kind of response you'd get?
EU: Absolutely not, I think the response has been staggering. Even a year ago we were thinking of this shifting 10,000 units over a lifetime.
All we wanted was a few hundred more students -- or for the students we were getting to have had a little more experience when they came to the door.
CNN: What was your own reaction when you heard how many you'd sold on the first day?
EU: Terror, I guess. When you've scaled everything for a particular size and then you discover you have this enormous spike of demand, then you're always going to wonder if you can fill it. And there were big queues, there were back orders for months after that as we and our partners worked very hard to try and scale out production.
CNN: You set out to sell primarily to schools for use by children in class, who's it actually being bought by?
EU: Until September, it was being bought almost entirely by people like me -- technically literate adults who wanted to use it to do interesting projects. You know this is something you can plug your television into and play videos on; it's got stuff you can use to control a robot. For people like me this is gold dust.
From September onwards we've started to see a swing round towards what we were hoping for, which is educational engagement -- individual children buying them and schools buying classroom sets of them.
CNN: Any other surprise takers?
EU: We're also starting to see some industrial applications. We're seeing people who have been buying $300 industrial computers saying "hang on a second, why am I buying this special purpose computer when I can buy one of these. It does the same thing, it runs units. My software engineers can be very comfortable with it, why don't I just switch over to these?"
Another really interesting one that I should have anticipated was of course the developing world. These make very good entry-level productivity computers for the developing world, so we're starting to see an interest there as well.
CNN: How are you able to sell it so cheaply?
EU: One of things that allows us to hit our very low price point is that we have a very high level of integration -- there's just not that much stuff on the board. All of the main features are integrated onto the chip in the middle. It's our central processor and also our graphic processor that drives the display and does some of our peripheral functions, so that's the main chip.
CNN: Do you remember the first time you took it into a school and what kind of reaction you got?
EU: We were really surprised by the reaction we got. School kids today are used to their tablets and their mobile phones, so we thought we were going to have to put into a shiny box.
But one of the biggest reactions from the children was because they could actually see it and point to it and tell what the different bits do. Normally you don't get to see the green stuff and they really love that, there's been such a positive response.
ZM Global Radio is a weekly radio show presented by various active coordinators of The Zeitgeist Movement in a rotational fashion. These broadcasts discuss the developments and aims of The Zeitgeist Movement.
About TZM:
The Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability activist group working to bring the world together for the common goal of species sustainability before it is too late. It is a social movement, not a political one, with over 1100 chapters across nearly all countries. Divisive notions such as nations, governments, races, political parties, religions, creeds or class are non-operational distinctions in the view of The Movement. Rather, we recognize the world as one system and the human species as a singular unit, sharing a common habitat. Our overarching intent could be summarized as “the application of the scientific method for social concern.”
Lavorerai con sudore, partorirai con dolore". Chissà se la maledizione biblica vedeva un collegamento tra le due cose. Che sia per l'aumento della popolazione, o per la crisi economico-finanziaria, la situazione del lavoro è tragica per tutto il pianeta.
In Italia, le notizie recenti riportano come la disoccupazione stia crescendo a livelli record, e che il 2013 sarà se possibile anche peggio. Dagli USA, arrivano notiziole di poco valore che dovrebbero essere confortanti, la disoccupazione in calo per miseri 146 mila posti di lavoro creati a novembre.
Se invece, come piace a noi, guardiamo i dati da una distanza un po' meno vicina che ieri mattina, ecco il drammatico grafico in apertura che si riferisce proprio agli States. Un crollo senza possibilità di scuse. Un Paese che, dal 95% di occupati del 1969, è passato a poco più del 58; dove un quarto della popolazione vive intorno alla soglia di povertà, dove chi lavora spesso deve fare tre lavori al giorno per arrivare a fine mese, dove i laureati lavorano gratis. La classe media è completamente distrutta.
Altrove non va meglio. In Spagna i senza lavoro sono 5 milioni, in Francia la disoccupazione è cresciuta al 10,3% nel terzo trimestre, in Grecia è al 26. Persino in Cina decine di migliaia di laureati e diplomati si affollano in file di ore per la speranza di un colloquio, mentre l'economia rallenta (guardate le foto, impressionanti).
La sensazione è che stia finendo il lavoro. Non ce n'è più per tutti, qualsiasi cosa si faccia, qualsiasi preparazione si abbia, qualsiasi capacità o conoscenza si sia in grado di offrire. E questa è probabilmente la prospettiva più agghiacciante nella fine del nostro sistema.
Un studiu recent arata ca trimiterea unui mesaj de pe telefonul mobil în timpul traversarii unui drum este cea mai riscanta activitate, sansele fiind de patru ori mai mari ca oamenii sa ignore astfel traficul si luminile. De asemenea, din cauza sms-urilor traversarea unei intersectii aglomerate dureaza mai mult timp.
Un trecator din trei foloseste telefonul sau face ceva care îi distrage atentia atunci când travereseaza un drum.
La studiu au participat 1.000 de pietoni care au fost urmariti în mai multe intersectii aglomerate din Seattle la ore diferite. Cercetatorii au urmarit activitatile care distrag atentia cum ar fi vorbitul la telefon, trimiterea sms-urilor, ascultarea muzicii la casti si conversatiile cu alte persoane. Astfel, un pieton din 10 asculta muzica, 7% trimiteau mesaje si 6% vorbeau la telefon. Trimiterea sms-urilor este cea mai periculoasa activitate pentru ca trecatorii ignora luminile si înainte de a traversa nu se uita în ambele sensuri, putând aparea astfel accidente grave.
Conducatoarea studiului, Beth Ebel, a spus ca oamenii intra în transa atunci când folosec pe strada telefoanele mobile sau când asculta muzica la casti, aceasta stare fiind numita de psihologi "atentie divizata" sau "orbire". Mai multe studii au aratat ca accidentele în care sunt implicate persoanele care asculta muzica la casti pe strada s-au triplat.
Quite easy, according to data scientist Nick Berry, founder of Data Genetics, a Seattle technology consultancy.
Berry analyzed passwords from previously released and exposed tables and security breaches, filtering the results to just those that were exactly four digits long [0-9]. There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged into to form a four-digit code. Berry analyzed those to find which are the least and most predictable. He speculates that, if users select a four-digit password for an online account or other web site, it's not a stretch to use the same number for their four-digit bank PIN codes.
What he found, he says, was a "staggering lack of imagination" when it comes to selecting passwords. Nearly 11% of the 3.4 million four-digit passwords he analyzed were 1234. The second most popular PIN in is 1111 (6% of passwords), followed by 0000 (2%). (Last year SplashData compiled a list of the most common numerical and word-based passwords and found that "password" and "123456" topped the list.)
Berry says a whopping 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting just 20 combinations of four-digit numbers (see first table). "It's amazing how predictable people are," he says. We don't like hard-to-remember numbers and "no one thinks their wallet will get stolen," Berry says.
Days, Months, Years
Many of the commonly used passwords are, of course, dates: birthdays, anniversaries, year of birth, etc. Indeed, using a year, starting with 19__, helps people remember their code, but it also increases its predictability, Berry says. His analysis shows that every single 19__ combination be found in the top 20% of the dataset.
"People use years, date of birth — it's a monumentally stupid thing to do because, if you lose your wallet, your driver's license is in there. If someone finds it, they've got the date of birth on there. At least use a parent's date of birth [as a password]," says Berry. Somewhat intriguing was #22 on the most common password list: 2580. It seems random, but if you look at a telephone keypad (or ATM keypad), you'll see those numbers are straight down the middle — yet another sign that we're uncreative and lazy password makers.
The Least Predictable Password
The least-used PIN is 8068, Berry found, with just 25 occurrences in the 3.4 million set, which equates to 0.000744%. (See the second table for the least popular passwords.) Why this set of numbers? Berry guesses, "It's not a repeating pattern, it's not a birthday, it's not the year Columbus discovered America, it's not 1776." At a certain point, these numbers at the bottom of the list are all kind of "the lowest of the low, they're all noise," he says.
A few other interesting tidbits from Berry:
-The most popular PIN code (1234) is used more than the lowest 4,200 codes combined. - People have even less imagination in choosing five-digit passwords — 28% use 12345. - The fourth most popular seven-digit password is 8675309, inspired by the Tommy Tutone song. -People love using couplets for their PINs: 4545, 1313, etc. And for some reason, they don't like using pairs of numbers that have larger numerical gaps between them. Combinations like 45 and 67 occur much more frequently than 29 and 37. - The 17th most common 10-digit password is 3141592654 (for those of you who are not math nerds, those are the first digits of Pi).
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