Boston Dynamics

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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

In the wake of their victory, they watched in amazement as the Boston Dynamics robotic bull trotted toward their garage. It squatted on the ground and shut down. The team members swarmed around the robot and opened the crate that was strapped to its back. It contained a case of champagne, brought as a congratulatory offering from the Boston Dynamics engineers in an attempt to bond the two groups of roboticists who would soon be working together on some future Google mobile robot. Several of the company’s engineers had considered doing something splashier. While planning for the Boston Dynamics demonstrations at the speedway, executives at another one of Rubin’s AI companies came up with a PR stunt to unveil at the Boston Dynamics demonstrations during both afternoons of the Robotics Challenge.

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In the initial DRC competition in 2013, the robots were almost completely teleoperated by a human reliant on the robot’s sensor data, which was sent over a wired network connection. Boston Dynamics built Atlas robots with rudimentary motor control capabilities like walking and arm movements and made them available to competing teams, but the higher-level functions that the robots would need to complete specific tasks were to be programmed independently by the original sixteen teams. Later that fall, when Boston Dynamics delivered the robots to the DRC, and also when they actually competed in a preliminary competition held in Florida at the end of the year, the robots proved to be relatively slow and clumsy.

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DARPA organized the first contest into “tracks” broken broadly into teams that supplied their own robots and teams that used the DARPA-supplied Atlas robots from Boston Dynamics. The preliminary trial turned out to be a showcase for Google’s new robot campaign. Rubin and a small entourage flew into an airport north of Miami on one of Google’s G5 corporate jets and were met by two air-conditioned buses rented for the joint operation. The contest consisted of the eight separate tasks performed over two days. The Atlas teams had a comparatively short amount of time before the event to program their robots and practice, and it showed. Compared with the nimble four-legged Boston Dynamics demonstration robots, the contestants themselves were slow and painstaking.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Leopoldina Fortunati, “Robotization and the Domestic Sphere,” New Media and Society 20, no. 8 (August 2018): 2673–2690; Elizabeth Broadbent, “Interactions with Robots: The Truths We Reveal about Ourselves,” Annual Review of Psychology 68 (2017): 627–652. 2. Matt Simon, “Watch Boston Dynamics’ Humanoid Robot Do Parkour,” Wired, October 11, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/watch-boston-dynamics-humanoid-robot-do-parkour/; Marc DeAngelis, “Boston Dynamics’ Atlas Robot Is Now a Gymnast,” Engadget, September 24, 2019, https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/24/boston-dynamics-atlas-gymnast/. 3. Mark Prigg, “Google’s Terrifying Two Legged Giant Robot Taught How to CLEAN: Researchers Reveal Ian the Atlas Robot Can Now Vacuum, Sweep and Even Put the Trash Away,” Daily Mail, January 15, 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3401743/Google-s-terrifying-two-legged-giant-robot-taught-CLEAN-Researchers-reveal-Atlas-vacuum-sweep-trash-away.html. 4.

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There’s even a soft bean-shaped robot named Somnox that you can spoon to sleep as it “breathes” and makes soothing noises. Many of these sociable characters have some impressive skills, like Boston Dynamics’s humanoid Atlas. Having thrilled everyone with his parkour and backflipping abilities in 2018, Atlas impressed again in 2019 with a gymnastics routine complete with tumbles, 360-degree jumps, a handstand, and even a split leap.2 Atlas’s designers intended him to be deployed in search-and-rescue operations, though one model by Boston Dynamics called Ian might make a decent smart wife. At six feet, two inches, Ian is filmed vacuuming, sweeping, and even taking out the rubbish.3 Swoon.

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See also Siri (Apple) as Big Five member, 85 employment at, and gender, 9 Home system, 46 renewable energy commitment, 101 users’ loss of control over devices, 193–194 working conditions, 99 Apple Watch, 30 Applin, Sally, 187 Aristotle (Mattel), 196–197 Artificial intelligence (AI) biases in, 219 as component of smart wife, 2 diversity imbalance in industry, 9, 10–11, 62 ethics, 224–226 marriage between Alexa and Siri, 127, 210 need for transdisciplinary approach to, 213 Artificial life made in creator’s image, 70 Ashley Too bot (Black Mirror), 218–219 Asian internet companies, 101 Asian smart wife markets, 4 ASIMO (Honda), 49, 56–57, 58, 67 Asimov, Isaac, 172–173 Assistive robots. See Social robots Association for Computing Machinery, 172 Astro Boy, 49, 65–67, 70, 211 Atlas (Boston Dynamics), 51 Audiovisual technologies, 178 Austin Powers (film series), 14, 15 Australia classification and ratings system, 222 and ecological footprint model, 86 functionality and usability of smart wives, 31, 39 housework and gender, 6–7 RUOK Mate, 192 stalking, 199–200 Autism, 52, 74 Ava (Ex Machina), 14, 125 AYA (digital voice assistant), 221 Baidu, 4 Ballie (Samsung), 58–59 Barassi, Veronica, 196 Barber, Trudy, 117 Barbera, Joseph, 25 Barrett, Brian, 188 Bartneck, Christoph, 160 Bates, Laura, 61, 116, 134, 137–138 Beard, Mary, 167 Bechdel Test, 218, 286n35 Becoming Cliterate (Mintz), 122 Beer fridges, 35–36 Bell, Genevieve, 27, 97, 192, 213, 227 Benefits of smart wives, 9, 38–42 Berg, Anne-Jorunn, 32 Bergen, Hilary, 14, 99, 150, 152, 153, 157–158, 163, 164, 192, 193–194 Bezos, Jeff, 79, 80–81, 83–84, 97, 99, 109, 255n34 Big Brother, 175, 193 Big Five, 85, 107, 189 Big Mother, 193 Bipedal FT (efutei), 71 Birhane, Abebe, 174 Black Mirror (TV series), 218–219 Blade Runner (film), 14, 15, 64, 125 Blade Runner 2049 (film), 125 Blue Origin, 81 Body F (RealDoll), 119 Bogost, Ian, 164 Borg (Star Trek), 102–105, 106, 198 Borg, Anita, 212 Bose speakers, 185–186 Boston Dynamics, 51 Bowie, David, 210 Bowles, Nellie, 83, 200, 202 Boyhood, 204.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

AdWords and AdSense together represented what Levy calls a “cash cow” to fund the next decade’s worth of Web projects, which included the acquisition of YouTube and the creation of the Android mobile operating system, Gmail, Google+, Blogger, the Chrome browser, Google self-driving cars, Google Glass, Waze, and its most recent roll-up of artificial intelligence companies including DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, and Nest Labs.70 More than just cracking the code on Internet profits, Google had discovered the holy grail of the information economy. In 2001, revenues were just $86 million. They rose to $347 million in 2002, then to just under a billion dollars in 2003 and to almost $2 billion in 2004, when the six-year-old company went public in a $1.67 billion offering that valued it at $23 billion.

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The distinguished Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf warns that intelligent machines could hollow out middle-class jobs, compound income inequality, make the wealthy “indifferent” to the fate of everyone else, and make a “mockery” of democratic citizenship.20 “The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs,”21 worries the generally cheerful economist Tim Harford in response to Google’s acquisition in December 2013 of Boston Dynamics, a producer of military robots such as Big Dog, a three-foot-long, 240-pound, four-footed beast that can carry a 340-pound load and climb snowy hiking trails. Harford suspects 2014 might be the year that computers finally become self-aware, a prospect that he understandably finds “sobering” because of its “negative impact of . . . on the job market.”22 He is particularly concerned with how increasingly intelligent technology is hollowing out middle-income jobs such as typists, clerks, travel agents, and bank tellers.

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It underpins the automation of classrooms, libraries, hospitals, shops, churches, and homes.”24 With its massive investment in the development of intelligent labor-saving technologies like self-driving cars and killer robots, Google—which has imported Ray Kurzweil, the controversial evangelist of “singularity,” to direct its artificial intelligence engineering strategy25—is already invested in the building and management of the glass cage. Not content with the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and seven other robotics companies in the second half of 2013,26 Google also made two important purchases at the beginning of 2014 to consolidate its lead in this market. It acquired the secretive British company DeepMind, “the last large independent company with a strong focus on artificial intelligence,” according to one inside source, for $500 million; and it bought Nest Labs, a leader in smart home devices such as intelligent thermostats, for $3.23 billion.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

In 2013, Google had paid half a billion dollars for Boston Dynamics, whose menagerie of uncanny creatures—BigDog, Cheetah, Sand Flea, LittleDog—had been created largely with DARPA funding, and whose Atlas robot was being used as hardware by several of the teams here in Pomona. A few hundred yards from the racetrack, in the massive hangarlike building from which the robots were directed by their engineers, a squad of Boston Dynamics technicians was also on hand to tend to the contusions and malfunctions of the Atlas humanoids. Boston Dynamics, with its weird techno-fauna, was itself a hybrid specimen of the relationship between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley; its machines were the unnatural creatures of a new military-industrial complex.

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Highlighted here were some of the organization’s major accomplishments, among the more recent of which were the 2003 launch of the X-45A, an early prototype of the Predator and Reaper drones responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Pakistani civilians and children, and a monstrous unmanned armored ground vehicle named, with admirable frankness, “The Crusher.” Further on, I passed a black quadruped robot in a glass display cabinet, a nightmarish pastiche of a Damien Hirst installation. The encased specimen was a creature known as Cheetah, developed with DARPA funding by Boston Dynamics, an industry-leading robotics laboratory that had been acquired by Google in 2013. This robot was capable of running at 28.3 miles per hour, faster than any recorded human. I had seen it in action on YouTube—itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Google—and it was somehow thrilling and abominable: this rough beast, its hour come at last, emerging at an uncanny gallop from some final merger of corporate and state power in the crucible of technology.

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Hewlett-Packard, the valley’s first major success, was a military contractor whose cofounder David Packard served as deputy secretary of defense during the Nixon administration. His most significant contribution during his term of office, Solnit points out, “was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law.” I was aware that there was something unreasonable, even slightly hysterical, in my reaction to Boston Dynamics’ menagerie of humanoids and techno-animals, some half-gleeful indulgence of a paranoid tendency, but I could not on that account disregard that reaction. At a subcortical level, I rejected these creatures and what they represented; some primitive, human part of me wanted to smash them with a hammer just as the young Thomas Aquinas destroyed the automaton of Albertus Magnus.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Gill Pratt: For Gill Pratt’s quote on the Challenge, see: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-amazing-moments-lessons-learned-whats-next. Boston Dynamics’ robot Atlas: See: https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas. Honda also got in on the action: Evan Ackerman, “Honda Unveils Prototype E2-D2 Disaster Response Robot,” IEEE Spectrum, October 2, 2017. Softbank: Ingrid Lunden, “Softbank Is Buying Robotics Firm Boston Dynamics and Schaft from Alphabet,” TechCrunch, June 8, 2017. After decades of rising life expectancies: See: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/07/09/japans-pension-problems-are-a-harbinger-of-challenges-elsewhere.

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Even DARPA program manager and Robot Challenge organizer Gill Pratt couldn’t abide his own live event: “Why would anyone sit in the sun and heat, watching a machine take an hour to go through eight simple tasks that you could do in five minutes?” But progress was swift. A year later, a video released online showed off Boston Dynamics’ robot Atlas, the second place winner from the 2015 DARPA Challenge, hiking through slick, snowy woods, stacking boxes in a warehouse, even regaining his balance after getting whacked with a hockey stick. A year after that, a different video showed Atlas navigating an obstacle course that included a backflip off a wooden crate and color commentary by a sports announcer: “A 360 spin onto the pallet, backflip gainer off…” Honda also got in on the action.

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By 2017, they’d created a prototype disaster-response bot that could climb ladders, shimmy sideways, and even get down on all fours and knuckle-walk through rough terrain. In the six years since Fukushima, we’d gone from drunken droids to disaster-ready ninjas. And not to be outdone by Honda, 2017 also saw the Japanese conglomerate Softbank buy Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (who had purchased the company back in 2013). The reason? A different national disaster facing Japan—a rapidly aging population and no one to care for the elderly. After decades of rising life expectancies and falling birth rates, Japan entered the new millennium with the bulk of its population edging into retirement, and no one to take their place.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

The agency may have been thinking about recent calamity at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, where the risks from radioactivity made human presence highly risky. But those are precisely the skills needed for operating in ground close combat too. The robots failed to impress. We’ve become familiar over the last decade with seeing the increasing dexterity of robots produced by the firm Boston Dynamics. They supplied the ATLAS robots used by competitors in the Grand Challenge. ATLAS is an impressive humanoid machine, capable of bounding from one surface to another.7 It’s a small imaginative leap from seeing that to visions of Arnie’s Terminator—a relentless killing machine, that as one character says, ‘absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead’.

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ATLAS is an impressive humanoid machine, capable of bounding from one surface to another.7 It’s a small imaginative leap from seeing that to visions of Arnie’s Terminator—a relentless killing machine, that as one character says, ‘absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead’. Thankfully the comic failures of the rescue droids in DARPA’s competition suggest Judgment Day lies some way distant. Opening a door handle was too much for one machine, which overbalanced, toppled and was unable to regain its feet.8 Definitely more Shakey than Arnie. The problem is that Boston Dynamics’ machines look amazing, and indeed are impressive. But they are remote controlled. AI controlled gyroscopes keep them upright and agile, but not much more. Their capacity for autonomous decision-making is, at best, undemonstrated in these corporate video releases. And if the state of the art in the Grand Challenge is anything to go by, it won’t be that great.

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Formidable divers, they fold back their wings at the last moment, spearing down into the ocean on the sardines below, in a battle of swarm versus shoal. Could it be that the warbot of the near future will move from one domain to another? More broadly, nature has offered inspiration to roboticists for decades, whether the sinister canter of a headless Boston Dynamics quadruped, or the graceful flapping of a flock of electric blue robot butterflies. This experimental phase, where concepts and platform designs for warbots are proliferating, is a robot menagerie. The best combination of traits in our warbot army remains undetermined. Even if we allow that the swarm is a potent way of using tactical autonomous weapons, it’s not the only possibility.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

If the AI disproportionately rejects parole for black prisoners, and yet reduces the black prison population significantly, is that a desirable outcome? The question forces consideration of the aim of policy—what counts as a better outcome—but also of the wider social system within which decision making is being delegated from humans to machines. 1. ‘Parkour Atlas’, Boston Dynamics, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LikxFZZO2sk; ‘UpTown Spot’, Boston Dynamics, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHBcVlqpvZ8, accessed 18 October 2018. 2. Public goods from which people can be excluded are known as club goods. 3. With a Laspeyres index. With a Fisher ideal index it would be a conceptual basket of goods, not the actual 2018 (or 1978) basket.

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The continuing economic, social, and political transformations driven by technological change are, paradoxically, making our increasingly machine-run world ever less mechanistic and predictable. As in mediaeval maps, there are monsters in the unknown territories beyond the boundaries of current knowledge. The new monsters are symbolised by the nightmare robot creations of Boston Dynamics.1 Digital transformation of everyday life, of business and consumption, of social relations and politics, raises two questions. One is an old question requiring new answers: what kind of society do we want, and how do we measure progress towards it? The second is what makes policies effective in delivering progress in this non-linear, complex world, that is not amenable to simple causal explanations?

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., 122, 124 BBC Reith Lectures, 77–78 BBC Trust, 83 Becker, Gary, 2, 92, 119 behavioural economics: aggregation and, 3, 40, 42, 71–72, 100–102, 106, 113, 122–23, 141, 176–77, 201–2; beliefs of tomorrow and, 22; bias and, 109, 136; Coase on, 58; cognitive science and, 35–36, 48, 51, 91–92, 118–19, 186; competition and, 45–51 (see also competition); consumers and, 22, 59–60, 92, 109; context and, 88; failures and, 55; Goodhart’s Law and, 72, 103; happiness and, 70–71, 153; incentives and, 29, 33, 35, 55, 63–64, 80, 106, 110, 160, 200; interventions and, 48, 63, 104, 106, 160, 208, 211; markets as process and, 37–45; models and, 22, 35, 47, 63, 88, 92–93, 119, 136, 154; outsider context and, 88, 92–93, 100, 103–9; performativity and, 11, 23, 30, 211; progress and, 136–37, 145, 154, 157–60; psychology and, 38, 63, 70, 92, 94; public choice theory and, 64, 106, 119, 124; public services and, 33; rationality and, 22, 35, 46–47, 59, 109, 117–19; self-referential policy advice and, 63–64; separation protocol and, 119–20, 124; special interest groups and, 64–66; technocratic dilemma and, 67–79; twenty-first-century policy and, 186, 202, 207–8; Wu study and, 8 Bell, Daniel, 67 Bernanke, Ben, 17 Berners-Lee, Tim, 195 bias: academics and, 6; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 13, 161, 165, 187; behavioural, 109, 136; causality and, 13, 105; control groups and, 105; data, 13, 101, 105, 161, 187, 209; decision making and, 13, 109, 187, 209; framing effects and, 47; gender, 6, 8; institutional, 180; market, 180, 187, 209; non-rational, 47, 109; skill-biased technical change and, 132; special interest groups and, 64–66; survey, 101; twenty-first-century policy and, 187, 209 Biden, Joe, 205 Big Bang, 16 big data, 3, 13, 40, 51, 86, 100, 203, 209 biodiversity, 39, 63, 165 Black, Fisher, 23–25, 28 blackboard economies, 99 black box solutions, 161 BlackLivesMatter, 9, 214 black markets, 43 Black-Scholes-Merton model, 24–25 Blair, Tony, 208 Blake, William, 150 Blue Books, 150 BMW, 196 Booking, 173 Borges, J., 90 Boskin Commission, 146–47 Boston Dynamics, 137 Bowles, Sam, 85, 117, 119 Bretton Woods, 192 Brexit, 1, 37, 53, 56, 70, 110, 131, 155, 213 Brown, Dan, 108 Brynjolfsson, Eric, 176 bubbles, 20, 22, 29 Buchanan, James, 33 budget constraints, 177 Bundeskartellamt, 205 Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis, 66 business cycles, 71, 81, 102, 124 calculus, 16, 33, 90, 145 Calculus of Consent, The: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Buchanan and Tullock), 33 Camus, Albert, 87, 108, 111 capitalism: criticism of, 19–20; free market and, 19, 41, 186; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–94, 196, 213; inequality from, 19; progress and, 143, 149; Schumpeter on, 143; twenty-first-century policy and, 186, 190, 195 Capital (Piketty), 131 carbon emissions, 38–40, 180, 187 Carlin, Wendy, 85 Cartlidge, John, 27 Case, Anne, 131 cash for clunkers, 55, 63 causality: bias and, 13, 105; correlation and, 94; deductive approach and, 103; economically establishing, 100; empirical work and, 2, 61, 94–96, 99; feedback and, 11, 94, 96; Leamer on, 102; methodological debate over, 2; models and, 2, 94–95, 102; moral issues and, 96; outsider context and, 94–96, 99–105; progress and, 137; public responsibilities and, 61, 74; randomised control trials (RCTs) and, 93–95, 105, 109–10; reflexivity and, 11, 81; societal statistics and, 61; statistics and, 61, 95, 99, 102; two-way, 94, 96 central banks: independence of, 16; progress and, 149; public responsibilities and, 16, 32, 62, 64, 66–67, 76, 81 central planning: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 184, 186–87; competition and, 38, 41, 124, 182; failure of communist, 40, 182–88, 190; socialist calculation debate and, 182–88, 190, 209 Central Planning Bureau, 66 Chetty, Raj, 86 Chicago School, 24–25, 73, 75, 190, 193–94 Chile, 184 China, 173, 195, 206 Citadel, 27 City of London, 16, 19 climate change, 85, 148, 154 Close the Door campaign, 155–56 cloud computing, 150, 170–72, 184, 197 Coase, Ronald, 57–58, 62, 98–99 codes of conduct, 9, 206 cognitive science, 35–36, 48, 51, 91–92, 118–19, 186 Colander, David, 100 Cold War, 190 Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The (Bell), 67 common sense, 78, 127 communication, 53, 127, 168; bandwidth and, 171; compression and, 171; cost of, 196; 4G platforms and, 195; instant messaging, 171; latency and, 171; price of, 150, 171, 177; servers and, 25–26, 141, 170; smartphones and, 46, 138–39, 164, 171, 173, 177, 195, 198; SMS, 171; social media and, 52, 73, 82, 140–41, 149, 157, 163, 173, 176–77, 195; telephony and, 4, 31, 46, 98, 123, 138–39, 144, 156, 164, 171, 173–74, 177, 184, 195, 198; 3G platforms, 60, 139, 173, 195; transmission speeds and, 171 comparative advantage, 78, 97 competition: behavioural fix and, 45–51; central planning and, 38, 41, 124, 182; Chinese, 173, 195, 206; creative destruction and, 41; digital economy and, 42, 85, 165, 181, 201–6; directory numbers and, 60; empirical work and, 181, 209; envelopment and, 203–4; incumbents and, 41–42; innovation and, 28, 41, 46, 68, 85, 209; monopolies and, 20, 42; network effects and, 202, 205; opportunity cost and, 56, 58, 80, 156; outsider context and, 98, 105; Pareto criterion and, 122–23, 126–27, 129; production and, 12, 41; profit and, 33, 41–42, 105, 204; progress and, 135, 158, 165; public responsibilities and, 28, 33, 38, 41–42, 45–48, 57–69, 74, 77, 79, 85; rationality and, 117; resource, 41, 45, 117, 123, 125; separation protocol and, 120, 123–25; socialist calculation debate and, 182–83; special interest groups and, 64–66; specific studies in, 12; spectrum auctions and, 60–61; SSNIP test and, 204; twenty-first-century policy and, 182, 201–9 Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), 205 computers: AI and, 116 (see also artificial intelligence [AI]); Black-Scholes-Merton model and, 24–25; changing technology and, 169; cloud computing and, 150, 170–72, 184, 197; data sets and, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209; David on, 169; declining price of, 170; empirical work and, 2, 17, 52; exchange locations and, 25; feedback and, 179; Millennium Bug and, 155; Moore’s Law and, 170, 184; power of, 2, 17, 40, 58, 170, 183–84, 188; progress and, 138, 144, 155; rationality and, 116–17; servers and, 25–26, 141, 170; software and, 25, 140, 155, 171, 177–78, 186, 197, 200–201, 203; Solow on, 169; speed and, 25, 184; statistics and, 17, 52, 58, 144, 169; supercomputers, 170; twenty-first-century policy and, 183–84, 186, 188, 214; ultra-high frequency trading (HFT) and, 25–27 conservatism, 30 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 146–47, 172 consumers: bad choices and, 3; behavioural economics and, 22, 59–60, 92, 109; conspicuous consumption and, 42; digital economy and, 42, 137, 172–76, 181, 198, 200–206, 213; empirical work and, 3, 181; income and, 93 (see also income); innovation and, 28, 102, 200; Keynes and, 22; online shopping and, 173, 198; outsider context and, 92, 96, 98, 100–102, 105, 108–9; progress and, 137, 141, 144, 146–47, 151; public responsibilities and, 22, 28, 42, 59–60, 65; rationality and, 116; technology and, 28, 102, 171–76, 181, 200, 213; time spent online, 176–78; twenty-first-century policy and, 184, 198–206; welfare and, 105, 206 Cook, Eli, 150 copyright, 140 CORE’s The Economy, 85–86, 212–13 cost-benefit analysis (CBA), 56–57, 58n12, 125–26, 207 cost of living, 143–47, 172 counterfactuals, 97–98, 158, 161, 198, 208 Covid19 pandemic: body politics and, 163; financial recovery from, 88, 114; GDP growth and, 88, 165; impact of, 3, 10–11, 14, 20, 38, 43, 45, 68, 75, 88, 110, 114, 132–33, 149, 153, 155, 163–66, 181, 194, 213–15; lockdowns and, 3, 43, 45, 88, 114, 163, 198; public opinion and, 165–66 “Creating Humble Economists” (Colander), 100 creative destruction, 41 curriculum issues, 2, 4–5, 83, 85, 88 Daily Telegraph, 159 Darwin, Charles, 48 data centres, 26 data sets, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209 David, Paul, 169 Deaths of Despair (Case and Deaton), 131 Deaton, Angus, 128–29, 131 debt, 76, 101, 153 decision making: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 116, 186–87; bias and, 13, 109, 187, 209; Green Book and, 56, 126; normative economics and, 110, 114, 120; opportunity cost and, 56; outsider context and, 93; production and, 12, 123, 140, 196; progress and, 160, 162; rationality and, 116 (see also rationality); rules of thumb and, 47–48, 90, 117, 212; self knowledge and, 81; separation protocol and, 120 DeepMind, 115–16 Deliveroo, 173 demand management, 31, 191–92 democracy, 33, 67, 69, 79, 193 deregulation, 16, 31, 60, 68, 71, 193–94 derivative markets, 16, 18, 23–25, 28 Desrosières, Alain, 146 Dickens, Charles, 150 digital economy: AI and, 115 (see also artificial intelligence (AI)); changing nature of, 168–81; cloud computing and, 150, 170–72, 184, 197; cogs and, 6, 129, 154, 165, 179; competition and, 42, 85, 165, 181, 201–6; consumers and, 42, 137, 172–76, 181, 198, 200–206, 213; difference of, 168–76; dominance of by giant companies, 133; envelopment and, 203–4; 4G platforms, 195; GAFAM and, 173; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–96, 213; GPTs and, 169; Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and, 113–14; growth and, 129, 132, 140, 143, 194, 202; implications of, 176–78, 211–14; individual and, 6, 13–14, 128–29, 141, 175, 179, 181, 201; innovation and, 169–70; market changes and, 173–76; measuring online value and, 176; monsters and, 6, 154; network effects and, 127, 141, 174, 177, 185, 199–202, 205, 209; new agenda for, 179–81; online shopping and, 173, 198; Phillips machine and, 135–37, 151, 192; populism and, 211; production and, 132, 140, 142, 176, 195–97, 202, 213; progress and, 14, 137–43, 150, 153–54, 164–67; Project CyberSyn and, 184; services and, 176; software and, 25, 140, 155, 171, 177–78, 186, 197, 200–201, 203; statistics and, 113, 150, 164, 170, 172, 212; superstar features and, 173–74; 3G platforms, 60, 139, 173, 195; twenty-first-century policy and, 13, 185–88, 194–210; wealth creation and, 132–33; welfare and, 128, 134, 143, 206, 208, 212 Director, Aaron, 190 directory numbers, 60 discount rates, 147–48 diversity, 6–9, 213–14 Dow Jones, 26 Duflo, Esther, 20–21, 52, 109, 137 eBay, 175 ECO, 11 Economics Job Market Rumors, 8 Economics Observatory (ECO), 214 economies of scale: changing technology and, 174; network effects and, 127, 174, 177, 185, 199–201, 209; progress and, 142 education: derivatives and, 16; growth and, 16–17, 132; interventions and, 12; online, 177; policy on, 60; provision of basic, 30; real-world context and, 88; skills and, 88, 128, 132, 169–70; spread of higher, 151, 153 Efficient Markets Hypothesis, 17, 29 Eichengreen, Barry, 16 electricity: changing economies and, 127, 169, 191–92; progress and, 139, 142, 156, 165, 169, 191–92; regulation and, 65; supply of, 32; twenty-first-century policy and, 191–92, 200–201; warranties on goods and, 105 empirical work: behavioural economics and, 117, 159; causality and, 2, 61, 94–96, 99; competition and, 181, 209; computers and, 2, 17, 52; consumers and, 3, 181; context and, 17, 35, 61, 78, 92; correlation and, 70, 94; counterfactuals and, 97–98, 158, 161, 198, 208; data sets and, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209; feedback and, 11, 94–95, 155, 179, 188–89, 203, 205; growth and, 17, 61, 78, 209; macroeconomics and, 74, 100; market structures and, 35; physics envy and, 50; politics and, 3, 76, 78–79, 124, 213; populism and, 77; public responsibilities and, 17, 35, 40, 52, 61, 70, 74–81, 90, 92, 94–102, 110–11; randomised control trials (RCTs) and, 93–95, 105, 109–10; rationality and, 17; separation protocol and, 119, 124, 128; social constructs and, 13; statistics and, 17, 52, 61, 90, 95, 99; taxes and, 3; theory and, 2, 17, 52, 74, 90, 96, 99, 124, 181 endogenous growth theory, 17, 202 Enlightenment, 20 envelopment, 203–4 environmentalists, 126 equilibrium, 31, 38–39, 90–91, 123, 182 ethics, 4, 34, 39, 100, 105, 115, 119–24 Ethics and Society group, 115 ethnicity, 6–7, 9 European Commission, 67, 130, 205 European Steel and Coal Community, 190 European Union (EU), 37, 67, 195, 204 Eurozone, 67, 74 exchange rates, 118, 192 Facebook, 133, 173, 204–5 facial recognition, 165 fairness, 43, 45–46, 166 fake items, 98 Fear Index, The (Harris), 27 feedback: causality and, 11, 94–96; changing technology and, 179; political economy and, 188–89; progress and, 155; twenty-first-century policy and, 203, 205 financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM), 28 Financial Times, 68–69, 97–98 Fisher Ideal index, 144n3 fixed costs, 174, 177, 179, 185–86, 200 forecasting: agent-based modeling and, 102; conditional projections and, 76; financial crises and, 17, 30, 100–101, 112–13; growth and, 37, 61; inflation and, 36; macroeconomics and, 3, 12, 36–37, 76, 101–2, 112; models and, 17, 74, 101–2, 113; self-fulfilling prophecies and, 5, 22–23, 154–55, 157; twenty-first-century policy and, 205; weather, 76 Fourastié, J., 191 4G platforms, 195 framing, 47, 130, 208 Frankenfinance, 18, 21, 25, 51–52, 165 Freakonomics, 108 free market: Brexit and, 213; capitalism and, 19, 41, 186; criticism of, 19; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–94, 196, 213; politics and, 30, 36, 130, 206; public responsibilities and, 19, 30–32, 35–36, 45, 54; separation protocol and, 123–24; twenty-first-century policy and, 182, 186, 191, 193, 195, 207 frictions, 22, 113, 136, 154, 182 Friedman, Ben, 16 Friedman, Milton, 16, 31, 93, 104, 121, 190 Furman, Jason, 86 GAFAM, 173 GameStop, 27 game theory, 48, 90–91, 129, 159–60, 179–80 Gelman, Andrew, 108 gender, 6–9, 93 GenZ, 166 Giavazzi, Francesco, 68 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 48 Gilded Age, 133 Giudici, Claudio, 69 Glaeser, Ed, 92 globalisation, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–96, 213 Goldman Sachs, 19 Good Economics for Hard Times (Banerjee and Duflo), 109 Goodhart’s Law, 72, 103 Google, 133, 141, 173, 201, 204–5 Gordon, Robert, 142 Gould, Stephen Jay, 49–50 Gove, Michael, 110, 149 Government Economic Service (GES), 53, 83–85 GPT, 169 Great Depression, 3, 10, 17, 20, 74, 191, 213 Great Financial Crisis (GFC): behavioural economics and, 51; consequences of, 1, 3, 11, 213; digital economy and, 113–14; dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and, 31; forecasting, 30, 101, 112–13; Greece and, 56–58, 67; Italy and, 56–58, 67–69; models and, 31, 101, 113; outsider context and, 87–88, 101, 110, 112–14; progress and, 149, 153, 159; public responsibilities and, 16–19, 21, 29–31, 37–38, 50–51, 56, 67–68, 73–74, 79, 84; technology and, 56, 181; twenty-first-century policy and, 194 Great Moderation, 17, 73 Greece, 56, 67–68 greed, 11, 16, 29, 164 Green, Duncan, 95–96 Green Book, 56, 126 Greenspan, Alan, 101 Griliches, Zvi, 198 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 60; Covid19 pandemic and, 88, 165; Fisher Ideal index and, 144n3; FISIM and, 28; flatlining of, 142; free market and, 130; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, 172–73; Gross National Product (GNP) and, 151; growth and, 28, 46, 88, 97, 138, 143–44, 159, 165, 169, 171–72; inflation and, 13, 113, 148; internet and, 97; Laspeyres index and, 144n3; macroeconomics and, 13, 101, 113, 151; progress and, 138, 142–44, 148, 151, 158–59, 165, 172–73; real, 101, 142–44, 169, 173; Sen-Stiglitz-Fitoussi Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and, 151; social welfare and, 134; twenty-first-century policy and, 187; Winter of Discontent and, 158, 192 Gross National Product (GNP), 151 Grove, Andy, 41 growth: changing economies and, 171–72, 212; Covid19 pandemic and, 88, 165; derivatives market and, 16, 23, 28; digital technology and, 129, 132, 140, 143, 194–210; education and, 16–17, 132; empirical work and, 17, 61, 78, 209; endogenous growth theory and, 17, 202; faster, 66, 71, 144, 159; forecasting, 37, 61; Goodhart’s Law and, 72; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, 28, 46, 88, 97, 138, 143–44, 159, 165, 169, 171–72; income, 70, 131, 138, 143, 164–65, 194, 207; inflation and, 12, 66, 73, 178; innovation and, 37, 41, 46, 68, 71, 194, 209; internet and, 97; living standards and, 143–47, 172, 194; outsider context and, 12, 97, 101n1, 111; political economy and, 167, 181, 188–95; progress and, 138, 140, 143–45, 152, 159, 165; public responsibilities and, 16–17, 23, 28, 37, 41, 46, 61, 66, 68–73, 76, 78; recession and, 17, 51, 73, 111, 154, 158–59; slow, 11, 72; spillovers and, 129–30; sustainability and, 11, 20, 111, 148, 152, 166; technology and, 71, 132, 140, 202; twenty-first-century policy and, 187, 191–92, 194, 202, 207, 209; velocity of money and, 71 Guardian, 159 happiness, 70–71, 153 Harberger, A.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

The smart home cannot fold the laundry, clear the dishes, or pick up the newspaper. It really wants a physical robot to do its bidding. FIGURE 5: (left) BRETT folding towels; (right) the Boston Dynamics SpotMini robot opening a door. It may not have too long to wait. Already, robots have demonstrated many of the required skills. In the Berkeley lab of my colleague Pieter Abbeel, BRETT (the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks) has been folding piles of towels since 2011, while the SpotMini robot from Boston Dynamics can climb stairs and open doors (figure 5). Several companies are already building cooking robots, although they require special, enclosed setups and pre-cut ingredients and won’t work in an ordinary kitchen.19 Of the three basic physical capabilities required for a useful domestic robot—perception, mobility, and dexterity—the latter is most problematic.

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There are dozens of grasp types just for rigid objects and there are thousands of distinct manipulation skills, such as shaking exactly two pills out of a bottle, peeling the label off a jam jar, spreading hard butter on soft bread, or lifting one strand of spaghetti from the pot with a fork to see if it’s ready. It seems likely that the tactile sensing and hand construction problems will be solved by 3D printing, which is already being used by Boston Dynamics for some of the more complex parts of their Atlas humanoid robot. Robot manipulation skills are advancing rapidly, thanks in part to deep reinforcement learning.20 The final push—putting all this together into something that begins to approximate the awesome physical skills of movie robots—is likely to come from the rather unromantic warehouse industry.

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A superficially quite different explanation of explanation-based learning: John Laird, Paul Rosenbloom, and Allen Newell, “Chunking in Soar: The anatomy of a general learning mechanism,” Machine Learning 1 (1986): 11–46. Image Credits Figure 2: (b) © The Sun / News Licensing; (c) Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives. Figure 4: © SRI International. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. Figure 5: (left) © Berkeley AI Research Lab; (right) © Boston Dynamics. Figure 6: © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 7: (left) © Noam Eshel, Defense Update; (right) © Future of Life Institute / Stuart Russell. Figure 10: (left) © AFP; (right) Courtesy of Henrik Sorensen. Figure 11: Elysium © 2013 MRC II Distribution Company L.P.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In March of 2012, Kiva was acquired by Amazon—a leader in advanced warehouse logistics—for more than $750 million in cash.31 Boston Dynamics, yet another New England startup, has tackled Moravec’s paradox head-on. The company builds robots aimed at supporting American troops in the field by, among other things, carrying heavy loads over rough terrain. Its BigDog, which looks like a giant metal mastiff with long skinny legs, can go up steep hills, recover from slips on ice, and do other very dog-like things. Balancing a heavy load on four points while moving over an uneven landscape is a truly nasty engineering problem, but Boston Dynamics has been making good progress. As a final example of recent robotic progress, consider the Double, which is about as different from the BigDog as possible.

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It makes for compelling entertainment, and it seems more and more plausible as technology continues to advance and demonstrate human-like capabilities. Teamwork, after all, is another of these capabilities, so why wouldn’t future versions of Watson, the Google autonomous car, the BigDog robot from Boston Dynamics, drone aircraft, and lots of other smart machines decide to work together? And if they did, wouldn’t they soon realize that we humans treat our technologies pretty poorly, scrapping them without a second thought? Self-preservation alone would plausibly motivate this digital army to fight against us (perhaps using Siri as an interpreter for the enemy).

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id=USARGDPH INDEX Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum and Roksa) Acemoglu, Daron Affinnova Aftercollege.com Agarwal, Anant Age of Spiritual Machines, The: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Kurzweil) Agrarian Justice (Paine) agriculture: development of inelastic demand in Ahn, Luis von Aiden, Erez Lieberman Airbnb.com Alaska, income guarantee plan in algorithms Allegretto, Sylvia Allstate Amazon Amazon Web Services American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Android animals, domestication of Apple Arthur, Brian artificial intelligence (AI) future of SLAM problem in uses of see also robots Arum, Richard ASCI Red ASIMO Asimov, Isaac Asur, Sitaram Athens, ancient ATMs Audi Australia, immigrant entrepreneurship in Autodesk automation: future of labor market effects of in manufacturing Autor, David Baker, Stephen Barnes & Noble Bartlett, Albert A. Bartlett, Bruce Bass, Carl batteries Baxter Beane, Matt Bebchuk, Lucian Beck, Andrew Bed Bath & Beyond Berners-Lee, Tim Bernstein, Jared Bezos, Jeff Bhutan BigDog Black Death Blecharczyk, Nathan Blogger books: digitization of Internet retailing of Boskin Commission Boston Dynamics Boudreaux, Donald bounty digitization and productivity growth and spread vs. Brabham, Daren Brain Gain: Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy (West) breast cancer Bresnahan, Tim Brin, Sergey broadband Brookings Institution Brooks, Rodney browsers Brynjolfsson, Erik Buddha Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

As a result, the company can in principle fuse together a suite of virtually hegemonic web products like GMail and the Chrome browser, the hundreds of millions of devices running the Android operating system, a high-resolution global mapping capability, the networked Nest thermostats and other home-automation systems, the Glass augmented reality visor, the Daydream VR headset, an autonomous-car initiative, the DeepMind artificial intelligence unit, the Sidewalk Labs smart-city effort, even the military robots produced by their Boston Dynamics division. There is surely something troubling, if not outright dystopian, about this particular assembly of forces and capabilities. The thought that a single entity controls all of these products and services—and is able to tap and exploit the flow of information as it courses through and between them—is more than a little unsettling.

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It has been widely reported that the Nest team loathed founder Tony Fadell, and the division suffered from a string of embarrassing reversals during its time under the Google aegis;2 to date, the parent organization has been unable to leverage the data presumably flowing upstream from its thermostats and networked cameras. Boston Dynamics was put up for sale in March 2016, in what has been characterized as a corporate retreat from the entire field of robotics (and what was notably, again, a failure to integrate organizational cultures following an acquisition).3 The company’s autonomous car initiative has suffered a long wave of defections among senior personnel, and keeps rolling back the date at which it plans to introduce its driverless technology;4 it now estimates its vehicles will be fielded commercially no sooner than 2020.

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,” Neurobiology of Aging, April 2009, Volume 30, Issue 4, pp. 507–14. 10Radical technologies 1.Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, “Topic 487: State of the World 2016,” The WELL, January 3, 2016, well.com. 2.Mark Bergen, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell Went to Google’s All-Hands Meeting to Defend Nest. Here’s What He Said,” Recode, April 13, 2016. f 3.Brad Stone and Jack Clark, “Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat,” Bloomberg Technology, March 17, 2016. 4.John Markoff, “Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist,” New York Times, August 5, 2016. 5.Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Funded by Google Aims to Fix Public Transit in US,” Guardian, June 27, 2016. 6.Siimon Reynolds, “Why Google Glass Failed: A Marketing Lesson,” Forbes, February 5, 2015. 7.Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016. 8.Mark Zuckerberg, “The technology behind Aquila,” Facebook, July 21, 2016, facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/. 9.Mari Saito, “Exclusive: Amazon Expanding Deliveries by Its ‘On-Demand’ Drivers,” Reuters, February 8, 2016. 10.Alan Boyle, “First Amazon Prime Airplane Debuts in Seattle After Secret Night Flight,” GeekWire, August 4, 2016. 11.Farhad Manjoo, “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

One common approach is to plan the motions in the much higher dimensional space of joint angles rather than the locations in three dimensional space. Movement and Balance One of the more difficult tasks for a humanoid robot is to maintain balance while walking over rough surfaces. The Atlas robot shown below can walk over a surface covered by unstable rocks. Atlas was developed by the Boston Dynamics company which has recently been purchased by Google. The kinodynamic processing requires very carefully measuring the current state of the robot’s balance and movement. This is then compared to the desired state so that movements can be planned that will produce the desired state. Due to the chaotic environment, these plans never quite work as expected, so new plans need to be continuously produced.

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The reader is encouraged to view the video of Atlas’s impressive performance, but it is still moves rather awkwardly, and only remains upright by flailing its weighted arms around quite vigorously. This is in stark contrast to a human that could not only walk but run over this terrain very smoothly. Atlas robot walking over rough terrain. Corporate Boston Dynamics Robocup Humanoid robocup. Corporate http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/soccer-playing-robots.html Some of the greatest advances in robotics are demonstrated at the annual international Robocup event, in which dozens of teams of engineers compete to build humanoid robots that can win a game of soccer against competing robots.

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One major benefit of the DARPA challenge is that DARPA has funded a sophisticated, publicly available, open source robotic simulator named Gazebo. This makes it much easier for smaller research teams that are not part of the main challenge to do advanced robotics research. Presumably the Atlas humanoid robots being built for DARPA by Boston Dynamics will also become available at more reasonable prices. While these problems may not require the resolution of the deeper issues in artificial intelligence, they do require the solution of many simpler ones, particularly in machine vision and sensing. And building a system that actually works coherently involves much more complexity than just the sum of the parts.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Moflin, from Vanguard Industries, claims to be furry, emotionally responsive, and make all the right noises, and, of course, it doesn’t have bowels or need to be taken outside. Tombot is marketed as an emotional-support animal who will bark for treats and wag his tail. He’s always a puppy, and he’s always there. I prefer Spot – from Boston Dynamics – but Spot is a working dog. With a great video. * * * For anyone who can’t go out – or who is afraid to do so – a robopet can manage without a walk, though your AI dog can be programmed to actively encourage you to go out – some have timers that can be set, and the dog woofs for walkies.

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They are also excellent at carrying people. * * * Robots. One word. So many applications. A mechanical programmable device. Giant assembly-line arms. R2-D2, C-3PO, Data, the Terminator. Sophia and her family (she has an argumentative brother called Hans). A sexbot with blinking eyes and a ro-gasm. Boston Dynamics’ Spot the dog. Robots are not one thing. Not one shape. Not one job. Robots are developing all the time. The smarter AI gets, the smarter robots will get. At present there are serious technical issues to overcome. All artificial intelligence is narrow AI – programmed, specific, problem-solving that doesn’t transfer well to other domains.

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Auden, reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd; p.145 Harmony RealDoll at the 2020 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo © Ethan Miller / Getty Images; p.162 Pepper the Humanoid Robot at the Tokyo International Film Festival © Dick Thomas Johnson / Creative Commons; p.167 Moflin © Vanguard Industries ; p.168 Tombot © Tombot, Inc; p.168 Spot © Boston Dynamics; p.169 Little Sophia © Hanson Robotics; p.170 Sophia the Robot © Hanson Robotics; p.210 Wrens operating the Colossus computer © Science & Society Picture Library; p.211 Ann Moffatt and her daughter in 1968 © Ann Moffatt; p.215 Woman setting the wires of the ENIAC, 1947 © Francis Miller / Getty Images; p.249 ‘An Arundel Tomb’ is from The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce this material.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Sensor technology, speech recognition, information searches, and so forth are advancing apace. So (albeit with a more substantial lag) is physical dexterity. Robots are still clumsier than a child in moving pieces on a real chessboard, tying shoelaces, or cutting toenails. But here too there is progress. In 2017, Boston Dynamics demonstrated a fearsome-looking robot called Handel (a successor to the earlier four-legged Big Dog), with wheels as well as two legs, that is agile enough to perform back flips. But it will be a long time before machines outclass human gymnasts—or indeed interact with the real world with the agility of monkeys and squirrels that jump from tree to tree—still less achieve the overall versatility of humans.

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See also genomes bio terror, 73, 75, 77–78 bioweapons of governments, 77 black carbon, reduction of, 47 Black Death, 76, 216 black holes: in center of Milky Way, 124; crashing together, 171; Einstein’s theory applied to, 166, 186; evaporation of, 179; fears about particle accelerators and, 111–12; as simple entities, 166, 173; space telescopes with evidence of, 142 blockchain, 220 Blue Origin, 146 Borucki, Bill, 132 Boston Dynamics, 88 bottlenecks, evolutionary, 155–56, 158 Boyle, Robert, 61–63 brain: basic science needed for medical applications to, 212; chain of complexity from big bang to, 214; complexity of, 174, 176–77; computer simulations of, 190; limits to human understanding and, 189–90, 192–94; mystery of self-awareness and, 193 brain death, 71 brain implants, downloading thoughts from, 105 Breakthrough Listen, 157 Brewster, David, 126–27 Brooks, Rodney, 106 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 26 Bruno, Giordano, 129 C4 pathway, 25 carbon capture and storage, 51, 58 carbon dioxide in atmosphere, 1, 38–44; cosmic history of carbon atoms in, 123; cutting to preindustrial level, 52; direct extraction of, 59; electric cars and, 47; predicting accelerated increase in, 57–58.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Enabled by a new generation of sensors and actuators, and driven by near-infinite computing and artificial intelligence, there’s a Cambrian explosion49 in robotics, with species of all sizes, shapes, and modes of mobility crawling out of the muck of the lab and onto the terra firma of the marketplace. Festo, for one example, has created a robot that flies like a bird. Boston Dynamics, for another, now makes robots that can climb, crawl, jump, and hop, and all while carrying heavy loads (some bots can manage over a hundred kilograms of weight). These “Sherpa-bots” can traverse boulder-strewn hillsides, balance on sheets of ice, and even jump from the ground to a rooftop three stories up.

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These “Sherpa-bots” can traverse boulder-strewn hillsides, balance on sheets of ice, and even jump from the ground to a rooftop three stories up. But what has been relatively slow progress—run out of university labs and funded by government grants—took a quantum leap forward in late 2013, when Amazon announced it was going into the drone business50 and Google announced the acquisition of eight robotics companies (including Boston Dynamics).51 With the big dogs in the game, progress is coming even faster. And the resulting change will be considerable. Robots don’t unionize, don’t show up late, and don’t take lunch, yet Baxter can work an assembly line for the equivalent of $4 an hour.52 A 2013 report from the Oxford Martin School concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers (AI and robots) within the next two decades.53 Good or bad, this same trend is evident around the world.

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Italic numbers refer to charts/graphs Aabar, 127 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), xi–xii, xv, 34, 54, 136, 137, 146, 162, 274 AbundanceHub.com, 158, 162, 210, 277 Abundance360Summit, 278 Academy of Achievement, 129 activists, xiii, 180 in crowdfunding campaigns, 201–3, 212, 230 additive manufacturing, 30, 31, 33, 41 AdhereTech, 47 AdSense, 139 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), 27 advertising, 241, 242 in crowdfunding campaigns, 212–13 crowdsourcing platforms for, 151, 152–54, 158 advocates, in crowdfunding campaigns, 200–201, 205 AdWords, 241 aerospace industry, 112, 117, 133 skunk methodology used in, 71–73, 75 3–D printing and, 34, 35–37 see also space exploration affiliate marketing, 199–200, 205 Ahn, Luis von, 154, 155–56 Airbnb, 20, 21, 66 Airbus, 249 airlines, 43, 124, 125, 126, 127, 260 AI XPRIZE, 54 algorithms, 43, 51, 52, 66, 85, 220, 227 crowdsourcing projects and, 158, 159, 160, 161, 227 machine-learning, 54–55, 55, 58 Netflix Prize for, 254–56 PageRank, 135 Align Technology, 34–35 Amazon, 50, 76, 97, 128, 129–34, 157, 195, 254 drone proposal of, 61, 133–34 Amazon Web Services, 131, 132 America Online (AOL), 76, 143 Anderson, Chris, 10–11, 54, 123, 224, 229, 242 Anderson, Eric, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 179, 202, 203–4 Andraka, Jack, 65 Andreessen, Marc, 27, 33 Android, 16, 135, 176 AngelList, 172, 173–74 Anheuser-Busch, 145 Ansari XPRIZE, 76, 96, 115, 127, 134, 246, 248–49, 253, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 anti-aging projects, 66, 81, 136, 139 Apollo Program, 96, 100, 118, 139 Appert, Nicolas, 245 Appirio, 227–28 Apple, 18, 28, 62, 72, 111, 128 applications (apps), 13, 13, 15, 16, 28, 45, 47, 150, 158, 176 Arduino, 43 ARKYD Space Telescope campaign, 172, 174–75, 179–80, 186, 187, 188, 193, 195, 207, 209, 242 early donor engagement in, 203–5 hype created in, 205 launch of, 200, 208 recruiting of activists in, 201–3, 212 ”space selfie” reward offered in, 180, 189–90, 196, 208 Arnaout, Ramy, 227 artificial intelligence (AI), x, 22, 24, 41, 44, 52–59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 81, 135, 146, 160, 162, 216, 228, 275, 276, 295n crowdsourcing projects and, 167, 295n entrepreneurial opportunities in, 54, 56–59 Google’s development of, 24, 53, 58, 81, 138–39 Association of Space Explorers, 102 asteroids, ix–x, 180, 228–29 mining of, 95–96, 97–99, 107, 109, 179, 221, 276 Asteroid Zoo, 228 astronomy, 219–21, 228, 247, 267 Autodesk, 48–49, 51, 63, 65 automation, 47–48, 56 automobile industry, 29, 222–23 3–D printing in, 32 see also Local Motors; Tesla Motors autonomous cars, 43–44, 44, 48, 62, 66, 135, 136, 137, 262 autonomy, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92 Babson School of Business, 14 BackRub (research project), 135 Bacon, Jono, 237 Bad Girl Ventures, 19 bake-offs, in incentive competitions, 264 Barnett, Chance, 173 Barrie, Matt, 149–50, 158, 163, 165, 166, 167, 207 Barry, Dan, 35, 61, 62 Bass, Carl, 48–49, 50, 51 Baxter (robot), 60–61 Beland, Francis, 250 Bennett, Jim, 255 Berns, Gregory, 108 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston), 227 Better Blocks, 240–41 Bezos, Jeff, xiii, 73, 97, 115, 126, 128–34, 138, 139, 167 on risk management, 76–77 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 128, 129, 130–33 Bezos, Mark, 128 Bianchini, Gina, 217, 219, 224, 233 Big Think, 49, 121 biotechnology, 63–65 see also genomics; synthetic biology BlackBerry, 176 Blakey, Marion, 110 Blastar (video game), 117 blogs, in crowdfunding campaigns, 177, 205, 206 blue ellipticals, 219–20 Blue Origin, 97, 133 Boeing, 127, 249 Boston Dynamics, 61 Boston Globe, 227 Brand, Stewart, 26 Branson, Richard, xiii, 73, 84, 86, 99, 100, 111–12, 115, 123–28, 138, 139 space tourism projects of, 96–97, 115, 125, 127 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 125–27 Briggs, William, 47 Brin, Sergey, 81, 128, 135 British Admiralty, 267 British Airways, 124, 125, 126 British Medical Journal, 109 British Petroleum (BP), 250, 251 Brooks, Rodney A., 60 Brown, Dan, 152 brute force, 51 Burchard, Brendon, 210 Business Insider, 132 Business World, 144 buzz marketing, 240–41 Bye, Stephen, 45 Calacanis, Jason, 139 Calico, 139 Callaghan, Jon, 62 Caltech, 27 camel racing, 59–60 cameras, 3–4, 152 see also digital cameras Cameron, James, 250 campaign managers, in crowdfunding, 192, 194 Canadian Space Agency (CSA), 102 Cane, Daniel, 57 Capp, Al, 71, 72 CAPTCHA, 154, 155, 167, 295n CastingWords, 145 celebrity (the face): in crowdfunding campaigns, 192, 198, 207 in incentive competitions, 273 cell phones, 49, 135, 163 see also smartphones CFM International, 34 challenge/skills ratio, 91 “charge-coupled device” (CCD), 4–5 Chen, Michael, 35, 36, 37 China, 17, 18, 62 Chinese National Space Administration, 102 Chrome, 135, 138 Chung, Anshe, 144 Cinematch, 254, 255 Cisco, 46 Clarke, Arthur C., 52, 53, 100 cloud services, 39, 45, 50, 51, 56, 57, 63, 65, 66, 132, 216, 227–28 CNN, 48 cognitive biases, 246 cognitive surplus, 215 CoheroHealth, 47 Colgate Palmolive, 154 Comedy Central, 95 communities, online, 22, 182, 215–42, 243 building member base in early days of, 233–34 case studies of, 219–28 collaborative structures of, 217, 227, 228, 236, 237, 255 contests and competitions in building of, 224, 225–27, 232, 237, 240; see also incentive competitions DIY, see DIY communities driving growth in, 239–41 engagement strategies in, 224, 227, 235, 236–38, 239, 241 exponential, see exponential communities Law of Niches in, 221, 223, 228, 231 managing of, 238–39 monetization of, 241–42 passion as important in, 224, 225, 228, 231, 258 rate of innovation in, 216, 219, 224, 225, 228, 233, 237 rating systems in, 226, 232, 236–37 reputation economics in building of, 217–19, 230, 232, 236–37 self-organizing structures of, 217, 237 see also crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns; crowdsourcing Compaq, 117 computers, x, 7, 26, 72, 76, 135 see also artificial intelligence (AI); supercomputers Comsat, 102 constraints, power of, 248–49, 259 contract research and manufacturing services (CRAMS), 65 Coolest Cooler campaign, 210–13 corporate sponsorship, 246, 246 Cotichini, Christian, 257 Cotteleer, Mark, 33 Coulson, Simon, 150 Craigslist, 11, 257 creative assets, crowdsourcing of, 158 Creative Commons license, 224 Credit Suisse, 56 Cretaceous Period, ix CrossFit, 229 Crowdfunder, 172, 173, 175 crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns, xiii, 22, 103, 144–45, 147–48, 167, 169–213, 216, 242, 243, 247, 258, 270 advertising in, 212–13 building perfect team for, 191–94 building your audience in, 199–203 case studies in, 174–80 celebrity face of, 192, 198, 207 choosing idea for, 184–85 costs in, 195 data-driven decision making in, 207–10, 213 emergence of, 170–71, 170 engagement strategies in, 203–6, 207 feedback in, 176, 180, 182, 185, 190, 199, 200, 202, 209–10 fundraising targets in, 185–87, 191 global focus in, 209 how-to guide to, 181–213 launching with super-credibility in, 190, 199, 203, 204 length and schedule for, 187–89 pitch videos in, 177, 180, 192, 193, 195, 198–99, 203, 212 planning, materials, and resources in, 194–95 promotions and contests in, 207 reward-based, see reward-based crowdfunding setting rewards in, 189–91, 189 seven benefits of, 181–83 telling meaningful story in, 195–98 types of, 172–75 week-by-week execution plan for, 206–7 see also specific crowdfunding campaigns Crowdsortium, 162–63 crowdsourcing, xiii, 18, 22, 57, 85, 103, 143–67, 193, 223, 237, 240–41, 243, 245, 256, 275 in advertising, 151, 152–54, 158 AI as potential threat to, 167, 295n in automotive production, 223–24, 238 best practices of, 163–67 building communities for, see communities, online clear roles and communication in, 165–66 collaboration in, 144, 165–66, 167, 217, 227, 228, 236, 237, 255, 260–61 competitions and, 148, 152–54, 159, 160, 223, 224, 226–27, 232, 237, 240, 259; see also incentive competitions of creative and operational assets, 158–60 definition of, 144 in designing incentive competitions, 257–58 dual-use, 154–56 Freelancer.com case study in, 149–51, 158 growing interconnectedness and, 146–47, 147 incentive competitions and, see incentive competitions industry websites on, 162–63 of micro- vs. macrotasks, 156–58 most common uses for, 156–67 in product development, 18, 19, 223–25, 226–27 in retail and consumer products industry, 159–60 in scientific research, 145–46, 220–21, 227, 228–29 in software development, 144, 159, 161, 226–27, 236 of testing and discovery insights, 160–62 traffic data garnered by, 47 Crowdsourcing.org, 162 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 89, 92 Cube, 32 CubeSats, 36–37 Culver, Irv, 72 Cummins Engine, 222 Curiosity rover, 99 customer-centric business, 84, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131–32, 133, 138 Daily Show, 95 DARPA Grand Challenge, 262 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, 59 data mining, 42–44, 47–48, 256 AI’s role in, 55–59 behavior tracking and, 47 see also information data sets, preparing of, 164 Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 152 debt funding, 172, 173, 174 deceptive phase, exponential, 8, 8, 9, 10, 24, 25–26, 29, 41 of AI, 59 in robotics, 60 of 3–D printing, 30, 31 Deep Learning (algorithm), 58, 59 Deepwater Horizon oil rig, 250 Defense Department, US, 71, 72 DeHart, Jacob, 143, 144 DeJulio, James, 151–52, 153, 166 Dell, 50 Deloitte Center for the Edge, 106 Deloitte Consulting, 33, 39, 159, 160, 245, 274 Deloitte University Press, 56 dematerialization, exponential, 8, 8, 10, 11–13, 14, 15, 20–21, 66 democratization, exponential, xii, 8, 10, 13–15, 21, 33, 59, 276 in bioengineering, 64–65 infinite computing and, 51–52 demonetization, exponential, 8, 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 138, 163, 167, 223 in bioengineering, 64–65 infinite computing and, 52 D.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Between Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft more than 500 companies have been bought out in the past decade.51 These giants are looking for the younger fast growers. You can see how big companies kill productivity by looking at Google and the field of robotics. In 2013 Google acquired Boston Dynamics, as well as eight other robotics companies, to create a new robotics division called Replicant, named in honor of the cyborgs in Blade Runner. The robotics industry was excited that the 800-pound gorilla in technology was throwing money at research. However, it turned into a disaster. Over time, Google shut many of the companies down and many of the top researchers left.

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Over time, Google shut many of the companies down and many of the top researchers left. Jeremy Conrad, a partner at hardware incubator Lemnos Labs, said, “These were some of the most exciting robotics companies, and they're just gone.”52 Google faced internal fears of being associated with terrifying machines that may take over human jobs, and Boston Dynamics was not part of its key search ad business.53 In June 8, 2017, Google announced the sale of the company to Japan's SoftBank Group. The phenomenon is not new. We've seen giant monopolies throw away innovation before. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Xerox had a monopoly on its copying technology, protected by its patents.

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., 158 Bayer, lobbying spending, 192 Beautiful Mind, A, (movie), 26 Beer duopolies, 122–123 mergers, impact, 43–44 Berger, David, 52 Berge, Wendell, 150 Berkshire Hathaway Buffett control, 2 “Celebration of Capitalism,” 1 Berners Lee, Tim, 101 Bessen, James, 188 Bezos, Jeff, 78, 105 Big 3 S&P500 ownership, 203f Big Business and the Third Reich (Schweitzer), 148 Big Data, Big Brother (relationship), 112 Big Is Beautiful (Atkinson/Lind), 6, 52 Birkenstock, piracy accusation, 103 Blade Runner (movies), 170–171 Blankfein, Lloyd, 189–190 Blonigen, Bruce, 40–41 Bogle, Jack, 202 Booth School of Business (University of Chicago), 163 Bork, Robert, 155, 157–159, 165 antitrust revolution, 238–239 Boston Dynamics, Google acquisition, 54 Boston Tea Party, reason, 236 Brandeis, Louis, 233, 237–238 Brands, ripoffs, 102–103 Brexit, vote, 112–113 Brown, G.R. Kinney Co. (Supreme Court merger prohibition), 154 Brown Shoe case, 153–154 Buffalo Courier-Express (business loss), 2 Buffalo Evening News (Buffett purchase), 2 Buffett, Warren, 196 billionaires, agreement, 1 investor waste, 201–202 Morgan, comparison, 198 Bunge, market dominance, 133 Burke, Edmund, 239 Burns, Arthur Robert, 145 Busch III, August, 29 Bush, George W., 161 reverse revolvers, 191–192 Businesses dynamism, decline, 46 investment level, reduction, 205 Buyback corporation, 208 Buybacks impact, 206 increase, 207f share buybacks, limitation, 247 C Cable mergers, impact, 43 monopolies/local monopolies, 116–117 Capital access, 66 ownership, worker shares, 246 perspective (Marx), 9 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 213–214 Capitalism problem, US/UK perception, 213 reforming, 239 Capital Returns (Marathon Asset Management), 8 Capone, Al, 22 Captured Economy, The, (Lindsey/Teles), 188 Cardinal Health, price-fixing allegations, 131 Cargill, market dominance, 133 Carlton, Dennis, 163 Carnegie, Andrew, 139, 143 Carpenter II, Dick M., 83 Cartels Chicago School perspective, 23 promotion, central bank rates (impact), 26f study, 25 Cartels: A Challenge to a Free World (Berge), 150 Castellammarese War, 21 CBS Corporation, market dominance, 133 CelebrityNetWorth, Google data theft, 89–90 Central Selling Organization, 24 CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, increase, 221f Chamberlin, Edward, 7 Chambers, Dustin, 179 Chemotherapy regulation, 167 usage, 178 Chicago School, 155–156 China, Big Data/Big Brother (relationship), 112 Chipotle, McDonald's release, 56 Christensen, Clayton, 55 Citigroup, market dominance, 127 Civil government, instituting, 191 Clayton Act of 1914, 7 Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), 144, 160, 209 Clemenceau, George, 233 Clifton, Daniel, 187 Clinton, Bill (reverse revolvers), 191 Clinton, Hillary, 189, 212 Coal Question, The, ( Jevons), 18 Cohn, Gary, 189 Collusion, impact, 32 Community Standards (Facebook), 92 Commuting zones, labor concentration (increase), 73f Companies growth phases, 52f lobbying, returns (comparison), 187f long-term returns, 204 platform companies, 97–98 self-disruption, failure, 55 synergies, 41 technology purchases, 106 Competition absence, 241 encouragement, patents (expiration), 246 Google, impact, 95 patents, impact, 175 promotion, patents/copyrights (impact), 246 reduction, mergers and acquisitions (impact), 12 restoration, Representative/Senator encouragement, 248 Competitors conflict, 31 reduction, mergers (prevention), 242 Composition, fallacy, 18 Computer operating systems, monopolies/local monopolies, 117 Concentrated industries, ranking, 33t Concrete, mergers (impact), 43 Confessions of the Pricing Man (Simon), 29 Conglomerates, purchase, 154 Connor, John, 23 Conrad, Jeremy, 54 Consumers, desires, 115 Consumer welfare, 158–159 Contract workers, hiring (fervor), 75–76 Copyrights, 246 Copyright Term Extension Act, 174 Corbyn, Jeremy (selection), 212 Corporate profits employee compensation, contrast, 223f increase, 65 Corporate trusts, control, 234 Costco workers, needs (understanding), 77 Counterfeits, impact, 102–103 Cox, Archibald, 157 CR4, 33 Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples Act (CREATES), 176 Creative destruction, process, 45 Credit reporting bureaus, oligopolies, 125 Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report issuance, 218 study, 10 Crisis of Capitalism, A, (Posner), 156 Curry, Steph, 3 Curse of Bigness, The, (Brandeis), 237 Customer lock-in (reduction), rules (creation), 246 CVS Caremark, market dominance, 130 D Dairy Farmers of America, price fixing, 119 Dalio, Ray, 229 David, Larry, 89 DaVita, Fresenius (merger), 124 Dayen, David, 96 Dean Foods, price fixing, 118–119 De Beers Consolidated Mines (cartel), 24 Decartelization Branch, 151–152 Decartelization/deconcentration policy, 150–151 Decker, Ryan, 47 Decline of Competition, The, (Burns), 145 de Loecker, Jan, 41, 226 Dent, Robert, 52 Diapers.com, Amazon predation, 106 Dickens, Charles, 18 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 103 Digital platforms, scale, 91 Dimon, Jamie, 182 Dirlam, Jeff, 167 Disraeli, Benjamin, 240 Diversity, impact, 58–61 DNA damage, 178 Dodd-Frank Act 2010 Full Employment Act for Lawyers, Accountants, and Consultants, 182 impact, 181 passage, 184 Döttling, Robin, 56 Doubleclick, Google acquisition, 91, 118 “Double Irish” arrangement, 92–93 Dow Chemicals, DuPont (merger), 121 Dreyfus, market dominance, 133 Drugs prices, high level, 174 reformulation, 175 wholesalers, oligopolies, 131–132 Duisberg, Carl, 146–147 Duke, James Buchanan, 142 Duke, Mike, 16 Dunbar's Number, creation, 51 Duopolies, 15, 115–116, 122–125 Durant, Will, 231 Düsseldorf Agreement, 148 “Dutch Sandwich” arrangement, 92–93 E Echo Show (Amazon), 107 Economic dynamism, reduction, 37 Economic freedom, 143–144, 233, 238–239 Economic inequality, increase, 227–228 Economic model, adjustment, 41–42 Economies of scale, increase, 51 Economy advanced economies, markups (increase), 228f firms, role (decrease), 48f problems, Trump perspective, 213 Edison, Thomas, 67, 195 Eeckhout, Jan, 41, 226 Eisenhower, Dwight, 146, 148, 151 Ellenberg, Jordan, 214 Employees compensation, corporate profits (contrast), 223f perks, 75 Employers and Workmen Act, 240 Employment clauses, usage, 69 Ennis, Sean, 226 Entrepreneurship, decline, 46 Equifax, security breach, 81–82 Erhard, Ludwig, 153 Europe rebuilding, 153–154 ordoliberlism, 153 Evans, Benedict, 108 Evans, David, 106 Exchange-traded funds (ETFs), inexpensiveness, 203 Express Scripts, market dominance, 130 F Facebook church, Zuckerberg comparison, 113 Community Standards project, 92 creation, 117 Instant Articles, 102 lobbying efforts/expenses, 95–96 market dominance, 123–124 News Feed, impact, 99–100 news/information source, problems, 112–113 profitability/power, 99 Factory Act, 240 Fair Isaac's Corporations (FICO), credit-scoring formula, 125 Fast-food chains, employment clauses, 69 Federal Arbitration Act, 80, 82 Federal Express, duopoly, 3 Federal government Goldman Sachs, revolving door, 190f Monsanto, revolving door, 193f Federal Register, pages (number, increase), 181f Federal Reserve Act (1913), 209 Federal Trade Commission, 159, 163 creation, 144 Federation of British Industry, Düsseldorf Agreement, 148 Fidelity, market dominance, 135 Financial crisis (2007-2008), 25 Firms entry, reduction, 53f predatory pricing, punishment (laws), 244 role, decrease, 48f First American, market dominance, 135 Five Families, 22 Five Forces (Porter), 14–15 Fleming, Lee, 70–71 Forced arbitration, 79–81 Ford, Henry, 16 Foreign exchange traders, currency price fixing, 24 Foundem, 97 search problems, 87–88 Frankel, Jonathan, 107 Freight railroad, concentration, 119 Freireich, Emil, 176–177, 181 Friedman, Milton, 155, 179, 204, 233, 238 Funeral homes, monopolies/local monopolies, 121–122 Furman, Jason, 39 G Game theory, 26 Gates, Bill, 78 Geithner, Timothy, 190, 211 General Theory, The, (Keynes), 17 Germany German Decartelizing law (1947), 152 nationalist party, impact, 213 reconstruction, 151, 238 surrender, 151 Gerstner, Jr., Louis V., 50 Gibbons, Thomas, 137–138 Gibbons v.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

“automated” vehicles, 39 Autonomy (Burns), 214 autonomy, defined, 42 Autophobia (Ladd), 80 Autopilot (Tesla), 26–29 Autor, David, 150, 151, 152, 155 Baidu, 54 Bezos, Jeff, 221 Big Dog (Boston Dynamics), 79 big mobility, 239–47 bike sharing Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 dockless bike-share, 64–65, 66, 67 docks, 64 Lime Bike, 67 microsprawl and, 202 rebalancing problem, 64–65 smartphone apps, 64 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 “white bikes,” 63 Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 “block captain” ushers, 78 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 214 Blue Apron, 141, 145–46 Blue Gene/L (IBM), 36 Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 193–94, 196, 242 Boston Dynamics, 79 Bostrom, Nick, 236–37, 238 Brooks, Rodney, 235 Brown, Joshua, 28 Burns, Larry, 214 buses bus rapid transit (BRT), 69–70, 72 CityPilot system, 72 driverless city buses, 216 platoons and platooning, 69–70, 70–71 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 BVG (Berlin), 216 CalPers, 182–83 Calthorpe, Peter, 202 Caltrans, 170 carbon emissions AVs as tool for reducing, 19, 137 driverless shuttles and, 105 from manufacturing of clothing, 148 microsprawl and, 200, 202, 203, 204 platooning and, 68 software trains and, 72 Careem, 177 car-lite communes, 14–15, 60, 121, 244, 253, 254 Charles I (king), 161 Charlier, Frederic, 170–71 Cheetah 3 (MIT), 79 Chicago parking-meter contract, 173 Chin, Ryan, 62–63 Christine (King), 42 circular economies, 146–49, 196, 221 Citi Bike docks (New York City), 64 CityMobil2, 102–5 CityPilot system, 72 civic caravans, 73–75, 76–77, 77, 199 Clarke, Randy, 72 ClearRoad, 169–72, 216 clothing AirCloset, 148 carbon emissions from manufacturing, 148 in circular economies, 148–49 Rent the Runway, 140–41, 145 CloudKitchens, 140 coal and Jevons effect, 143–45 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 144 code and programming for AVs malleability of, 228, 245, 248 pushing code, 227 role in shaping driverless revolution, 227–28, 247–49 writing compared to coding, 226–27 see also computers and self-driving vehicles Cody (IDEO), 125 cognitive tasks and automation, 150–51, 151, 152–53 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 computers and self-driving vehicles data exhaust, 108–12 data logged daily, 35, 108 microtransit mesh, 107–8, 111, 157 Pegasus onboard AV computer, 35–36 scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 supercomputer location under seat, 84 vehicular variety increase, 53 see also code and programming for AVs; deep learning; reprogramming mobility computer vision, 152, 230, 231 congestion pricing at the curb, 223 electronic tolling, 169–72 mobility policy and, 182 in New York City, 165–67, 167, 168, 172–73 speculation or perverse incentives, 172–73 support for, 167–69 Uber, 179, 181 Vickrey’s study of, 165–66 weaponization by speculators, 17 see also financialization of mobility continuous delivery compared to historical shopping habits, 115–16, 120–21 and last mile logistics, 121–29 costs decline in twentieth century, 130 deskilling of delivery, 124 effect of instant delivery, 218 efficiency improvements and rebound effect, 145–47 free or cheap delivery and, 116–17, 204 freight AVs and, 125–26 fulfillment centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158 impact on jobs, 155 impact on local businesses, 140–42 kippleization and, 142–43 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130 overview, 120–21 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 same-day delivery, 119, 123–24, 132–33, 138 see also e-commerce conveyors in circular economies, 148 deep learning, 57 Kiwibots, 57 last-mile deliveries, 124–25 maintenance, repair, and remote monitoring, 132 overview, 56–57, 60–61 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Coord, 232–33 Cops (TV show), 24 Coresight Research, 117 core (urban core), 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 Costco, 116 Could This Be You (TV show), 24 creative destruction, defined, 137 Credit Suisse, 117 cruise control, 24–25, 26 curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23, 232 Curbs API, 232–33 Cushman & Wakefield, 117 Daimler, 6, 68, 69, 72, 190 Daley, Richard, 173 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenges, 6–7, 68, 104, 133, 230 data collaboratives, 233 data exhaust, 108–12 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 57 deaths caused by motor vehicles, 9, 38, 156 deep learning advances in, 39, 42 computer power consumption, 37 conveyors, 57 fleet learning, 37 human intelligence tasks (HITs) required, 41 limits of, 235–36 neural networks, 36–37, 84, 235 occupancy grid, 37 overview, 36–37 and task model, 152 training, 37, 41, 153, 235 see also artificial intelligence; machine learning Deliveroo, 56, 124 delivery, continuous.

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And if you delegate the balancing act of a two-wheeled speed demon to software and gyroscopes, many more people might downsize to high-revving, lane-weaving hot rods. Highways could carry far more singlepassenger vehicles. Then there are the hominids, which are blurring the line between driverless vehicle and autonomous machine. Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog was built as a cargo-carrying support vehicle for troops. It can carry a 100-pound load over the roughest terrain. MIT’s Cheetah 3 is superior to many AVs, since it can operate in complete darkness or torrential rain. Instead of cameras, radar, or lidar, it navigates entirely through tactile feedback picked up by its four feet—a technique its creators call “blind locomotion.”

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

He also understood that the best way to test those models was to build real robots and to see how biological legged locomotion worked. He realized that in order to test that idea, he needed the resources of a company to actually make those things. So, that’s what led to Boston Dynamics. At this point, whether it’s Boston Dynamics or other robots, such as Rodney Brooks’ work with the Baxter Robots, we’ve seen these robots do impressive things with their bodies, like pick up objects and open doors, yet their minds and brains hardly exist at all. The Boston Dynamics robots are mostly steered by a human with a joystick, and the human mind is setting their high-level goals and plans. If we could just get something at the level of the mind of a one-and-a-half-year-old into the robotic hardware that we already have, that would be incredibly useful as a technology.

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That, to me, is the first thing to understand, and if we could build a robot that had that level of intelligence, it would be amazing. If you look at today’s robots, robotics on the hardware side is making great progress. Basic control algorithms allow robots to walk around. You only have to think about Boston Dynamics, which was founded by Mark Raibert. Have you heard about them? MARTIN FORD: Yeah. I’ve seen the videos of their robots walking and opening doors and so forth. JOSH TENENBAUM: That stuff is real, that’s biologically inspired. Mark Raibert always wanted to understand legged locomotion in animals, as well as in humans, and he was part of a field that built engineering models of how biological systems walked.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Having collected a large data set from this activity, the systems turn out to be better at recognising images from the ImageNet database than systems which have not had the physical training.[clii] Google's robot army – the dog that didn't bark In late 2013, Google announced the purchase of no fewer than eight robotics companies. (Since you ask, they are Boston Dynamics - purveyor of the famous Big Dog and Atlas models - Bot and Dolly, Meka, Holomni, SCHAFT, Redwood, Industrial Perception, and Autofuss.) Google also announced that the new division which owned them would be run by Andy Rubin, who created a huge global business with the Android phone platform.

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Google also announced that the new division which owned them would be run by Andy Rubin, who created a huge global business with the Android phone platform. A year later, in October 2014, Andy Rubin left Google to found a technology startup incubator, which prompted observers to remark that Google had been surprisingly quiet about its collection of robot makers. In early 2016, rumours spread that Google was considering selling Boston Dynamics, the creator of Big Dog and Atlas, two of the world’s most impressive robots. Google is an experienced acquirer of companies – by the end of 2014 it had acquired 170 of them – and it expects them to make an impact. The hurdle for potential acquisition targets is the “toothbrush test”, meaning that their services must be potentially useful to most people once or twice every day.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

France has initiated a similar program, pledging $126.9 million to develop its industry and catch up to Germany. Sweden has similarly earmarked millions to give out to individuals and corporations through innovation awards such as Robotdalen (“robot valley”), launched in 2011. The private sector is also investing at increasingly higher levels. Google purchased Boston Dynamics, a leading robotics design company with Pentagon contracts, for an untold sum in December 2013. It also bought DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company founded by wunderkind Demis Hassabis. As a kid, Hassabis was the second-highest-ranked chess player in the world under the age of 14, and while he was getting his PhD in cognitive neuroscience, he was acknowledged by Science magazine for making one of the ten most important science breakthroughs of the year after developing a new biological theory for how imagination and memory work in the brain.

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See also Amazon BGI, 67 Bitcoin: Andreessen on, 103–4, 116–17 benefits of, 102–5, 116–17 blockchain and, 101–6 CoinDesk, 167 criticism of, 111–12 establishment and, 111–15 explained, 98–100 financial system and, 99 future of, 115–17 governments and, 111–15 hacking and, 106–11 micropayments and, 105–6 mining and, 102–3 competitors and, 117–19 Songhurst on, 104 widespread use of, 98 see also blockchain blockchain: Bitcoin and, 101–6 efficiency and, 104 establishment and, 111–15 explained, 101 future of, 120 hacking and, 106, 108–9 law enforcement and, 111 as next protocol, 115–17 regulation of, 103 transaction history and, 114 see also Bitcoin Bloomberg, Michael, 167–68 Booker, Cory, 167–68 Booker T. Washington Middle School, 59 Boston Dynamics, 25 botnet attacks, 126, 134–35, 141. See also cyberattacks Brin, Sergey, 57–58, 60 Broad Institute, 48, 54 Brooks, David, 162 bucardo, 63–64 Camp, Garrett, 92 cancer: brain and, 55 breast, 72–73 detection and, 72–73 DNA and, 45 drugs and, 51–52, 59, 72 FLT3 and, 46 future of treatment, 6, 33, 185 genome sequencing and, 46–52; see also genomics liquid biopsy and, 49 mutations and, 51 ovarian, 49–50 PGDx and, 50–51 R&D investment in research for, 66 RNA and, 45–46 robots and, 33 Wartman, Lukas and, 44–47, 58, 61 Celtel, 85–86, 88 Chase.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

While there have no doubt been many difficult challenges in replicating or making equivalents of human and animal body parts, these are largely being met, driven partially by the development of new materials and ever faster and smaller electronics. The Shadow Robot Company of London manufactures hands that demonstrate the same dexterity and range of motion as their human counterparts, with the strength to firmly grasp power tools and the delicacy to hold an egg. In 2005, Boston Dynamics revealed ‘BigDog’ – a four-legged robotic packhorse that can carry 340 pounds and traverse tricky terrain with apparent ease. Robotic vision systems can now capture images in resolutions that rival the human eye. No, it’s not the mechanics of the robot body that’s the sticking point for the autonomous intelligent robot, it’s giving it a mind.

…

INDEX 23andMe 274, 297–9 42 100, 273 2001: A Space Odyssey 76, 102, 133 A Abengoa Solar 193 activated carbon 216–17 adenine 37–9, 46 aerosols 168–70 af Ekenstam, Robin 103, 104 Africa 252, 253, 302 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil) 274–5 agriculture 221–40, 253 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise 163 AInimals 92, 94, 96, 102–4, 105 algae 187, 210–12 Algenol Biofuels 187, 189 alleles 45, 48 Allen 83, 84 Amundsen, Roald 178 Anderson, Chris 291–5 Andrews, Lori 27 Angier, Natalie 47 Annas, George 27 Ansari X Prize for Spaceflight 135 Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation 208, 210–12 Arcadia 237–8 Arcadia (Stoppard) 281 Archer, David 177 Archon X Prize 50, 51 Aristotle 97 ARPANET 152 Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) 40–1, 51–2 artificial intelligence 73–107 Artificial Intelligence: AI 75 Asimov, Isaac 76–7 augmented reality 162–4 Augustine Commission 136 Australia climate change scepticism 168, 171 farming 221–40 Internet 157 mousepox virus 63–4 autocatalysis 270 B Bacillus subtilis 100, 273 Bacon, Francis 96–8, 99 bacteria 56–7, 61, 302 Bedau, Mark 66, 280 Bedford, James 15 Berners-Lee, Mike 169–70 Berners-Lee, Tim 154, 159 ‘Better World Shopper’ 163 Bezos, Jeff 141 BigDog 84 Bigelow, Robert 137 Billen, Abigail 31 Binney, Don 218 biochar 208–10, 212–20 biofuels 56–7, 61, 186–9, 210–12 biomass 209–10 bionics 14, 29, 301 biotechnology 35–70 bioterrorism 63–6, 68 BioTime 53–4 Birchall, Martin 20 bird flu 69–70 black carbon 169–70 Black Phantom 212–14, 219, 299, 301 Blackburn, Elizabeth 18 Blackstone Ranch 234 Blackwell, Paul 213 Blasco, Maria 18, 19 Blayney 235–7 Blenheim 210–12 blood transfusion 33 Blue Brain 90, 91 Blue Origin 141 Blundell, James 33 Bonaparte, Napoleon 146 Bongard, Josh 95 Boree Creek 237–8 Borman, Frank 135 Boston Dynamics 74–5 Bostrom, Nick 13, 17, 18, 22–31, 62, 65, 66 carbon-chauvinism 102 existential risk 63 and Kurzweil 267, 269 Bourke, Joanna 149 Brand, Stewart 108–9, 128, 270, 276 Branson, Richard 135, 141 Breazeal, Cynthia 76–82, 84–6, 90–2, 94, 101–2, 269, 277–8 Bréon, François-Marie 169 Brin, Sergey 273–4, 297 Broad Institute 40 Broecker, Wallace 173, 174, 177–86 Brooks, Rodney 76, 82, 83–4, 89, 103, 104, 105 Brown, John Seely 156, 282–3, 284–91, 292, 304 Buck, Vicki 207–8, 210–20, 288, 299 Burke, James 160, 161, 162 Burma 157 C C-3PO 76, 83, 102 cadmium 195, 196 California NanoSystems Institute 118 cancer 19, 40–1, 46–7 Candide (Voltaire) 218 carbon cycle 209 carbon dioxide (CO2) 57, 167–8, 170–1, 175–7, 186, 302 and agriculture 228–31, 233–5 biochar 209–10 biofuels 187–9 industrial uses 183–4 carbon nanotubes 110–11 carbon neutrality 243–4, 245 carbon scrubbers 179–85, 259–60, 299 Carbonscape 208, 212–20, 299, 301 carrying capacity 128–9 Castillo, Claudia 19–20, 33 Çatağay, Tolga 273 Catholic Church 106 Cave, Nick 304 Celera Genomics 36 Celsias 208 Cerf, Vint 151–64, 187, 245, 268, 283, 284, 299 Chappe, Abraham 146 Chappe, Claude 146 Chappe, René 146 charcoal 208–10, 212–20 chess 82, 83, 86 China 157, 200 Chomsky, Noam 303 chromosomes 44, 45–6 Chu, John 155 Chui, Alex 15 Church, George biofuels 57, 211 bioterrorism 63, 65–6 genome engineering 52, 56, 60–3, 64, 70, 105, 186–7, 203 genome sequencing 50–1 human genome project 35 human machines 89 IVF 106 and Lackner, Klaus 189 licensing 66–7 Personal Genome Project 36–7, 39, 41–50, 273, 299, 300, 301 Ćirković, Milan 65 cities 250, 252–3 Claramunt, Xavier 137 climate change 143, 164, 167–72, 174–7, 208 and agriculture 228–31, 233–5 Maldives 241–9, 256–62 Northwest Passage 178 Clinton, Bill 35–6 clouds 169 Cobar 231–5 Collins, Mike 135 Collins, Paul 192 Columbia University Medical Center 31 Columbus, Christopher 303 Comer, Gary 177, 178 Commercial Spaceflight Federation 138 Complete Genomics 51 Connections 160 Consortium for Polynucleotide Synthesis 68 Copenhagen Accord 256 Cornell University 93–6, 98–101, 210 couchsurfing.org 158 Coughlan, Anna 221–2, 239–40 Coughlan, Michael 221–2, 239–40 ‘Couldn’t Be Done’ (Tim Finn) 208 Crichton, Michael 122 cryonics 15–16 Cuba 157 cytosine 37–9, 46 D dance 155 De Cari, Gioia 262 de Grey, Aubrey 14, 16, 17–18, 21, 34 ‘Death Clock’ 12–13 deductive reason 97 Deep Blue 82–3 del Cardayré, Stephen 61 Desertec Industrial Initiative 193 Deutsche Bank 193 diatoms 117–18 diesel 56–7 Dijkstra, Edsger 82 DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) 38–9, 40, 297–8 naked 46 nanotechnology 113, 119–20 Parkinson’s disease 273–4 Door into Summer (Heinlein) 142 double helix 38 double pendulum 98–9 Dragon 136 Drexler, Eric 109–17, 125, 127–30, 286, 287, 299, 300 critics 123–4 Grey Goo 121–3 and Kurzweil 268, 269 E E. coli 56–7, 61, 64 E85 cars 188 EasyJet 20 education 284–5, 288 Egypt 157 Ehrenreich, Barbara 303 Eigler, Donald 113, 125 Einhorn, Thomas 31 Einstein, Albert 140 Eisenberger, Peter 184 electricity 285–6 Eliza 86–7 Ember, Carol 147 enhancement 26–9 Endy, Drew 66 energy 191–2, 193–5, 202, 204 fossil fuels 168, 191–2, 193, 302 solar 190–1, 192–3, 195–205, 206, 274, 295, 302 Engines of Creation (Drexler) 109, 110–11, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127–8, 300 Enlightenment 267 Enriquez, Juan 33, 278–82, 293 Eros (Asteroid) 134 Estep, Preston 16 ethanol 187 Ethiopia 199, 200 Etiwanda Station 231–5 Eureqa 101 evolution 70, 105, 279–80, 281–2 existential risk 63 Exxon Mobil 56 EZ-Rocket 142 F Falcon 9 136 farming 221–40, 253 Feynman, Richard 112, 113 Finn, Tim 208 Flannery, Tim 215 flu 64–5, 69–70 Følling’s disease 44, 58 foot-and-mouth disease 68–9 forests 253–4 Forster, E.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

When these demos appear to work—which they almost always do—they provide a compelling signal of truth to their viewers; it’s hard to question something you’ve seen with your own eyes. Thanks to our truth bias, we trust that what we are seeing is at least a close approximation of reality and that we’re not being deliberately misled. For example, the robotics firm Boston Dynamics (once owned by Google) regularly releases videos of its humanoid robots doing incredible stunts, such as performing parkour moves, but no video can tell us whether the robot would succeed on an obstacle course it had never seen with objects it had never encountered. Maybe it would, but in the face of a compelling demo, we tend to assume that the performance we’re seeing is generalizable to similar settings even when we have no direct evidence, at least from the demo, that it does.6 The practice of developing computer systems capable of performing with apparent intelligence in highly constrained situations and either claiming or implying that they would work just as well in a broad range of contexts goes back at least fifty years.

…

When psychics like Browne fail spectacularly, it’s often because they mistakenly assumed that they could get away with a specific prediction about an unsolved cold case—because nobody would ever be able to challenge it. Chris used to show his classes a video clip of Sylvia Browne getting nothing right about a caller’s dead father, but when he went back to YouTube the next year, the video was gone. 6. Boston Dynamics parkour video: “More Parkour Atlas,” September 24, 2019 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E]. 7. For an example of research on “one-pixel attacks” on deep neural networks for image recognition, see J. Su, D. V. Vargas, and K. Sakurai, “One Pixel Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 23 (2019): 828–841 [doi.org/10.1109/TEVC.2019.2890858]. 8.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Traditional military contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin were early entrants into the world of robotics, followed by smaller specialized firms such as Boston Dynamics and iRobot (yes, the same people who make your Roomba vacuum make the IED-disposal PackBot). But now another deeply disruptive player has entered the world of robotics: Google. The search giant is on a robo-buying binge and purchased or acquired eight separate robotics companies in a six-month period through 2014, including companies that specialize in humanoid walking robots, robotic arms, robotics software, and computer vision. Its largest and most surprising robotics acquisition, however, was the military robotics company Boston Dynamics, the same folks who make BigDog, Cheetah, Sand Flea, RiSE, and PETMAN (a biped humanoid robot that might well be the soldier of the future).

…

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), such as iRobot’s PackBot, routinely help with the detection and disposal of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Foster-Miller’s TALON is a “man-portable robot which operates on small treads” like a miniature tank. It can be outfitted with machine guns, .50-caliber rifles, grenade launchers, and antitank rockets, all while being remotely controlled via joystick. Boston Dynamics’ Sand Flea weighs only eleven pounds but can jump up to thirty feet high, landing on the roof of a building or precisely leaping through an open window, capturing all it sees with its HD camera. The company has also created BigDog, a four-legged robot that can carry up to four hundred pounds of gear and weapons, easily walking over rugged terrain and obediently following its soldier master.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“If you can create a self-driving car, which is a robot on wheels, then you can make a robot on legs as well,” Musk said. In early 2021, Musk began mentioning at his executive meetings that Tesla should get serious about building a robot, and at one point he played for them a video of the impressive ones that Boston Dynamics were designing. “Humanoid robots are going to happen, like it or not,” he said, “and we should do it so we can guide it in a good direction.” The more he talked about it, the more excited he got. “This has the potential to be the far biggest thing we ever do, even bigger than a self-driving car,” he told his chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen.

…

A few days later, Tesla’s design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, convened a group to begin building the real thing: a robot that could emulate a human. Musk gave one directive: it was to be a humanoid robot. In other words, it was supposed to look like a person rather than a mechanical contraption with wheels or four legs like Boston Dynamics and others were making. Most workspaces and tools are designed to accommodate the way humans do things, so Musk believed that a robot should approximate human forms in order to operate naturally. “We want to make it as human as possible,” von Holzhausen told the ten engineers and designers seated around his conference table.

…

See Tesla Autopilot project Babuschkin, Igor, 605 Babylon Bee, 419, 527, 529, 554 Baglino, Drew, 195 Autopilot project and, 246, 247 Model S and, 199 Optimus and, 498 Robotaxi and, 501, 502 Straubel departure and, 302, 303 Baker, Jim, 571 Balajadia, Jehn, 362, 513 Bankman-Fried, Sam, 460–61 Banks, Azealia, 308–9 Banks, Iain, 400 Bannon, Pete, 396 Bard, 601 Barenholtz, Jeremy, 497, 561, 562–63 Barra, Mary, 421 Bassett, Natasha, 7, 265, 451, 491 Battle of Polytopia, The, 46 Bauch, Matt, 597 Beal Aerospace, 115 Beeple, 448–49 Belsky, Scott, 520 Benioff, Marc, 430 Berland, Leslie, 465, 508, 534 Bernstein, Carl, 573 Beykpour, Kayvon, 520 Bezos, Jeff, 223, 353 Amazon HQ and, 336 competition with SpaceX, 226, 227–28, 231–32, 233–34, 354 competition with Starlink, 355–56 Inspiration4 mission and, 385 love of space travel, 224–25 management style, 166, 354–55 space tourism and, 353, 356, 383, 476 Trump and, 261 Washington Post purchase, 357 wealth of, 408 Bhattacharya, Jay, 573, 578 Biden, Hunter, 567, 577, 579 Biden, Joe, and administration, 420–23, 535, 567 Binder, Matt, 576 Birchall, Jared Austin home plans and, 473 EM’s demon mode and, 539 EM’s management of Twitter and, 543 EM’s politics and, 419, 443 Kimbal’s restaurant business and, 300–301 philanthropy and, 439 Twitter acquisition and, 442, 451, 452–53, 464, 490, 494, 512 Twitter board invitation and, 445 Blade Runner, 318, 485 Blastar, 29, 33, 425 Blue Origin, 224, 226, 227–28, 233–34, 354, 355 board games. See strategy games Boeing, 101, 113, 123, 187, 206, 348, 350 See also Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance Bolden, Charlie, 206 Bolsonaro, Jair, 419 Boring Company, The, 257–59, 288, 298, 441, 472, 496, 585 Boston Dynamics, 394 Botha, Roelof, 75, 82, 86 Boucher, Claire. See Grimes Boudette, Neal, 283, 406 Bowles, Nellie, 568, 569–71, 576 Brady, Nicholas, 48 Branson, Richard, 353, 356–57, 383, 476 Brin, Sergey, 63, 126, 138, 180, 468–69 Brodie-Sangster, Thomas, 471 Brown, Jerry, 218 Brown, Mary Beth, 116 Brown, Tina, 66 Brownlee, Marques, 217 Burning Man, 103, 252, 310, 341, 378–79 Bush, George W., 101 Butterfield, Elissa, 258, 321, 329 Buzza, Tim Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 151, 184, 185, 186 Falcon 9 liftoff and, 210 on improvisation, 116–17 launch location and, 145 NASA contract and, 205 on production algorithm, 113 testing and, 115, 116 Calacanis, Jason, 523, 529, 530, 531, 576 Cameron, James, 92 Cantrell, Jim, 95–96, 98, 99–100, 101 CAPTCHA technology, 83 Challenger mission, 119, 385 Chanos, Jim, 278 Chappelle, Dave, 580 ChatGPT, 243, 593, 600–601, 606 Chinnery, Anne, 149 Christensen, Clayton, 84 Christian symbolism, 71 CitySearch, 65 Civilization, 46, 51, 425 Claassen, Kate, 511 Cleese, John, 498 Clinton, Hillary, 261, 424, 525 Clooney, George, 143 Cobra Kai, 346 Cocconi, Alan, 126 Coffin, Gage, 273 comics, 27 communications satellites.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It is frequently an equal partner that works side by side with government agencies, using its resources and commercial dominance to bring companies with heavy military funding to market. In 2008, it launched a private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.140 It bought Boston Dynamics, a DARPA-seeded robotics company that made experimental robotic pack mules for the military, only to sell it off after the Pentagon determined it would not be putting these robots into active use.141 It has invested $100 million in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defense contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee.142 And it also runs JigSaw, a hybrid think tank–technology incubator aimed at leveraging Internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems, everything from terrorism to censorship and cyberwarfare.143 Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a twenty-nine-year-old State Department whiz kid who served under both President George W.

…

And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology” (Brian X. Chen, “Google’s Super Satellite Captures First Image,” Wired, October 8, 2008). 141. John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, December 14, 2013; Alex Hern, “Alphabet Sells Off ‘BigDog’ Robot Maker Boston Dynamics to Softbank,” Guardian, June 9, 2017. 142. Yasha Levine, “From Russia, with Panic: Cozy Bears, Unsourced Hacks—and a Silicon Valley Shakedown,” The Baffler, March 2017, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine. 143. Started as Google Ideas in 2010, it was rebranded as JigSaw in 2016.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

As one said, “Fact of nature: There are no large land creatures with six legs and there never have been.” Designs that find their inspiration in living organisms are known as “biomimetic” (“bio” from “biology” and “mimetic” meaning to “mimic” or “copy”). Perhaps the best known of these in military circles is a four-legged robot made by Boston Dynamics. The “Big Dog” (others call it the “Robot-Ass,” but that name hasn’t stuck for marketing reasons) is designed to serve as a modern-day packhorse, following after soldiers with their backpacks and other gear. The current prototype is the shape and size of a mule. The four legs differ from a mule’s in having three joints and springs built into them that can change length, much like a tent pole.

…

Such “self-transforming” or mighty “morphing” robots will range from changing slightly between a few designs like the Transformers to ones that could recast themselves into hundreds of forms like the T-1000 robot in the movie Terminator 2. At the most simple level are robots with morphing effectors that alter to allow more efficient movement in different domains. An example of this is the RHEX made by Boston Dynamics. It has legs that can transform into flippers, allowing it to walk on land or swim underwater. The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, similarly built a plane the size of a small bird that can both fly and crawl. It originally came out of a request by the special forces for robotic planes that could do such things as fly up to a windowsill and then creep inside.

…

Balkan wars Ballistic Missile Early Warning System Band of Brothers (Ambrose) Barber, Mack Baroque Cycle (Stephenson) Bateman, Robert “Bob,” BAUV (Biometric Autonomous Undersea Vehicle) Beane, William “Billy,” Bear, Greg Bell, Sam Bellflower, John Bello, Louis Bennett, Andrew Berra, Yogi Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century, The (Turtledove and Greenberg) Big Dog (robot) bin Laden, Osama Biometric Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (BAUN) Black Hawk Down (film) Blackwater Blade Runner (film) blitzkrieg warfare Blue, Linden Blue, Neal Blue Brain project Blue Force Tracker Blue Gene (supercomputer) Boeing company Boeing X-45, Bogosh, Ted Boot, Max Border Hawk (drone) Border Patrol, U.S. Bosnia Boston Dynamics Boutelle, Steven Bowles, Erskine Bradbury, Ray Bradley, Omar BrainGate technology Brain-Interface Project Branson, Richard Brazil Brezina, Byron Brooks, Rodney Brown, Dan Bruemmer, David Buchan, Glenn Buchanan, Walter Buddha in the Robot, The (Mori) Bug’s Life, A (film) “Building Gods or Building Our Potential Exterminators?”

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Is it going to turn into civil disorder?” The architects of the techno-utopian ideal now fear it will inspire a revolt of the mob that all this technology was originally invented to contain and control. Others fear AI for what people may choose to do with it. Employees protested when Google acquired military robot maker Boston Dynamics in 2013, and the company eventually shed the asset. A few years later, four thousand Googlers signed a petition and at least a dozen resigned in protest over the company’s deci sion to provide AI to Project Maven, a Pentagon program with the purpose of helping drones distinguish between targets, objects, and people.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Wall Street has long dismissed Google’s side projects like self-driving cars and AI as money sinks, but Google has a thoughtful plan and one you may not be fully comfortable with. Google (in the verb sense; may as well start there) “self-driving car,” “AlphaGo,” and “Android Marketshare” and you’ll get a sense for the future Google might have in mind. You can add in Boston Dynamics +Atlas +Google, and you might get a sense of Google’s terminal ambitions, even if it ultimately ditches Boston Dynamics in favor of other robotics companies. * My subject is generational; I stake little territory in the largely unhelpful and mostly pseudoscientific debate (on both sides) regarding the inherent capacities of a given group for a given subject.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

But then the impossible suddenly became inevitable. Enter Atlas, the robot who learned to somersault. Atlas Somersaults If you go to YouTube and type ‘PETMAN prototype’ into the search bar, the first video that appears, posted in October 2009, is a demonstration of a biped robot developed by Massachusetts-based company Boston Dynamics. Awkward and attached to several cables, PETMAN looks like the love-child of a subwoofer and Bambi on ice. Now type in ‘What’s new, Atlas?’ On your screen will appear a video of another robot manufactured by the same company. Only this video was published in late 2017 and the robot isn’t just walking without cables, it’s doing box jumps and backflips.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Claire Cain Miller and David Gelles, “After Big Bet, Google to Sell Motorola Unit,” New York Times, January 30, 2014; Dan Gallagher, “Google Still Feathers Its Nest With Big Bets,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2014; “Google Market Cap (GOOG),” YCharts, http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap. 70. Robert Sorokanich, “Google Just Bought Crazy Walking Robot Maker Boston Dynamics,” Gizmodo, December 14, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/google-just-bought-crazy-walking-robot-maker-boston-dyn-1483235880; Michael Carney, “Gruber: Nest Can Teach Google to Make Hardware. Google Can Help Nest Go Fast,” PandoDaily, January 14, 2014, http://pando.com/2014/01/14/gruber-nest-can-teach-google-to-make-hardware-google-can-help-nest-go-fast. 71.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

I should note that a few robotics groups have actually developed dishwasher-loading robots, though none of these was trained by reinforcement learning, or any other kind of machine-learning method, as far as I know. These robots come with some impressive videos (for example, “Robotic Dog Does Dishes, Plays Fetch,” NBC New York, June 23, 2016, www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Boston-Dynamics-Dog-Does-Dishes-Brings-Sodas-384140021.html), but it’s clear that they are still quite limited and not yet ready to solve my family’s nightly dishwashing arguments. 15.  A. Karpathy, “AlphaGo, in Context,” Medium, May 31, 2017, medium.com/@karpathy/alphago-in-context-c47718cb95a5. 11: Words, and the Company They Keep   1.  

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Respectful. Even tempered. Does exactly what she’s told. She’s the computer-driven Jill of all trades.” What’s more, Rosey gives sass when suitable. “Beneath the aluminum alloy core beats a battery-powered heart of pure gold.”13 We’ll get there. “The biggest problem is safety,” the former chairman of Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, told the Post. The company has developed agile robots that resemble animals. “The more complicated the robot, the more safety concerns. If you have a robot in close proximity to a person, and anything that goes wrong, that’s a risk to that person,” Raibert said.14 Decades ago, long before there were any actual robots, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov proposed three laws to keep us safe from machines we create.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

(Credit: Aethon) Figure 4.8: da Vinci surgical robot (Credit: da Vinci Surgery) The teaming of Google, whose Calico was created to solve a little problem we call death, and Johnson & Johnson, the giant of home healthcare products, is a watershed moment that will promote robots in unprecedented numbers to the operating room. One can imagine what the technologies from Google’s Boston Dynamics division, Calico, Google’s Biotech division and J&J’s incredible depth of medical device knowledge will bring. Humanoid robot surgeons will change everything, and will likely be preferred or demanded within a decade by many patients. If this seems far off, we are already moving towards a world where robots can perform surgeries without human intervention or interaction.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo stood up to host the panel, wearing a long, flowing white jacket. “We watch something of a revolution happening here in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom looks to growth,” she said, inviting Mohammed bin Salman onto the stage, alongside Schwarzman of Blackstone, Son, Marc Raiburt of Boston Dynamics, and Klaus Kleinfeld, the new head of the NEOM project. “If you allow me, I will speak in Arabic because a lot of Saudi audience here and I really respect them,” Mohammed said, before describing the “almost imaginary” opportunities at NEOM and squinting slightly as he listed its benefits, ticking them off on his hand.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles,” New York Times, 10 September 2017. 25.  For “harsh terrain,” see “Cable-Laying Drone Wires Up Remote Welsh Village,” BBC News, 30 November 2017; for “knotting ropes,” see Susskind and and Susskind, Future of the Professions, p. 99; for “backflip,” see Matt Simon, “Boston Dynamics” Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It’s Full-Title Insane,” Wired, 16 November 2017; and for others, see J. Susskind, Future Politics, p. 54. 26.  Data in “Robots Double Worldwide by 2020: 3 Million Industrial Robots Use by 2020,” International Federation of Robotics, 30 May 2018, https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/robots-double-worldwide-by-2020 (accessed August 2018). 2017 data from Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/947017/industrial-robots-global-operational-stock/ (accessed April 2019). 27.  

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

(If you are thinking about Siri and its limitations, be assured that there are far more powerful programs working today in research labs.) AI is also being used to allow machines to walk and perform other movements, identifying what is an obstacle and determining what to do to get around it. Machines created by Boston Dynamics have demonstrated remarkable dexterity using AI programs to guide their decision making as they traverse real-world obstacles outside the laboratory. The field of AI gained greatest acceptance in the corporate world when it began processing the sea of data that the rest of information technology was producing.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Research shows that when introduced to the topic of emerging technologies and their risks, people really do care and want to find solutions. Although many of the harms are still a way off, I believe people are perfectly capable of reading the runes here. I’ve yet to find anyone who’s watched a Boston Dynamics video of a robot dog or considered the prospect of another pandemic without a shudder of dread. Here is a huge role for popular movements. Over the last five or so years, a burgeoning civil society movement has begun to highlight these problems. The media, trade unions, philanthropic organizations, grassroots campaigns—all are getting involved, proactively looking at ways to create contained technology.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Imagine turning a robot into a dream “smart husband.” In Japan, robots are being designed to help mitigate the “do-it-all” mindset that women have had to embrace. But also in the United States, we are seeing dazzling progress on the domestic front. Atlas is a humanoid robot that was designed by Boston Dynamics to be a search-and-rescue robot. It is over six feet tall and can do backflips, high jumps, split leaps, and handstands. The newer model, Ian the Atlas Robot, has been taught to clean, vacuum, and take out the trash. The reality is that women still perform the bulk of care work, rendering them significantly less mobile and flexible.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

(Los Alamos National Laboratory) The DARPA Modular Prosthetic Limb. The work advances robotics but is it helping warfighters who lost limbs? (U.S. Department of Defense, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) DARPA’s Atlas robot is a high-mobility humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics. Its “articulated sensor head” has stereo cameras and a laser range finder. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Allen Macy Dulles and his sister, Joan Dulles Talley. A brain injury during the Korean War, in 1952, made it impossible for Dulles to record new memories. DARPA’s brain prosthetics program alleges to help brain-wounded warriors like Dulles, but program details remain highly classified.

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

The rules of Jenga were simple: You built a tower of wooden blocks based on the pieces provided, and then the goal was to pull pieces out, one at a time, in the hope that the tower did not fall. You competed against your opponents in the hope that the tower fell on their move, not yours. Initially, Black Swan was tested on a digital version, but later was allowed to inhabit a robotic arm with advanced, multi-articulated fingers designed by Boston Dynamics. Black Swan always won. Insofar as one could “win” Jenga, of course. The great lesson of that game was, similar to pinball, that one never truly won at Jenga. Eventually, the lesson went, the tower would fall. It could not remain standing because that was the nature of towers and time and human intervention: Just because it did not fall on your turn did not mean it would not fall.