hortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of “The Second Machine Age,” a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, about the coming automation of many professions previously thought of as impervious to technological change, such as those of drivers, doctors, market researchers, and soldiers. With the advances being made in robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, we are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution.
Group items tagged
Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker - 2 views
-
-
The U.S. military appears to be moving in the direction of eliminating pilots, albeit tentatively. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have long operated unmanned drones, including the Predator, which are used for reconnaissance and bombing missions. In 2013, the U.S Air Force successfully tested the QF-16 fighter-bomber, which is practically identical to the F-16, except that it doesn’t have a pilot onboard. The plane is flown remotely. Earlier this year, Boeing, the manufacturer of the QF-16, delivered the first of what will be more than a hundred QF-16s to the Air Force. Initially, the planes will be used as flying targets for F-16 pilots to engage during training missions. But at least some military observers expect the QF-16 to end up being used in attack missions.
-
Until now, most executives in the airline industry have assumed that few people would be willing to book themselves and their families on unmanned flights—and they haven’t seriously considered turning commercial aircraft into drones or self-operating vehicles. By placing experienced fliers in the cockpit, the airlines signal to potential customers that their safety is of paramount importance—and not only because the crew members are skilled; their safety is at stake, too. In the language of game theory, this makes the aircraft’s commitment to safety more credible. Without a human flight crew, how could airlines send the same signal?
The Danger Artist - The New Yorker - 0 views
-
It’s not true that Chris Burden, the profoundly satirical Los Angeles artist who died last week, of cancer, at sixty-nine, had himself shot in the arm for the performance work “Shoot,” in 1971. Rather, he was shot by a friend whose claim to be a marksman proved an overstatement. The .22 bullet was supposed to only graze Burden. The shooter missed. So Burden told me, years ago. He shared with others that he had been frightened of having himself crucified on a Volkswagen, for “Trans-Fixed” (1974), but was pleasantly surprised by how painlessly the thin nails passed through his hands. He went to extremes, but he wasn’t nuts. When, nearly naked and holding his hands behind him, he wriggled across fifty feet of broken glass in “Through the Night Softly” (1973), the glass was the crumbled safety kind—not that that made for comfort. He said that he liked how the scattered bits, glittering on the asphalt of a parking lot, in the black-and-white film of the event, resemble a starry sky.
Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views
-
last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
-
In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
-
eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
- ...1 more annotation...
Is It Wrong to Watch Football? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
-
His body wrecked at 36, Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing in the National Football League. After he died of an overdose of pain medication at 27, Tyler Sash was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Concussion diagnoses have increased by about a third since the league let independent medical officials assess players. And it seems that with each N.F.L. veteran’s death, another diagnosis of C.T.E. is revealed. How can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives?
How Firm Are Our Principles? - NYTimes.com - 2 views
-
MORAL quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences. Should we ban assault rifles and large sodas, restricting people’s liberties for the sake of physical health and safety? Should we allow drone killings or torture, if violating one person’s rights could save a thousand lives? We like to believe that the principled side of the equation is rooted in deep, reasoned conviction. But a growing wealth of research shows that those values often prove to be finicky, inconsistent intuitions, swayed by ethically irrelevant factors. What you say now you might disagree with in five minutes. And such wavering has implications for both public policy and our personal lives.
-
For a recent paper to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, subjects were made to think either abstractly or concretely — say, by writing about the distant or near future. Those who were primed to think abstractly were more accepting of a hypothetical surgery that would kill a man so that one of his glands could be used to save thousands of others from a deadly disease. In other words, a very simple manipulation of mind-set that did not change the specifics of the case led to very different responses. Class can also play a role. Another paper, in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that upper-income people tend to have less empathy than those from lower-income strata, and so are more willing to sacrifice individuals for the greater good. Upper-income subjects took more money from another subject to multiply it and give to others, and found it more acceptable to push a fat man in front of a trolley to save five others on the track — both outcome-oriented responses.
-
Even the way a scenario is worded can influence our judgments, as lawyers and politicians well know. In one study, subjects read a number of variations of the classic trolley dilemma: should you turn a runaway trolley away from five people and onto a track with only one? When flipping the switch was described as saving the people on the first track, subjects tended to support it. When it was described as killing someone on the second, they did not. Same situation, different answers.
- ...1 more annotation...
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page