Robots

by jonl

Robot photo from Rhizome

My favorite-so-far Bruce Sterling post in the State of the World conversation:

“Following on from John Payne’s comments in <76>, are the robots
coming for our jobs? Is a certain amount of unemployment going to end
up as part of the system and, if so, what happens next?”

*It’s so interesting to see this perennial question coming into vogue
once again. When I was a pre-teen first discovering “science fiction,”
that automation dystopia story was all over the place. Even on the
cover of TIME magazine. See this Artzybasheff computer monster, all
busy stealing guy’s jobs? Looks oddly familiar, doesn’t it?

Heckuva commercial artist, Artzybasheff

Of course that issue pre-dates me by a long chalk. It’s also the folk
song of John Henry the Steel-Drivin’ Man, who breaks his heart
defeating the boss’s Steam Hammer.

I can tell you what’s NOT gonna happen with “robots.” Nobody’s gonna
defeat the logic of the assembly line by starting a Pre-Raphaelite Arts
and Crafts commune where people shun the Robot and make hand-made wall
tapestries. That’s been tried eight thousand different times and
places. It never works for anybody who’s not Amish.

Framing the issue as “robots coming for our jobs” is rather a moot
point anyhow, because the blue-collar guys who “own” assembly “jobs”
have zero input on whether robots get deployed or not. What practical
difference does that question make? No modern salaried employee
anywhere has the clout to defend a “job” from “the robots.” The
investors deploying the robots are serenely unworried about Luddite
saboteurs or crippling labor-union strikes. Those possibilities of
working-class resistance were de-fanged ages ago.

So, you know, either they automate some processes at the cost of human
labor, or they don’t. Somebody’s alway gonna try it, and in some
areas it works out rather better than it does in others, but the basic
robot story isn’t robots, it’s “whatever happens to musicians will
eventually happen to everybody.”

Apparently this latest little robot-vs-job flap gets most of its
impetus from two things, a cool new assembly robot created by Rodney
Brooks and a typically Emersonian intervention from Kevin Kelly.

So, here I’ll tell my Rodney Brooks story. I met the guy once, at
some forgettable event in Washington DC, and after the panels were
over, Prof Brooks and I ventured into the bar.

So, I was nursing a whiskey sour, and I was like: “So, Doctor Brooks,
I know a little about your work, and –”

“Call me Rod!”

“So, Rod — level with me about this MIT scheme you have to automate
the movement of insect legs. How’s that supposed to work, exactly?”

So, Rod was nothing loath, and he was pretty well going at it hammer
and tongs, while I was asking the occasional provocative sci-fi style
question — stuff like “so, how does the cube-square law work out when
the robo-insects are walking on the ceiling?” — because we sci-fi
writers dote on MIT.

Then I happened to glance across the bar, and I saw that our bartender
was “frozen in disbelief.” He was so amazed by what Brooks was saying
that his glass and his cleaning cloth were rigid in his unmoving arms.
This bartender had the affect of a sci-fi movie android with a power
failure. It was the only time I’ve ever seen that figure of speech as a
genuine aspect of human behavior.

So, I give Rodney Brooks a lot of credit, he’s a fascinating guy, I’m
glad to see him kept busy on things other than, for instance, an
MIT-style Vannevar Bush Manhattan Project at an undisclosed desert
location. I’m confident that Rod’s new manipulator is pretty snazzy.

But let me ask this: if an assembly-line device is going to “take our
jobs,” wouldn’t a 3dprinter also “take our jobs?” Why do we treat them
so differently? I mean, they’re both basically the same device:
automated mechanical systems precisely moving loads in three dimensions
by following software instructions.

So how come the Brooks robot is framed as a sinister job-stealing
robot, while a 3dprinter is framed as a printer, like, a cool nifty
peripheral? Didn’t digital printers also take a lot of “people’s
jobs?”

Besides, a Brooks robot is just imitating human-scale movement while
3dprinters create objects in micron-accurate ways that no human can
possibly do at all. So clearly the 3dprinter is a more radical threat
to the status quo.

Along this same line: Chris Anderson, late of WIRED, has got a new
book out about “Makers.” I read it. It’s all about how network society
cadres with 3dprinters and open-source schematics and instructables
are going to create a “Third Industrial Revolution.” Great, right?
Okay, maybe Makers take over the world or they don’t, but how come
nobody says “A Third Industrial Revolution means those Makers are going
to take our jobs?” Because they would, wouldn’t they? How could they
not?

Shouldn’t this prospect be of larger concern than Rodney Brooks’
latest gizmo, one among hordes of assembly line robots that have been
around for decades now? An “Industrial Revolution” should *almost be
definition* take everybody’s jobs. But the general reaction to
Anderson’s book is that the guy is *too optimistic,” that he drank his
own tech-hype bathwater and is having way too much fun. Isn’t there an
inconsistency here?

Then there’s the latest Kevin Kelly argument, which is more or less
about how robots are gonna take everybody’s jobs, but fine, that’s
great, especially if they’re sexbots. There’s nothing sparkly-new
about this line of reasoning, it’s very Automation Takes Command. The
pitch is that robots take the dull dirty and dangerous jobs, which
frees us to become, I dunno, humane speculative creatives like Kevin
Kelly, I guess.

However, I don’t believe automation has ever worked like that; there’s
no creeping wave-line with “robotics” on one side and “humanity” on
the other. Playing chess is very “human,” but Deep Blue is a robot
that can kick everybody’s ass at chess. You can claim that “Deep Blue”
is not “a robot,” but come on: just put a tin face on him and give him
a manipulator arm. Instant “robot.” Robotic has never been an issue
of mechanical men versus flesh men, like in a Flash Gordon episode.

The stuff we call “robotics” today is more like Google’s “robot car,”
which is not some Karel Capek man-shaped “robot” of the 1920s; the
Google Car is the Google Stack with wheels attached to it. Similarly,
“Google Glass” isn’t virtual-reality supergoggles, it’s the Google
Stack with a camera, Android mobile software and a head-mounted
display. Will they “take your jobs?” How could they not?

If you lose your job as a bus driver because a Google Bus took your
job, you didn’t lose it to a “robot,” you lost your enterprise to
Google, just like the newspapers did. Don’t bother to put a sexbot
face on the silly thing, it’s Larry and Sergei & Co. Go find a
musician and buy him a drink.

Fighter pilots are “losing their jobs to robots,” to aerial drones.
Are those the “dull dirty and dangerous” jobs? Heck no, because
fighter jocks are romantic folk heroes, like Eddie Rickenbacker and the
Red Baron and George Bush 1.0. When most flight work is carried out
by “robots” (actually by GPS systems and databases, but so what), are
we somehow going to discover a more refined and human way to fly? Will
we be liberated to fly in a more spiritual, humanistic, Beryl Markham
poetic aviatrix kind of way? I very much doubt that. I’m pretty sure
we’ll stop “flying” entirely, even if we anachronistically claim we’re
“flying” when we’re zipping around in sporty ultralights letting drone
systems do all the labor.

Bookstore clerks never had “dull, dirty, dangerous” work, they were
the mainstays of humanistic commerce actually, but Amazon is a Stack.
Amazon’s all about giant robot warehouse distribution logistics. It’s
all databases and forklifts in the Amazon stack, so of course “robots”
took the jobs of bookstore clerks. Bookstore clerks imagined they were
chumming around with the literate community turning people on the Jane
Austen, but the high-touch, humanly clingy aspect of this line of work
changed nothing much about its obsolescence.

So it’s not that “robots” take “our jobs.” It’s more a situation of
general employement precarity where applications built for mobile
devices and databases can hit pretty much anybody’s line of work, more
or less at random, without a prayer of effective counter-action.
Right? Let’s move right along, then!

That being the case, “what ought to be done?” Well, if job security
of all kinds is going to be made precarious indefinitely, then the
sane, humane thing to do is clearly to socialize security and put
everybody on a guaranteed annual income. Brazilian-style socialism:
keep your nose clean, keep the kids in school, and we fee you off and
you can go buy whatever produce the robots have cooked up lately.

One might also invent some kind of Stack Fordism, where Facebook pays
you enough to hang out on Facebook making Facebook more omniscient.
It’s a lot cheaper than putting the unemployed into prison.

Obviously the American right-wing isn’t gonna go for this wacky
liberal scheme; bailing out the “takers” of the 47% is their worst
Randroid nightmare. But what people never understood about the John
Henry story is that we have no steam hammers left. The robots “take
your job” and then the robots *keep changing at a frantic pace,* the
robots have the lifespans of hamsters. We’ve still got plenty of
muscular, human John Henries, but his steam hammers are all extinct.

Look what happened to Nokia. These Nokia guys had the classic Wired
magazine bulletproofed dream jobs. They’re not John Henry. They’re
creative class, computer-literate, inventive, super-efficient, global,
digital, Asperger’s high-IQ types… They got annihilated in 18
months. Not by “robots” but by Google and Apple. However, well, same
difference really.

What kind of “jobs” do Republicans have to offer themselves, when
their nominee was a corporate raider, and their top financier is a
weird Jewish casino owner up to the eyebrows in Macao? That’s not
exactly the Protestant work ethic happening, so, well, I dunno.

It might still work, just needs more political pretzel-bending. Don’t
use the word “guaranteed income,” farm it out to Fox News for semantic
re-framing. Toss in the “values requirement” that your annual income
requires you to wear Mormon undies, go to tent revival meetings and
own and display a handgun. They’d line up for it.

Photo from Rhizome

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State of the World 2013

by jonl

Bruce Sterling and I are holding forth on the State of the World in our annual conversation on the WELL, with several other contributors joining in.

Bruce:

Speaking of art, the past, and its lessons for the future:

In my neighborhood in Turin, there’s a bronze statue to a statesman
called “Massimo d’Azeglio.” Massimo happened to be born a rich
Turinese aristocrat, but he always wanted to be a novelist and painter.
He married the daughter of the most famous novelist in Italy, and his
brother actually managed to become a painter.

Massimo himself never managed that. He wrote a few derivative
knock-off novels and he did a lot of weekend painting, but he happened
to be living in a time of national catastrophe and tremendous political
upheaval. So he enlisted in the cavalry, where he got shot in a
losing battle and never recovered his health. Then he got called into
politics, where the King made him Prime Minister because he was the
only courtier around who didn’t lie and cheat all the time.

Massimo is a great statesman and the father of Italian
Constitutionalism and all that, but I never stroll past his statue, and
in Turin I do that all the time, without a shudder of dread. That guy
was a born artist who was forced to become important because he was
never left alone to do what he personally wanted to do.

He put his bohemianism aside, and he became dutiful and responsible.
He made a big difference: he liberated a suffering people (for the
brief periods before they got stomped again), he forged a new national
consciousness, he signed a lot of budget bills, he sat around a lot of
smoke-filled tables with the rich and the well-born. The wife never
liked it much. There seems to have been a lot of trouble over that.

Massimo’s got a bronze painter’s palette and an open bronze book,
sculpted at the foot of his towering monument — ’cause his persecutors
knew he was an artist — but he’s never gonna be able to bend down
from his bronze heights of statesmanship and pick them up.

Given his noblesse oblige, I’m not sure that Massimo was ever allowed
an open choice about being powerful rather than being an artist, but
power is a form of bondage. No one who needs power and has it, ever
gets enough of it. Artists like to talk about their work, but powerful
people like to talk about their vacations.

To think that you can become powerful, and not become like that
personally, is like thinking you can knock back a gallon of Gentleman
Jack and not get drunk because you can write novels and paint. You can
write and paint, but that’s not what it is, that’s not what it means.

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He bought his guns on the Internet

by jonl

Gun Room at Philadelphia's City Hall

In casual conversations, we often hear someone say “I read blah blah on the Internet,” and if you ask for a specific source, you’ll often get “I don’t remember where.” So it could have been the New York Times, or it could have been an inexpert blog post: a comment qualified in that way has no authority or meaning. Same with “bought it on the Internet.”

I was struck by a comment MSNBC’s Chuck Todd made while talking about access to weapons in the U.S. He mentioned that James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora shooter, bought considerable guns and ammunition “on the Internet.”

My first thought was that Todd is a careless journalist (something I never thought before), in part because he used a phrase so vague. Also because he followed with a comment suggesting that Holmes dyed his hair bright orange “like Heath Ledger’s Joker in Batman.” The Joker existed as a character before Heath Ledger played the part, and clearly does not have the bright orange hair we see in the photos of Holmes. Chuck, you’re thinking of Bozo the Clown. The Joker’s hair is green.

But I digress. The relevant question here is the significance of saying that Holmes bought his arsenal online? That anyone can buy guns? Could we argue that, had Holmes bought his guns from a physical gun store, the clerk would have noted his demented stare and refused to make the sale? I doubt it.

It doesn’t matter where he bought the components of his arsenal. He could have bought them anywhere guns (and bullet-proof vests) are sold. Or so I read on the Internet.

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John Shirley: “empathy may be a precious commodity in the future”

by jonl

In the wake of the Connecticut shootings, John Shirley posted on Facebook this excerpt from a text he wrote as the basis for a TedX talk:

“People who are quadriplegic have stated that they feel less emotion than they did, when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into electronics reduces our relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.

“And empathy may be a precious commodity in the future. Most people unconsciously cut off their empathy when they’re feeling endangered–when the population increases to 8 and 9 and 10 billion, we may instinctively become, as a race, proportionately less empathetic–unless we actively struggle against that kind of degeneracy.”

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Just another post about a tragedy

by jonl

[Don't waste your time reading my hasty post before you read Ethan Zuckerman's take: "Mourn, and take action on guns."]

Another senseless American tragedy with much chaotic wailing in social media, including my own. More traditional media, as ever, is ready and willing to tell us what we are thinking, if not what we should be thinking. The Onion manages to be more real than “real” news in this:

Americans reported feelings of overwhelming disgust with whatever abhorrent bastard did this and with the world at large for ever allowing it to happen, as well as with politicians, with the NRA, and above all with their own pathetic goddamn selves, sitting in front of a fucking computer instead of doing fucking anything to help anyone—Christ, as if that were even fucking possible, as if anyone could change what happened, as if the same fucking bullshit isn’t going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it’s time to change the way we live, so what’s the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?

Roger Ebert had an interesting take on the media’s role in his review of Gus Van Sant’s film “Elephant,” inspired by the Columbine shootings. I’ve seen this quote 2-3 times on the interwebs over the last 24 hrs:

… I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

12/12/20115 Austin American-Statesman

Austin American-Statesman front page, 12/12/2015

This news is everywhere. It filled the front page of Austin American-Statesman today, with a max point size headline saying “Our Hearts Are Broken Today.” The New York Times says “Nation Reels as Shooting Details Emerge.” I don’t question the sincerity of most responses, though there were also outrageous viral hoaxes like this one, posted on Twitter (I fell for it):

Landfill Harmonics: rethinking/reusing what we’re throwing away…

by jonl

Transforming garbage into good-quality musical instruments – forget flying cars, this is the more relevant future. Thanks to Joseph Rowe for sending this my way. Joseph says of this sort of good news: “… most media (big or small), if they report it at all, class it condescendingly as ‘entertainment’ or ‘human interest. When will those with power and influence start to realize that art is not an ornament, nor a luxury, but a necessity of life?”

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Christopher Alexander and “A Pattern Language”

by jonl

Great post about Christopher Alexander’s work and influence via The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, originally published at the Metropolis website, which followed up with posts on “The Sustainable Technology of Christopher Alexander” and “The Living Technology of Chrisopher Alexander.” The authors emphasize Alexander’s emphasis on patterns, context and a whole-systems vision. He was writing as an architect, but his influence has been more widespread.

an earlier generation of computer programmers, organization theorists, design theorists and many others, were struggling then to figure out how to generate and manage the large new design structures of that era — computer software being one prominent example. Alexander gave them some very helpful conceptual tools to do that…. In essence, the tools were patterns: not things, but relations of things, which could be identified and re-combined and re-used, in a language-like way.

The article goes on to say that Anderson’s work has “…amounted to a kind of technological critique, revolving around the observation that we’re doing something wrong in the way we make things. We’re substituting an oversimplified model of structure-making — one more closely related to our peculiar hierarchically limited way of conceiving abstract relationships — in place of the kinds of transformations that actually occur regularly in the universe, and in biological systems especially.”

Ours is a much more limited, fragmentary form of this larger kind of transformation. The result of this problem is nothing less than a slow unfolding technological disaster. We know it as the sustainability crisis.

That’s where this discussion touches on what’s happening today — economically, ecologically, and culturally. Growing numbers of people do recognize that we have to get our houses in order. But whose house, to what extent, and in what way? That’s the big question of the day.

What Alexander argues is that we have to make some very fundamental reforms — not only in our specific technologies, but in our very way of thinking about technology. We have been isolating things, as mechanical sub-entities, and manipulating them. That works quite well, but only up to a point. As any systems theorist or ecologist will tell you, the context, not the thing, is the key.

So it seems that we have ignored an incredibly important aspect of natural systems — namely, the fact that every structure is embedded in a larger structural context, and ultimately, in the entire structure of the cosmos itself. What Alexander offered was not just the recognition of this truth, but the basis of a new technology that could incorporate it.

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Spaun is not “consciousness in a box”

by jonl

The hype about the “neuron brain model” Spaun made me think of my skeptical FringeWare Review piece about storing or replicating human consciousness, “Consciousness in a Box.” Sci-fi culture has set the assumption that construction of an “artificial brain” is not only possible, but inevitable, but I’ve argued that it’s unlikely, if not impossible to build a machine that replicates human cognition. Context is important: however we came to “think” in the way we do, to be conscious, sentient entities, that won’t be replicated in a bundle of switches, however slick, fast, and capable. SPAUN, in fact, is somewhat less than the hype suggests:

The first thing to point out is that Spaun doesn’t learn anything. It can be arranged to tackle eight pre-defined tasks and it doesn’t learn any new tasks or modify the way it performs existing tasks. The whole system is based on the Neural Engineering Framework – NEF- which can be used to compute the values of the strengths of connections needed to make a neural network do a particular task. If you want a neural net to implement a function of the inputs f(x) then NEF will compute the parameters for a leaky integrate and fire network that will do the job. This is an interesting approach, but it doesn’t show any of the plasticity that the real brain and real neural networks show.

If anything, this approach is more like the original McCulloch and Pitts networks where artificial neurons were hand-crafted to create logic gates. For example. you can put neurons together to create a NAND gate and from here you can use them to implement a complete computer – a PC based on a Pentium, say, using the neuronal NAND gates to implement increasingly complex logic. It would all work but it wouldn’t be a thinking brain or a model of a neuronal computer.

If we ever do build a “thinking machine” that is to any degree autonomous, I’m certain it won’t replicate human consciousness or thought processes – it’ll have its own way of “thinking.”

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Community: listening and leading

by jonl

For the last two decades I’ve been preaching about the limits of “community management” – no one can “own” a community or tribe; top-down approaches fail. You can lead, you can facilitate, but you can’t dictate – you have to listen to the community, and be sensitive to community input.

At larger scale, this is the rationale for democracy, “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Democracy is difficult, you can’t have a true and pure democracy and make it work – but when we talk about democracy we’re seldom talking about a system that’s purely that, a direct democracy. We always have vertical hierarchies, however flat they might be, and we always need leadership. Few members of a community will have the understanding and perspective required to make decisions; success depends on their input. But success also depends on a system that supports a sense of open, public discussion preceding whatever decisions are embedded in policy.

We see this in micro in online communities and social networks. On a platform like Facebook, for instance, there’s a persistent tension between what Facebook wants to do and what its users will accept; Facebook-the-company has been forced to back off on policies that were perceived by users as too constraining. It’s an ongoing dance, and to the extent that the users of Facebook are its product (sold as eyeballs to advertisers), the system must empower its users while at the same time depending on a more passive form of information consumption (the kind that makes advertisers happy). Facebook is a company, it makes platform decisions, but to the extent users feel locked out or ignored, they’re cranky and might ultimately walk, if they feel they have no input, no control over the online environment. You didn’t have this with television, because television doesn’t create the same sense of place or community. It was media, but not social media.

Coding Horror has a post that about online social space and community empowerment, quoting the 1990 paper “The Lessons of LucasFilm’s Habitat.” Habitat was an early online game/community, “one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment.” This quote could have been written about any number of online platforms that have emerged over the last two-plus decades:

… we shifted into a style of operations in which we let the players themselves drive the direction of the design. This proved far more effective. Instead of trying to push the community in the direction we thought it should go, an exercise rather like herding mice, we tried to observe what people were doing and aid them in it. We became facilitators as much as designers and implementors. This often meant adding new features and new regions to the system at a frantic pace, but almost all of what we added was used and appreciated, since it was well matched to people’s needs and desires. As the experts on how the system worked, we could often suggest new activities for people to try or ways of doing things that people might not have thought of. In this way we were able to have considerable influence on the system’s development in spite of the fact that we didn’t really hold the steering wheel — more influence, in fact, than we had had when we were operating under the delusion that we controlled everything.

The author of the Coding Horror post, Jeff Atwood, points to his earlier post about lessons learned managing the Stack Overflow community, “Listen to Your Community, But Don’t Let Them Tell You What to Do.” That strikes me as a good description of the process of practical democracy: those who hold power (community managers, legislators, executives) must listen (actively, seriously), but they have to make their own decisions from their perspective, which is different from the perspective of the average community member or citizen. As Atwood says in his “Listen” post, “Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why.” I.e. leaders have to work hard at having the right perspective and understanding to make meaningful, “right” decisions. He goes on to say that “half of community relationships isn’t doing what the community thinks they want at any given time, but simply being there to listen and respond to the community.” Spot on.

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Mindjack

by jonl

Pete Rothman’s published a post at h+ on Donald Melanson’s brilliant neophiliac website Mindjack. I was on Mindjack’s board at one time, and contributed a few pieces to the site, including “Nodal Politics,” a chapter from my unpublished book Virtual Bonfire. In that particular piece, I was considering the potential for the Internet to serve as a platform for political organizing. Many if not most of the Mindjack authors were members of Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds community, originally formed as a for-profit ad-based social site. (There’s a whole other interesting story about the sale of Electric Minds and the attempt to preserve the community as the platform changed hands.)

I don’t even remember writing a post at Mindjack about SXSW 2002 – post-dotcom-bust – but there it is.

This year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference was lean and mean – attended mainly by the core group of edgy ‘net whackadistas, the conference had an interesting vibe, like “Wow, glad the goddam dotcom splurge is over, let’s get back to what we were doin’…” And what we were doin’ had real depth, it was way more compelling than ecommerce or net.publishing, the kinds of projects MBAs brought to the table when they started calling the Internet an ‘industry’ and creating the concept of the IPO casino. Before all that stuff happened we were thinking about open and free paradigms for software development, technologies for community, new and better ways to tell our stories. We were re-inventing ourselves as cyborgs, humans enhanced by accelerated technologies, looking for ways to nurture each other and share ideas over faster, increasingly accessible networks. And though many were all a little tired, a little disoriented, a little uncertain about where they were going, there was no question that the crowd at this year’s SXSW was still committed to Internet technology and the web. Sadder, wiser, more grounded, but still eager to build.

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“We’re headed for a disaster of biblical proportions!”

by jonl

Jeremy Grantham has been doing the math, and is convinced that world resources are way insufficient to support the current population.

Grantham believes that the planet can only sustainably support about 1.5 billion humans, versus the 7 billion on Earth right now (heading to 10-12 billion). For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.

This is where we should be innovating – how do we match the level of resources to the (growing) need? Space travel is the old school sci-fi remedy: let’s go to Mars!

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Innovation is Madness

by jonl

Genius architect Pliny Fisk of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems is featured in a GE Focus Forward short film contest semifinalist, “Innovation is Madness.” “This whole idea that I am a mad scientist essentially comes from the fact that I have created a situation where madness can happen safely…”

Innovation Is Madness | Mark Decena from Focus Forward Filmson Vimeo.

INNOVATION IS MADNESS is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it’s among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it. Click on the VOTE button in the top right corner of the video player. Note that voting may not be available on all mobile platforms, and browser cookies must be enabled to vote.

Pliny Fisk III was one of the founding members of the green building movement. In 1975 he co-created the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit education, research, and demonstration organization specializing in life cycle planning and design. Shooting a video series for the US Green Building Council, we were introduced and subsequently fell in love with Pliny and his merry band of crazies. CMPBS has not only become a collaborative model for invention, but a physical space for innovation to happen. It’s time for the inmates to run the asylum.

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To blog, or not to blog…

by jonl

I’m posting this here because someone saw my post about it on Twitter, and wondered why there wasn’t more about it here on the blog.

So I thought I was ready to stop blogging at Weblogsky. I mentioned it on Google+, and that was cross-posted on Twitter. I had some discussion about it on both platforms. After that, with more thought, I made this response at Google+:

…I realize there’s another approach that makes sense – dismissing the sense of obligation to keep the blog “alive,” but to continue to use it as a place to post some original writing and thinking. When I created the blog I was riffing with some friends of mine who have a group blog (http://boingboing.net), and following a curation model somewhat influenced by Whole Earth Catalog’s approach (write a short review with one or more excerpts). Much of my own thinking hasn’t seen the light of the day, except through inference, partly because I keep thinking I’ll write a book and/or some shorter pieces and do that for money. That hasn’t really happened, I’ve found other ways to put bread on the table and have some internal doubts and conflicts (as I’ve grown older, I’ve been less convinced that my thinking is marketable, though I’ve seen others buld careers on similar thinking – but the marketability of ideas is often only clear in retrospect). I should add that I’m mentally lazy – capturing and taming ideas and presenting them in a compelling way is a lotta work.

But I have friends who’ve known me for a while and say they wonder why I’m not doing more with my quirky little brain…

I said I’m lazy, but actually I’ve been burning it at both ends for a while, and I’m always prone to think I’m not doing enough. One thing not mentioned in that response – I hate to think of this as a “vanity project.” I want readers to feel that my posts here have value for them.

Right now I’m thinking I should work at having more discipline and spend more time capturing my thinking, here and possibly in a book, as well as in the various forms of social media I’m using. So maybe the blog stays, but with fewer posts that are more carefully conceived and written, taking more time for each.

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Murmuration

by jonl

Amazing video of starling swarms.

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