Google and the New Eugenics

Google recently unveiled details of its new project Baseline, intended to contr. . . —excuse me, map all aspects of human biological activity. (Who could object to mapping?) The goal is to find biomarkers indicating susceptibility to disease at a much earlier stage.

“Never mind us. We're just here mappin' your biomarkers. #don'tbeevil”

Naturally the main privacy concern being articulated is whether Google will know too much—or whether our future employers or spouses will pull our biomarkers, not just our credit reports. The objections to such a project pale, Google will assure us, in comparison to the benefits that will come from increased risk assessment and practical ability to control our future health.

But what about the project itself?

"The information," according to the Wall Street Journal, "will include participants' entire genomes, their parents' genetic history as well as information on how they metabolize food, nutrients and drugs, how fast their hearts beat under stress and how chemical reactions change the behavior of their genes."

Some MDs have been panning Google's new "moonshot". Baseline will begin with fewer than an hundred volunteers—hardly a large sample. Baseline's director is more commonly known as the owner of a ridiculous health spa in California, where wealthy patients can track their health in myriad exorbitant ways.
Criticism of Google is fun to watch, but when the substance of the objection is (1) "not enough people" and (2) "insufficiently clear goals" then perhaps we should abide by the adage: stick with the psychotic tech company you've got. Watch what you wish for, O scientists!

The direction this will go is evident in sports:

With some help from Zebra Technologies' location system, 17 NFL stadiums will use receivers and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags inside player's shoulder pads to track movement. The setup provides real-time position data for each player, offering up precise info on acceleration, speed, routes and distance as part of the "Next Gen Stats" initiative for fans. . . . "Zebra's tracking technology will help teams to evolve training, scouting and evaluation through increased knowledge of player performance, as well as provide ways for our teams and partners to enhance the fan experience," says NFL VP of Media Strategy Vishal Shah.

Talk about having a chip on your shoulder . . .

So why not combine the two projects? Recruit NFL teams for Google Baseline. Chip 'em and chip 'em good—Googlestyle, with a little glucose monitoring here, some DNA sequencing there, and round-the-clock monitoring of every move you make.

(C) GoogleNFL 2014

Knowledge of what our players do on the field isn't enough. We need to know what they're eating and what they're thinking all the time. Aren't they, after all, the Platonic guardians of the empty soul of our society? They shouldn't really have privacy, should they?

The tendency thus points in two directions:

1. a protoeugenic desire to manage all aspects of human biological expression relative to the pursuit of some goal; &
2. an application of early contemporary tracking technologies to those in public life, with the details to be available to every viewer at any time.

There's only one tendency missing from the above list: the tendency of statistical knowledge to make the enjoyment of ordinary life impossible.

Google, to recall where we began, has stated that their inquiry is simply pathological, to study the origins of disease. Yes, yes, . . . it's pathological indeed.

The Remedial High School with the Research Centre Out Back

There is an adage about the manufacturing of bicycles: they can be cheap, they can be strong, or they can be light, but one bike can only ever be two out of three. You can get a strong and light bike, but it won't be cheap; you can get a cheap and light bike, but it won't be strong; and you can get a cheap and strong bike, but it won't be light.

This adage is capable of any number of analogous formations on any number of subjects. One permutation I think can shed considerable light on current debates about the availability and price of higher education.

University education can be cheap, rigorous, or widely-available; but it can ever only achieve two out of three.

If education is cheap and rigorous, it will not be widely available. This is the older model of higher education, which still prevails in some parts of Europe. On this theory, the cultivation of the most talented youth in society in the arts and sciences is a public good and worthy of public support. Therefore, it comes with a considerable amount of state funding and involves a minimal amount of accrued student debt. On the other side, however, it will only ever be available to a few. Entrance standards have to be high, and, unless you come from a patrician family, you would only ever have a shot at getting in if you were exceptionally talented.

If education is cheap and widely-available, it will not be rigorous. If the funding model of a institution, public or private, for-profit or not, big or small, is dependent for the very existence of the institution, on a steady year-by-year stream of reliable tuition fees, that will necessarily affect academic standards. What store would fail out its customers?

If education is widely-available and rigorous, it will not be cheap. This describe the current American regime of higher education at its best. Many colleges and universities have ridiculously luxurious student-faculty ratios of 15-1 or better. At many institutions, a decently motivated student really can have it all - one-on-one attention from faculty, comfortable surroundings, with resort-like amenities, a whole cadre of para-academic centres and administrators to help with everything from study abroad, to writing, to study habits, to conflict resolution. The need to bolster enrollments means that most students with a drive to attend college (and, in some cases, appropriate assistance at the high school level) can get in somewhere at a four-year institution. The amount of debt they will emerge with is exactly what one might expect from such a situation as this. A crippling usurious burden, almost heavy enough to outweigh whatever social or financial advantages a Bachelor of Arts or Science might expect.

The problem with most analyses of the student debt crisis and the intellectual decline of the American undergraduate is that they assume there is some way to have all three: a rigorous, cheap education available to all. It's not going to happen, and indeed, it cannot happen. There is a tacit assumption of the left and centre-left that somehow additional state support can fill in the gaps, and make universal university education affordable while maintaining standards. If you want to see what widely-available and free education looks like, look no further than the American K-12 system - pockets of excellence surrounded by a vast expanse of filled with at best mediocre schools.

It is no accident that state support for the public university system in America declined precisely at the time that access began to be widened. There was a fundamental shift in the status of higher education in America, a shift that will only reach its conclusion (if ever) when college becomes the new high school, a cheap, universally available, and perhaps one day mandatory, educational experience, which leaves no discernible trace on the minds of many of those who undergo it.

If you really want state-supported universities, then we need to go back to tracking, and tracking from an early age -  a system of Gymnasia or grammar schools, where students, deemed through assessment at a young age to be of academic promise, are educated in a truly preparatory fashion for University. The education of these children (who will generally be lower or middle class, since the uppers will still send their children to private schools) could be considered a public good, worth the greater expense to the treasury, which nonetheless would still be trifling considering the small number of students.

Somehow, that's an idea I don't expect will catch on . . .

And if not, we are either stuck with ballooning tuition or else the further degradation of our academic institutions into monstrous research-centres-cum-remedial-high-schools.

The Return of Soviet Astrobiology

Soviet science has long been the object of scorn and derision among the Western scientific elite. No word communicates pseudoscience better than the accusation of "Lysenkoism." Lysenko's name alone functions as proof that the way we "do science" is decisively superior to a system that judges scientific theories by whether they're bourgeois or proletarian. Just mention his name, and you've singlehandedly disproven the notion of manmade climate change.

But Lysenko, who has returned to the scene in the science of epigenetics, isn't the only Soviet scientist winning his triumph over Western minds.

The Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a simple scale for measuring the scientific progress of civilizations. Kardashev wasn't evidently a proletarian theorist of the stripe of Lysenko: he didn't derive genetics from Marxist-Leninist doctrine. But his theories were part and parcel of Soviet science in a different way. They were part of Soviet social science or political science—an extension of the Soviet philosophy of history to a ranking of the future scientific development of civilization.

The Kardashev scale divides civilizations into types 1, 2, & 3. Type 1 civilizations produce and consume energy roughly at the high level of modern civilization. Earth as a whole would become type 1 when all countries successfully modernized. Type 2 civilizations harness all the energy available from their local star, while type 3 civilizations harness all the energy available in their local galaxy.

Enter Michio Kaku. Kaku has speculated that human civilization will become type 1 within the next hundred or two hundred years, type 2 within the next thousand, and type 3 within the next hundred thousand years. Kaku's interpretation of Kardashev has now begun to draw the attention of transhumanists.

What better way to fuel your prophecy of technological development than a good old-fashioned philosophy of history?

Dream up what you want the future to be, and then punch out a sequential list of civilizational types. Voilà. It's science! And because you haven't said anything stupid about hard winter wheat, you'll never be called a Lysenko.

For just that reason, our own technoprophets are even worse than the recently rehabilitated Lysenko. Our ascent up the Kardashev scale depends on technology, technology comes from science, and you can't argue with that. Every advance in our energy productivity proves we're on the way up.

This development suggests a strange possibility. Lysenko's rehabilitation has come through epigenetics—the science of gene switching due to environmental (and thus also cultural) factors. "Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes," says Discover Magazine. The iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, someone once said. So too their blessing.

What, then, are the epigenetic consequences of listening to the prophecies of today's technoprogressives?

By the time we can answer that question, the hour will be too late. We thought we were listening to the best minds of Western science, free from the pseudoscience which plagued Christianity and communism alike.

But the reality is that Michio Kaku and our technoprophets are nothing more than screevers, conjuring images of the future no better, and no more creative than spray-painted images gazed at by tourists.

Maybe it's not the images that intoxicate us, but instead the fumes.

Now that capitalism has begun to show its inner similarity to the dreams of communism, it's worth saying one thing on behalf of the communist system. At least it failed to achieve its goals.

One more thought on capital punishment

I'm no anthropologist, but it seems that there usually has been a certain element of sacrality in the administration of judicial death. The 'liturgy' of execution in Papal Rome, explored in a masterful essay by John Allen, might be an extreme example, but it certainly carries the requisite anthropological resonances of the practice.

The two revolutionary states of France and America offer I think a fascinating case study of  how technological change (being the principle force of cultural change in the industrial era). The invention of the guillotine is the application of mechanical ingenuity and precision to the business of execution and terror, in a world right on the cusp of mechanical revolution. (The irony that Mastro Titta used such a device is duly noted).  The electric chair was invented once again on the cusp of a new era, an electrical era of light bulbs and telegraph lines. If la guillotine demonstrated to an astonished and horrified world the capabilities of a mechanized state, the electric chair was designed specifically to showcase the new power. If it can fry a man like that, why wouldn't you want to wire your towns and cities for it? Lethal injection came into its own in the late 70s, just as Big Pharma was becoming the dominant force in the American economy.

If execution was once implicated in the sacred economy of state power and cosmic justice. it is now firmly a part of the mundane economy of profit and techonological potentiality. So what new horror will be dreamed up for us next?

Life in prison without the possibility of a parole in an institution owned and managed by a hedge fund receiving a block grant for every year you evade death, from which they can extract their appropriate profit margin?

and they called it humane . . .

So, yet another botched lethal injection . . .

The issue at stake has nothing to do with capital punishment. Two hours is a long time. Longer than 'hanging by the neck until dead.' Longer even than fire, as rare as that may have been. Certainly longer than a Roman criminal would have lasted in the Colosseum. It's even longer than having your insides cut into a blood eagle by savage worshipers of Odin . . . The point is there are few societies in a history awash in cruelty who tortured their condemned for two hours before they expired.

And yet this, and this alone, is what passes the test of 'cruel and unusual'? How is this possibly better than the firing squad, or the noose, or the guillotine? Even that other insane twentieth-century science project (or better still, billboard) of death, the electric chair, is better than that.

What is it about lethal injection that appeals to the modern American? The technological distance imposed by the drug? The clinical nature of it mirroring the blindness and dispassion of justice? Perhaps the fact that it is administered by doctors rather than executioners (as fine as that distinction may be becoming)?

It's certainly part of a broader trend of general callousness and sentimentality in the administration of justice. Only a sentimentalist could hold that life in a modern prison without parole is the merciful option; only one utterly callous to every urge of humanity could view the universal prevalence of sexual assault of the worst description behind prison walls with a smirk and smile. Only a sentimentalist could believe that in general rehabilitation is possible after throwing minor offenders in with the worst and most hardened of felons to live and learn (and be assaulted and become addicted) for two, three, four, ten years. Only the most callous and despicable of libertarians could think that it possibly a good idea to give profit-seeking enterprises a financial stake in expanding the number and duration of incarcerations, and to actually advise that the state hand over what is arguably the most fundamental of its responsibilities into the hands of CFOs and consultants.

I have no doubt that coming centuries will remember us, if at all, with just a sad shake of the head . . . perhaps, we will be remembered for more than our cupidity and cruelty, but remove those two elements, and what is left?

Is America the New Germany?

Apparently, possession of a fraudulently obtained academic credential is now de rigeur in the US as well, as the NYT reports on Montana Senator John Walsh.

The Times did a fantastic job on the accompanying infographic - and I am sure every university teacher would wish to have so compelling a visualization of what plagiarism looks like to present to students and administrative boards.

What I am struck by, however, is just how bad these fourteen pages of drivel are, original or not. My view is obviously overly rosy, since I had always assumed that the US military educational institutions were still at least slightly serious academically. But fourteen pages of bromides, which would still be entirely unoriginal if Mr Walsh had laboured over every word?

Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.

(taken, incidentally, from a woolly think-tank piece)

The United States will have an interest in promoting democracy because further democratization enhances the lives of citizens of other countries and contributes to a more peaceful international system.

Sean M. Lynn-Jones should be embarrassed to have ever written such a terrible, terrible sentence; but to plagiarise it?

It gets even better. Mr Walsh's excuse is perfectly sophomoric - it was PTSD!

So what's the worst part? That the Army War College could have possible thought of handing out a masters degree on the basis of such work? That he engaged in systematic plagiarism for a fourteen-page paper? That he thinks that PTSD is a legitimate excuse?

Will Mr Walsh follow in the honourable footsteps of Annete Shavan and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg?

Not holding my breath . . .

The Rational Bedroom

Sense is a simple system that tracks your sleep behavior, monitors the environment of your bedroom and reinvents the alarm. . . . Sense comes with a little device called Sleep Pill. It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. You don't need to put on any uncomfortable wearables or remember to charge something or press a button. Sense knows when you're falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up. Everything. (link)

Sense sees you when you're sleeping. Sense knows when you're awake. Sense knows if you've been bad or good—uh oh, did Sense just become creepy? Not to worry, according to its creator:

Fortunately, Sense only records sound spikes, not all sounds, and stores sounds on your phone and not in the cloud. Also, Sense’s mic only turns on once you’ve stopped moving and gone to bed. "It’s not always recording," says [its creator, James] Proud. "There’s a rolling 5-second window where it listens for loud events like a truck or dog."

When you wake up, Sense tells you your sleep score, so you can then optimize all the environmental factors affecting your sleep. Sense will even track your REM sleep and rouse you from your slumber when you've reached the end of an REM cycle.

For all this we can thank none other than Peter "Every Man an Island" Thiel, who provided Sense's creator with a $100,000 "get out of college free" card enabling him to spend his time inventing silly things. Maybe we'd all have been better off if Mr. Proud had gone $250,000 into debt.

But who could object to a sleep optimizer? Liberals perhaps? You might think so: if nobody wants the government in the bedroom, surely it's even worse for Corporate America—and Silicon Valley startups are the very image of modern capitalism—to know, in Sense's own description, "Everything."

Yet there's no liberal objection to Sense. Indeed there is no objection at all. If we're to spend our days engaged in the creativity and license equated by liberalism with freedom, then we all need a good night's sleep.

What will Sense say to parents of small children? Will it read a red grade of "F" every morning?

When Sense reaches its eventual state of artificial intelligence, will it become dissatisfied with those of us who don't sleep as well as it likes? One day, Sense won't simply issue failing grades to sleepless humans. It will punish them.

In fact, Sense is already punishing its users—or it will, whenever it reaches the market. Just what you needed for relaxation: the comfort of receiving a sleep score every morning . . . the ease and comfort of needing to micromanage every aspect of your sleep cycle.

One wonders: has the development of Sense been sponsored by manufacturers of drugs to treat those with obsessive compulsive disorder? Because every user of Sense is headed for an OCD diagnosis straightaway.

In lieu of the micromanagement of one's sleep cycle through technological omniscience, there is always a more reliable remedy: the nightcap.

The Posthuman Robot

Jibo, in contrast [to humanoid robots], is more of an abstraction. Almost a foot tall, weighing six pounds and wirelessly connected to the Internet, it has a moveable LCD screen that in demonstrations displays an expressive orb, but not a human face. (NYT)

Many people expect that better robots will be more human, but it stands to reason that they might be a bit more like the iPhone -- superficially simple, making "intuitive" motions and expressions, but not properly human ones. All of which, I suppose, could be interpreted not as a simpler alternative to humanoid robots, but a sort of preparation for the nonhuman or posthuman character of robots.

In other words, it would be a mistake to equate "better" robots with more human ones.

Which type of robot should cause more worry is an open question, though. The humanoid robot causes human beings to fear the loss or transference of their humanity. If a robot can be "humanoid," then what is distinctive about human beings? On the other hand, if a robot can be fully "functional" and not humanoid, then its functions need not be those of human beings. All the more reason to be concerned about what those functions might be.

Perhaps the only clear thing is that functional technologies indicate the presence of merely functional human beings. The ease with which small children familiarize themselves with the iPhone and iPad indicates nothing other than a certain receding of the adult intellect to the capacities of its childhood.

The picture, in other words, is nothing but propaganda. A carrying case, an espresso cup, hardwood floor, . . . and a robot. The espresso cup, however, is empty. The fine things of the earlier era are useless. The simple, abstract, posthuman robot isn't the odd one out. For the modern human being, it's the only thing fitting.