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WORLD’S FIRST UNMANNED CONVENIENCE STORES

Are you fed up with surly or slow convenience store clerks? Do you want to buy something you’re slightly ashamed of, and would prefer not to face a human clerk? Wheelys offers a solution.

A Swedish firm best known for selling bicycle-mounted coffee bars, creperies, ice cream dispensers, and juice bars, Wheelys has opened an unmanned convenience store in Shanghai, China. The prototype store will be open around the clock, seven days a week. Because it requires no staff, the Wheelys concept will make it easier for entrepreneurs with limited capital to enter the grocery business.

Wheelys tested the concept successfully in a small town in rural Sweden. The Shanghai store marks its first test in a dense urban setting.

For access to the Wheelys store, the customer installs an app on his iOS or Android tablet or phone. The door opens automatically for anyone carrying a device with a registered app. The customer scans the bar codes for any goods he wants to buy, and Wheelys charges them to his credit card.

To prevent theft, a camera monitors the store. And since customers log themselves in through their apps upon entry, they can be identified easily if they take any goods without scanning them.

Wheelys says that if the Shanghai test is successful, it will license the unmanned store technology so retailers can incorporate it into their existing stores. A company spokesman said, “What Uber did for taxis, we do for retail.”

The Wheelys system is not as advanced as the unmanned store concept currently under development by Amazon– though Amazon has yet to test its system in an actual market setting. Amazon said that its stores will not require scanning of individual products. After logging in, the customer with simply load his cart with the goods he wants, and a scanner will total his purchases as he leaves.

Amazon has not said it plans to license its unmanned store technology.

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ROBOTS:  WILL THEY TAKE OUR JOBS?

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Apocalypse by Robots is a recurring theme in technical publications and science fiction. As our tools become more sophisticated and able to learn, the more alarmist writers tell us, they might attack us. A machine programmed to make paper clips might try to turn the entire world into a paper clip factory. Robots programmed to find their own power sources could deny us the power we need for survival. Robots could be deadly.

Some of the less excitable tech writers dismiss such alarms,. They still say, though, that say automation will foster mass unemployment. In fact, we’ll need a guaranteed minimum income to save the hordes of technologically unemployed from rioting in the streets because they can’t support themselves. MIT’s Technology Review, Wired, Gizmodo, The Verge, Singularity Hub, Mashable, Ars Technica- almost every technical rag echoes the same theme.

There are a few dissenting voices, but almost every article addressing the subject warns that automation will destroy far more jobs than it will create. In the past, technical development has only disrupted job markets for the short term, and in the long run has created far more jobs– and far more remunerative jobs-  than it has destroyed.

But this time it’s different, the alarmists say. We can’t use the Industrial Revolution or the dawn of the Information Age as our model. The big difference now is artificial intelligence or machine learning. As our tools learn from ’experience’, instead of just responding to specific inputs, the need for direct human control nearly vanishes. A small technical and financial elite will control almost everything, and will become fantastically wealthy. The rest of us will be mired in poverty, permanently shut out from the labor force.

How Have Robots Affected Job Markets Before?

This certainly is a grim prospect. But is it likely?

We doubt it. Suppose we concede that the distant past has nothing to teach us about out own futures. We’ll look into just the rise of robotics in the last sixty years. In all that time, robots have finally and irrevocably destroyed only one job category, elevator operators. But automation has created more jobs for elevator engineers and repairmen.

We’ve seen the same trend in other industries. Replacement of land lines with mobile phones has radically altered the work of telecom technicians, but has not made them obsolete. Replacing cathode ray tubes with LCD, LED, and OLED TV sets radically shrank the market for TV repairmen, but created new jobs for electronics designers and coders. The waning influence of broadcast TV networks has opened new markets in cable TV, satellite TV, and streaming video,. It has created more demand for content– and for content creators.

Automation has brought us an enormous blessing: assignment of the most dangerous, dirty, exhausting, and boring tasks to machines. This leaves us with far less onerous work, often in air-conditioned comfort. Machine learning will accelerate this trend. The tasks we handle in the future might not be what we call ‘work’ today. They might even seem like play. But suppose you could enter a time machine, and could talk with a farmer or a merchant living two centuries ago. If you describe your current job to him, will he understand it? Will he consider it work? Not likely. He’ll probably think you’re just playing.

What Can You Do?

This doesn’t mean you should be complacent. If you’re unprepared, a rapidly changing job market can hurt you badly. Your best job insurance is continually upgrading your skills.

Above all else, learn how to learn. We can’t always predict what occupations will be in demand. Students who spend years preparing for specific jobs in trendy fields often find, not long after they graduate, that their hard-won skills are obsolete. If you have solid communication, math, and reasoning skills, and if you know a fair amount about literature and history, you have a huge advantage over others. What you don’t know, you can learn quickly.

With a nimble mind and a solid work ethic, you probably don’t need to fear competition by robots.

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TWILIGHT OF “KNOW-HOW”

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Part Two of a Three-Part Series

The twilight cometh…

By the mid-sixties, ‘know-how’ was outmoded. To mention it was to mark oneself as hopelessly unhip and unaware. The assassination of President Kennedy had soured the nation’s mood, riots tore many of our biggest cities apart, the Vietnam war appeared endless and unwinnable, and street crime was skyrocketing. America’s most cherished institutions were under assault by leading public intellectuals. Talk of ‘know-how’ was out of sync with the national mood.

Events of the seventies generally reinforced this timid, embittered, and cynical spirit. For millions of us, the Watergate Scandal destroyed faith in our government’s essential decency. We questioned its regard for the well-being of the people. Double-digit inflation, repeated recessions, and repeated energy shortages undermined confidence in our material futures. The catastrophic loss in Vietnam, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet Empire’s seemingly unstoppable advances cast a shadow over the future of America itself. The country seemed to be in its twilight.

Many of us took refuge in unrestrained hedonism. We dosed ourselves with psychoactive drugs, entertained multiple lovers, spent inordinate amounts of time in recreational activities, and avoided work when we could. The period was called the “Me Decade” for a reason.

We’ve gone through numerous twists and turns since then, our cultural competence and self-confidence waxing and waning by turns.

In early 2016, we seem to be in another trough. Our largest political parties are discredited. Republicans exhibit pathetic and inexplicable weakness. Democrats appall us with their excessive ambition, the social disruption inherent in their embrace of identity politics, and the moral bankruptcy of their governing model. Our military forces, despite overwhelmingly superior training and weaponry, face defeat after defeat at the hands of barely organized bands of savages. Our national government is mired in seemingly unpayable debt, and few of our leaders even bother to ask how we’re going to deal with it.

How did this happen?  How could ‘know-how’ have slipped through our fingers? Can we recover it?

We believe there is a way back. But it will not be easy.

The Twilight of “Know-How” to be continued…

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KNOW-HOW AND CULTURAL SELF-CONFIDENCE

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I’m looking at some old magazine ads touting “American know-how”. Do you remember “know-how”? If you do, you’re old enough to collect Social Security benefits.

“Know-how” was one of the enduring buzzwords of the fifties. It meant technical competence, of course, but much more. It was an attitude and a philosophy. Technical competence was the decisive factor in almost all aspects of life. There were hardly any problems that couldn’t be solved with the right tools, the right training, and enough elbow grease. Seemingly intractable social ailments such as war, crime, and poverty would be eradicated if the right people applied the right methods. Almost no challenge was beyond the reach of “know-how”.

Was Our Confidence Justified?

It was easy to believe in “know-how” then. America was the dominant power in the world. We were the only major industrialized nation not to have fought World War II on its own soil. Our unmatched industrial capacity had helped us defeat Tojo and Hitler. The crime rate had plunged dramatically since the thirties. Our economy was growing by leaps and bounds. We were by far the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods. By 1955, Americans had developed vaccines to prevent polio and other crippling diseases, and we had effective antibiotics to treat other diseases. Nuclear power-“Atoms for Peace”– promised limitless cheap energy.  A middle-class American family enjoyed levels of comfort, leisure, entertainment and mobility unimaginable a few decades earlier. No other people had ever had it so good. No other nation had come close.

We also seemed supremely competent in international matters. Our advances in agriculture would end famines forever. Advances in travel and communications would tie the world together, reduce misunderstanding, and promote peace. We’d win the good will of foreigners with electricity and well projects.

Even the United Nations- an American project at first- seemed to be working. It seemed a useful tool for promoting peace and freedom. Its most important project in the fifties was defending South Korea from Communist invasion. It was much later that we came to revile the UN as a hive of scum and villainy***.

The National Mood Sours

“Know-how” fizzled in the early sixties. Afterward, to mention it was to mark oneself as hopelessly unhip and unaware. The JFK assassination had soured the country’s mood. Riots tore many of our cities apart. Failed social experiments had fostered skyrocketing crime rates. Our most cherished institutions were under assault in the universities and the press.

By 1965, talk of “know-how” was out of touch with the national mood. To many of us, it seemed a cruel joke.

Coming Soon: What Went Wrong? What Can We Do?

(***…a hive of scum and villainy… This is how Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi described Mos Eisley in the first Star Wars movie.)

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TRUMP TO DUMP CPB & NEA?

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Subsidized arts, TV, and radio are feeling the Grim Reaper’s cold breath on the backs of their corporate necks. They’ve heard powerful hints that their taxpayer-funded lifelines are about to be severed.

The Hill, a D.C. publication specializing in ‘insider’ coverage of the Federal Government, said on Sunday that President Trump plans to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Trump plans to leave them with no federal funding for fiscal year 2018.

The CPB is the Federal entity that partially funds National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. The NEA, by its own account, “funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities”.  It does so by subsidizing favored artists, writers, dancers, musicians, and theater productions.

The NEA receives about $150 million per year from the Federal Government, making it the biggest arts funding source in the country. No other source is even close.

The CPB receives more than $445 million in federal funding each year. About half of it goes to the 350+ public TV stations in the U.S.  The stations return some of the money, in the form of licensing fees, to PBS, which produces commercial-free content such as Frontline, PBS NewsHour, and Sesame Street. (Since August 2015, HBO has held exclusive rights to first-run episodes of Sesame Street. After a nine-month window, though, they’re available at no charge to PBS member stations.

The NEA and the CPB have long been political targets for conservatives. They argue that CPB news coverage– NPR especially– is not at all objective or impartial, and that the NEA often funds obscene and aesthetically questionable work. In 1987, critics flayed the NEA fiercely for its subsidies of Andres Serrano, whose work featured his bodily fluids and religious imagery, and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs were explicitly homoerotic. These are only two examples. There are many more.

Can the CPB and the NEA thrive without their taxpayer-funded lifeline? Maybe they can survive on ad sales and voluntary contributions. From their reaction and the reaction of their media allies to the news of the looming budget cuts, though, they don’t seem confident that they will.

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NIELSEN RATINGS REVAMPED

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Nielsen has been a TV god. From the dawn of the TV industry, the Nielsen Ratings were its gold standard of performance measures. They served electronic media whose programming and personnel decisions had previously been combinations of guesswork and voodoo. For an industry rife with superstition, the Nielsen system was the closest thing to science.

Like the Word of God from Mt. Sinai, the system’s judgements were absolute- and beyond appeal. Actors, talk show hosts, programming directors, and ad buyers lived or died by them. The ratings conferred wealth and fame for some; career death, financial ruin, and highly dreaded obscurity on others. Nobody in TV or advertising could afford to ignore the ratings.

The system is a dramatic improvement on all that came before. It’s far from perfect, though. Survey samples are skewed. In part, this is because participation is voluntary, and participants know they’re being surveyed. And the samples have always been small. In the beginning, the sample was only a few thousand households. Though Nielsen enlarges it once in a while, as late as November 2015 it was only 25, 000. It is now about 100,000.

The system worked well enough when only four networks (including PBS) competed for viewers. It became less reliable with cable channels multiplying, and the need for precision was greater than ever.

Other developments undermined the rating system. Viewers often ‘time-shifted’ their viewing with DVRs. With ever more viewers watching on tablets and smart phones, many were beyond the reach of the Nielsen system. TV also has to compete with internet browsers. The browsers track user interests and buying habits- and adapt targeted ads for them. Legacy TV systems couldn’t keep up.

The Nielsen Rating System was in danger of becoming obsolete. To survive, it needed to be revamped– dramatically and quickly.

Last month, AT&T stepped into the matter. The telecom forged a multi-year agreement with Nielsen to provide anonymous viewer data from DirecTV and U-Verse receivers and streaming apps. The new system will provide instantaneous data from more than 25 million subscribers, so it will be many times more accurate than the previous one.

A few months ago, Dish Network signed a similar contract with Nielsen.

For the first time, all concerned will truly understand what viewers want to watch. The difference will be especially dramatic for data from rural and less populous suburban areas, for which data from the original Nielsen system was especially erratic. It will be easier to track the performance of regional or specialty channels that currently attract limited audiences. And the new system will more easily detect when a specialty channel has potential to break into the mainstream.

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CONNECTED DEVICES & PRIVACY

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Can you keep a secret? No, you can’t, at least not for long. With ever more of your electronic devices, appliances, utility meters, fitness trackers, and home security systems connected to the internet, it’s nearly certain that at least one of them will rat on you sooner or later.

Could Your Devices Be Subpoenaed?

Allison Berman, writing for Singularity Hub, warned that the connected devices in your home could be subpoenaed as witnesses against you. She cited a 2015 murder case, for which police asked Amazon to turn over cloud-based data sent by an Alexa-enabled Echo device in the home of James Andrew Bates, in whose hot tub detectives had found the body of his colleague, Victor Collins. On the night of the murder, the device had been used for streaming music. The Echo device, equipped with seven mikes, listens constantly for the ‘wake word’ that will activate it, making it receptive to commands. Just before and after sensing the wake word, Echo begins recording sound and transmitting it to Amazon’s cloud.

Police believe the Echo device may have recorded audio germane to their investigation.

In the near future, police may solve crimes by interrogating refrigerators, thermostats, TV sets, stereos, phones, tablets, and security systems. With multiple electronic witnesses, they can obtain fairly accurate and comprehensive pictures of the crimes, as they seek to do by interviewing multiple witnesses to an auto accident.

Privacy laws regarding connected devices are very weak. Because the information is stored in the cloud, the owner or user of the devices doesn’t own the data they transmit. It’s not protected to the same degree that documents in his house are.

Could Your Connected Devices Be Hacked?

Of course, any connected device can be hacked. If Alexa is hacked, could a hostile party listen to everything you say in your home? And if you have twenty connected devices in your home, a hacker might obtain eerily accurate and complete information about what you do all day. Could he use it to blackmail you? What could a stalker do if he knows where you’ll be, when, and for what reason?

Hackers could also hijack your devices to spread false information about you. Patrick Frey, who blogs as ‘Patterico’, suffered a ’SWATting’ attack in 2011 after a hacker ‘spoofed’ his cellphone number to place a midnight 911 call. Pretending to be Frey, the caller said he had shot his wife.

Sheriff’s deputies pounded on Frey’s door and rang his doorbell. When he opened the door, they pointed their guns at him and told him to put his hands up. The deputies handcuffed Frey and placed him in a squad car. Then they awakened his wife, led her downstairs, and frisked her. After ascertaining that the children were safe, the police finally left.

The incident could easily have cost Frey his life. Cops are likely to be nervous in confronting a man they believe to be armed and to have just committed a murder.

Can You Trust Browsers and Social Media?

Loss of privacy need not require either hacking or law enforcement inquiry. Certain browsers, such as Google, and social media, such as Facebook, offer overly complicated terms of service– as long as 30,000 words. Few, if any, users read them. The rules are nearly inscrutable for a reason. They’re meant to protect providers from liability, not to protect your privacy.

Since you don’t pay for Google and Facebook services, you are their product. They earn their money through sale of advertising, so they want as much data about you as possible. Their advertisers demand it.

Two years ago, Facebook faced a media firestorm after the discovery that it had been manipulating the emotional states of thousands of users. Facebook had learned that the emotional impact of the images it showed users would affect the character of their posts. With this information, it could reinforce advertising messages.

You reveal far more through social media than you’d guess. MIT’s ‘Gaydar’ project confirmed that one could reliably infer that a particular subject was gay, based solely on his social media posts, even if he had never admitted it openly, and even if he was trying strenuously to keep it hidden. Another MIT project, called ‘Psychopath’, tracked social media posts to determine presence or absence of schizophrenia.

Can You Trust Your Smart TV Set?

On Monday, February 6, Vizio settled a lawsuit over claims that it had violated consumer privacy. The plaintiffs had alleged that Vizio’s connected ‘smart’ TV sets had been tracking ‘second by second’ data about customer viewing habits. To this, Vizio had allegedly added specific demographic information: age, sex, marital status, size of household, income, home ownership, and household value. The company is alleged to have sold this information to third parties. The third parties would use it to enable targeted advertising.

LG and Samsung have also been accused of collecting viewer data through their connected TV sets.

What Can You Do?

What can you do to protect yourself? Update your passwords often. Encrypt what you can. Always stay aware of when your connected devices are switched on.

It may help to assume that everything you do will become public- and live accordingly.

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CONSCIENCE & THE MACHINE

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Conscience and Emerging Technology

We want to believe that technical development is unalloyed blessing. As our tools  get better, out lives get better. What could possible go wrong? Why should any new technology trouble anyone’s conscience.

In fact, many of our the most prominent voices in politics and the press predict the imminent arrival of a secular Eden. Mankind’s third great technological leap, they say,  is already on our doorstep. It will bring universal prosperity. With abundant food, water, clean energy, and leisure for all, there will be nothing to fight over. Peace will reign over the whole Earth. The long-promised Utopia, the pundits say, at last is at hand.

Is this too simplistic, though? Should we avoid some types of innovation? Should technological development ever trouble conscience? Should we worry that our quest for better living will pave the road to Hell?

Some analysts argue that emerging technologies bring new temptations. Conscience should not make us cowards, afraid of any new tool or technique. But many emerging technologies entail thorny ethical questions. Driverless cars, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gene-editing could be horribly destructive if used in the wrong way.

Here, we will examine the ethical dilemmas presented by just two emerging technologies: virtual reality and facial mapping.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality:  

Since the invention of the printing press, pornographers have been quick to exploit every innovation in information technology. Virtual Reality, combined with sensors attached to the user’s body, could create an immersive experience nearly indistinguishable from actual sex. VR lovers would be physically perfect, always available when wanted, and never present when unwanted. Will most of us prefer VR  mates to flawed flesh-and-blood lovers? Will we stop mating? If we do, does the human race have a future?

VR experiences in general, offering realism conventional movies couldn’t match, could become extremely addictive. Will millions of people refuse to leave their VR environments to address problems in the relatively boring and colorless real world?

Information Technologies:  

When I was a small child, I often heard people say, “The camera doesn’t lie.” It wasn’t true then, and it’s even less true now. We can lie far more effectively with cameras than without them. Every improvement in information technology can augment deception.

With Face2Face, a digital facial capture and mapping tool, a couple of wags overlaid real-time facial mapping over source video of Donald Trump, making him seem to say hilariously preposterous things– not that he’s incapable of doing so on his own.

With Face2Face, other CGI tools, and advanced audio editing, we could convincingly put words in anyone’s mouth. We could fake almost any event involving almost any character. With such video and audio manipulation in the wrong hands, we may be unable to trust any online videos, so how will we know what’s accurate? Do we have to read source code to be sure?

More to come…

In a future post, we will explore other innovations that provoke vexing questions of conscience. Among these will be gene-editing, radical life extension, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence.

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(The accompanying image is a still from the Roman Polanski movie: Macbeth.)

 

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RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN OVERTURNED

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We all want privacy. We have a right to it, don’t we? We want to forget our more embarrassing moments, and we want others to forget them, too.

Unfortunately, the internet’s memory is eternal. Every Facebook post we write, and every tweet we send, can come back to haunt us. Our friends, colleagues, and casual acquaintances have their own digital records of our lapses in judgement; and their audio, video, and text records can wreck our reputations. Follies we forgot about years ago can still thwart our job searches and romantic prospects.

It may be wise for us to manage our lives as if every moment outside of our homes is in the public record. After all, there is a very strong chance that it is.

But if we fail, what then? Are we doomed to relive our worst moments for the rest of our lives?

Some governments have decided to enforce digital privacy by statute. The European Union, among other entities, has embraced a ‘right to be forgotten’ rule. Under its terms, Google and other browsers will have to make certain information ‘unsearchable’ at the subject’s request. One’s embarrassing past will simply disappear from the internet. Nobody will ever find it again.

With the EU’s support, almost every expert expected other governments to adopt similar laws.

It’s not so certain now that this will be the case.

Search engines have challenged the ‘right to be forgotten’ in court. This morning, they scored one of their first major legal victories in the matter. Brazil’s highest court ruled that such laws place too heavy a burden on search engines, forcing them to become censors.

If other courts, in other states, follow suit, the ‘right to be forgotten’ may become unenforceable. The internet is international, and information can’t be confined within national boundaries.

We probably can’t rely on digital censors to protect our reputations. We may just have to assume that everything we do will become public- and act accordingly. And be careful with selfies.

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TRUMP PRESIDENCY PREDICTED BY THE SIMPSONS

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Is Donald Trump’s election to the presidency a complete surprise? It was for most journalists. It may be for you. It isn’t for Matt Groening, the brain behind The Simpsons TV series, though. He predicted a Trump presidency fifteen years ago.

In 2001, Groening and his crew produced an episode in which Bart Simpson dreams about his future as an adult. The adult Bart, who wears a ponytail, sunglasses, and a Hawaiian shirt, is the lead singer and guitarist for an unsuccessful band. The band is so desperate, the few dive bars that will hire it pay only in popcorn shrimp.

In the extremity of his financial duress, Bart seeks help from the Federal Government. He visits the White House, where his sister Lisa is “America’s first straight female president”. This implies, of course, that the first female president was… eh, never mind. While Bart and Lisa are talking in the Oval Office,  Milhouse Van Houten, the Treasury Secretary, rushes in and tells Lisa that her predecessor, Donald Trump, left the country broke.

Maybe the actual Trump presidency will leave America in better fiscal condition. But we’re not making any predictions.

 

The Simpsons was not alone in predicting Trump’s presidency. Adam Corolla, a comedian who hosts a daily radio show and a weekly podcast, predicted it eight years ago. On his radio show, Corolla said, “He’s gonna be president in eight years. You understand that, everybody?” His co-cost, Theresa Strasser, groaned at this. Corolla repeated his assertion: “He’ll be president one day. It’ll be in our lifetime.”

Corolla’s not infallible. Strasser asked him, “Will he still have Melankia, or whatever her name is?” She obviously meant Melania, Trump’s third wife.

“Oh, no, no no”, Corolla said, “because she will have passed her 38th birthday.”

 

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