Monthly Archives: July 2010

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Why we should clone a Neanderthal

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Earlier in the year, there was some discussion over the possibility of cloning Neanderthals from archaeological remains. Now Kyle Munkittrick of Discover Magazine‘s Science Not Fiction blog speaks out in favour of the idea:

Knowing where Neanderthals fit, however, also creates a problem. What do we do if what makes humans “human” isn’t from a “human” at all? How do we justify “human rights” in light of evidence that our rational and moral minds are in no small part the result of prehistoric crossbreeding? In short: if human rights are based on being human, what rights would a cloned Neanderthal have?

The problem is, of course, that we don’t have a cloned Neanderthal. Which is why we need to make one.

[…]

To assert that the Neanderthal is between human and animal and is therefore an impossible fit for our world simply not true. The line between human and animal is blurred. Dolphins, whales, chimps, great apes, and other species are already changing the way we think about intelligence and rights; perhaps a Neanderthal, fully developed but so mentally different as to be incompatible with our way of living is the very example our society needs to change our perception of intelligent non-humans. When the technology is safe and the ability to nurture and care for her in place, we owe it to humanity as a whole to clone a Neanderthal and see what wonders she might teach us about ourselves.

There’s no simple answer, of course. Much as a cloned Neanderthal might teach us a great deal about ourselves, responsibility for his or her happiness and well-being would have to come first: to do otherwise would be to derail the essentially humanist thrust of Munkittrick’s argument. Human or not, a Neanderthal would be a sapient being, and quite likely more than capable of understanding that they were created for the sake of science… a lab rat that knew it was a lab rat, in other words. It’s a fascinating intellectual exercise to imagine how it might work out, but to actually do it?

All I can say is that as much as I’d love to learn how much of what we call being human is a cultural artefact as opposed to a biological phenomenon, I don’t know that I’d be able to take responsibility for the decision to create a living creature that might never feel it was living a life that made sense.

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The crap jobs of tomorrow

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Via BoingBoing, the New York Times looks at a new breed of grim bottom-end employment in the digital age: Internet Content Reviewing. Main responsibilities include trawling through an endless river of text, images and video to ensure the removal of offensive content… and if you’ve more than a passing moment hanging out on the intertubes, you’ll have some idea of just how nasty some of that content might be.

With the rise of Web sites built around material submitted by users, screeners have never been in greater demand. Some Internet firms have tried to get by with software that scans photos for, say, a large area of flesh tones, but nothing is a substitute for a discerning human eye.

The surge in Internet screening services has brought a growing awareness that the jobs can have mental health consequences for the reviewers, some of whom are drawn to the low-paying work by the simple prospect of making money while looking at pornography.

[…]

David Graham, president of Telecommunications On Demand, the company near Orlando where Mr. Bess works, compared the reviewers to “combat veterans, completely desensitized to all kinds of imagery.” The company’s roughly 50 workers view a combined average of 20 million photos a week.

The compensation isn’t exactly awesome, either: wages peak out at US$12 per hour, and that’ll fall rapidly once someone gets a reliable outsource operation up and running. At least if you’re a sewer worker you can wash the stench off when you get home.

Leaving aside the extremity of the case in hand, though, it’s worth noting that this is essentially a gatekeeper/curation task – and we’ve already noted that curation is a growth industry thanks to the geometric expansion of content. Augmented reality will provide a whole new environment for this sort of work in the next few years… though I doubt the prospect of working outdoors will do much to ameliorate the essential unpleasantness and tedium of the task.

What other new (and shitty) jobs might our bright digital future provide?

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Happiness and sadness go viral

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Once again, research threatens to vindicate an old intuitive idea: that the emotional states of happiness and sadness can be contagious, spreading between individuals in much the same way that flu does. The bad news? It looks like sadness is far more virulent than happiness…

In the current study, Hill’s team compared patterns of relationships and emotions measured in the study to those generated by a model designed to track SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and other traditional contagions. They discounted spontaneous or immediately shared emotion — friends or relatives undergoing a common experience — and focused on emotional changes that followed changes in others.

In the spread of happiness, the researchers found clusters of “infected” and “uninfected” people, a pattern considered a “hallmark of the infectious process,” said Hill. “For happiness, clustering is what you expect from contagion rates. Whereas for sadness, the clusters were much larger than we’d expect. Something else is going on.”

Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

At this point it’s worth remembering (as the researchers themselves point out) that correlation isn’t causation:

Both Hill and Rand warned that the findings illustrate broad, possible dynamics, and are not intended to guide personal decisions, such as withdrawing from friends who are having a hard time.

“The better solution is to make your sad friends happy,” said Rand.

Amen to that.

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Bionic legs put wheelchairs on notice

OK, so the wheelchair won’t be obsolete until the REX system and its inevitable competitors are a great deal cheaper than US$150k, but I feel safe in assuming that won’t take too long in the grand scheme of things. Even so, as a proof of concept for technology that will allow people with paralysis of the legs to walk – actually walk, not just get around some other way – this is some sweet hardware; as a commenter at MetaFilter put it: “Jokes aside, even though the functionality is fairly constrained, the smile on his face says it’s worth it.” I’m inclined to agree.

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Attention economics, redux: why supermodels are like toxic assets

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Remember me linking to that article that compared the inflationary bubble in the cult of celebrity to the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Well, here’s a similar (and slightly more serious) piece that explains how supermodels are similar to toxic assets [via MetaFilter]:

Coco [Rocha] is what economists would call a winner in a “winner-take all market,” prevalent in culture industries like art and music, where a handful of people reap very lucrative and visible rewards while the bulk of contestants barely scrape by meager livings before they fade into more stable and far less glamorous careers. The presence of such spectacular winners like Coco Rocha raises a great sociological question: how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14 year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants? How, in other words, do winners happen?

The secrets to Coco’s success, and the dozens of girls that have come before and will surely come after her, have much less to do with Coco the person (or the body) than with the social context of an unstable market. There is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens—when dealing with symbolic goods like “beauty” and “fashionability,” we would be hard pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, social processes are at work in the fashion modeling market to bequeath cultural value onto Coco. The social world of fashion markets reveals how market actors think collectively to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. And this social side of markets, it turns out, is key to understanding how investors could trade securities backed with “toxic” subprime mortgage assets leading us into the 2009 financial crisis.

Well worth a read; it’s interesting to see someone looking at a market in terms of its social construction rather than as a bunch of mathematical abstractions and assumptions. One of the things that has frustrated my research into economics is the way it always seems to be portrayed as a coldly rational science, without any attempt to understand or deconstruct the emergent social consensus that drives it. This is almost ertainly due to me looking in the wrong places, so if anyone has any suggestions for good sources of social and/or behavioural economic literature that won’t baffle an inquisitive layman, please pipe up in the comments.