Category Archives: Blog

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From prison ship to labour camp – interstitial employment, coming to a port near you

prison-ship labour campThere’s been a labour dispute here in the UK regarding European companies shipping in workers from their native nations rather than hiring locally for UK-based contracts; given the current state of the economy, it’s caused a fair amount of angry words and governmental filibustering on all sides. [image via Financial Times]

Subtopia looks beyond the obvious headlines, however, and examines the former prison-ships being used to house the immigrant workers – partly to keep them safe from angry locals, but perhaps also subliminally as a reminder of their menial economic status:

While UK laborers bark about equal opportunity and contract fairness (and perhaps spew some racist vitriol in the process) there is the greater undercurrent of geo-economic exploitation here bobbing spaces of injustice on the surface. Particularly eerie to me in this picture is the spatial intermixing of incarceration and migrant labor, and how architecturally speaking the surplus of global capital’s industrial bodies are rounded up at sea inside the old remains of an overcrowded penal system, once oceanic jails now filled with a new kind of transient inmate, a new kind of quasi-prison labor force.

The bulk shipping of cheap outsourced labour isn’t nice for the local population, but what the mainstream media here in the UK is skipping over is how desperate the immigrants must be for work that they’ll put up with such deeply unpleasant conditions. This is the nasty underbelly of corporate globalism at work, and I expect we’ll see a lot more of it as the economic power of nation-states declines and the corporations move into their place.

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Doctorow on the decline and fall of novels

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man reading a novelThe ever-ubiquitous Cory Doctorow crops up over at Internet Evolution, talking about “media-morphosis” – the ways in which the internet is mangling and mutating all the other forms of media. The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought I’d pick out a bit of Doctorow’s thinking about the future of the novel, as it fits quite neatly with some of the recent ebook posts here at Futurismic. [image by John Althouse Cohen]

Doctorow points out that books are suffering on two sides – firstly from the rise of the big-box retailers, which have restricted the titles available, and secondly from the way we’re being conditioned by the web (and other media imitating the web) to read in short, easy-to-swallow chunks – and then paints a worst-case scenario:

If big-budget movies might turn into opera, then long-form narrative books might turn into poetry. There’s a hell of a lot of published poetry — more than ever — mostly consumed by other poets and a small band of extremely dedicated followers of the form. A few poets make a big living at it, a few more make a marginal living at it, but for most poets, income is aspirational, not reality-based (this is pretty close to the situation in short fiction already, and not far off from the world of novel writing in many genres).

But a future in which novels turn into hand-crafted fetish items for a small group of literati is one in which the relevance of the novel dwindles away to a dribbly nothing.

I think most of us here would see that as a rather sad omega point for one of our favourite media, especially given the incredible artistic possibility it has to offer; Doctorow suggests that one route to salvation for the novel would be to build the sort of evangelical business that distributes books to places that they otherwise might not reach.

But what if his worst-case is actually the fact of the matter? Is it not possible that the novel will increasingly become an anachronism, the sort of thing considered historically interesting but culturally irrelevant by 21st Century humankind? Maybe we just need to face up to the idea that reading books for fun is a pastime whose days in the sun are over, no matter how personally attached to it we may be.

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BattlefieldMorality2.0

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Terminator statueTo brighten your Monday morning, here’s some speculation on robot morality – though not one of the usual sources. Nick Carr bounces off a Times Online story about a report from the US Office of Naval Research which “strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the ‘rush to market’ and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.”

Carr digs into the text of the report itself [pdf], which demonstrates a caution somewhat at odds with the usual media image of the military-industrial complex:

Related major research efforts also are being devoted to enabling robots to learn from experience, raising the question of whether we can predict with reasonable certainty what the robot will learn. The answer seems to be negative, since if we could predict that, we would simply program the robot in the first place, instead of requiring learning. Learning may enable the robot to respond to novel situations, given the impracticality and impossibility of predicting all eventualities on the designer’s part. Thus, unpredictability in the behavior of complex robots is a major source of worry, especially if robots are to operate in unstructured environments, rather than the carefully‐structured domain of a factory.

The report goes on to consider potential training methods, and suggests that some sort of ‘moral programming’ might be the only way to ensure that our artificial warriors don’t run amok when exposed to the unpredictable scenario of a real conflict. Perhaps Carr is a science fiction reader, because he’s thinking beyond the obvious answers:

Of course, this raises deeper issues, which the authors don’t address: Can ethics be cleanly disassociated from emotion? Would the programming of morality into robots eventually lead, through bottom-up learning, to the emergence of a capacity for emotion as well? And would, at that point, the robots have a capacity not just for moral action but for moral choice – with all the messiness that goes with it?

It’s a tricky question; essentially the military want to have their cake and eat it, replacing fallible meat-soldiers with reliable mechanical replacements that can do all the clever stuff without any of the attendant emotional trickiness that the ability to do clever stuff includes as part of the bargain. [image by Dinora Lujan]

I’d go further still, and ask whether that capacity for emotion and moral action actually obviates the entire point of using robots to fight wars – in other words, if robots are supposed to take the positions of humans in situations we consider too dangerous to expend real people on, how close does a robot’s emotions and morality have to be to their human equivalents before it becomes immoral to use them in the same way?

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Moore’s Law gets a new lease of life

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digital camera CCD chipGood news for Kurzweilian Singularitarians and flop-junkies – Moore’s Law has been looking increasingly likely to derail as we approach the lowest practical limit for semiconductor miniaturization, but newly announced research means there’s life in the old dog yet:

Two US groups have announced transistors almost 1000 times smaller than those in use today, and a [nano-scale magnet-based] version of flash memory that could store all the books in the US Library of Congress in a square 4 inches (10 cm) across.

[…]

Using 3-nanometre magnets, an array could store 10 terabits (roughly 270 standard DVDs) per square inch, says Russell, who is now working to perfect magnets small enough to cram 100 terabits into a square inch.

“Currently, industry is working at half a terabit [per square inch],” he says. “They wanted to be at 10 terabits in a few years’ time – we have leapfrogged that target.”

If this were Engadget, we could squee about how we’ll have laptops the size of wristwatches by the end of the decade, but that would be to miss an important point. The ever-falling cost and size of memory and processing power will certainly mean more gadgets, but those gadgets will bring social changes along with them – as Charlie Stross pointed out a while ago, if you can read and write data at the atomic scale then physical storage capacity becomes a complete non-issue, allowing you to record everything – literally everything. [image by Fox O’Rian]

When you can record everything, how do you go about managing and using what you’ve recorded?

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Seeing Red for the Last Time

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by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service People Writer

[ This is a guest broadcast from the Alternate Reality News Service. ]

When I got to the viewing area across the street from the subject’s nest, the first thing the two researchers instructed me to do was keep my head down and my conversation hushed.

“She can be a little skittish,” sociobiological Thanatosist Gandalf Jarmusch explained. “We need to be as inconspicuous as possible.”

The second thing they did was hand me a pair of binoculars and a beer. The binoculars were for spotting the subject when she appeared. The beer was to break the tedium.

“We have been observing this subject for several years,” theoretical geneticist Michael Monsantone told me, “and we pretty much understand its migratory habits. It will get off the 37 bus at approximately 5:34 pm and reach the front door of the nest at approximately 5:37 pm. That’s three hours from now.”

“The beer takes the edge off,” Jarmusch added.

While waiting for the subject – which the team had whimsically named Anita – Jarmusch and Monsantone kept busy mapping the data they had collected over the seven years of their research project into various charts and graphs and speculating on their subject.

“We know she’s a waitress of some kind,” Monsantone stated, “because one day two and a half years ago she left home late in her uniform. However, where is a matter of some conjecture.”

Before Monsantone could conjecture, Jarmusch waved his hand and urgently whispered, “There she is! There she is! Subject spotted at…5:36 pm!”

Sure enough, a woman was walking down the street. She was undistinguished save for the mane of blood red hair that fell past her shoulders.

“Look at her plumage,” Jarmusch admiringly commented. “Have you ever seen anything so exquisite?”

“And, it’s perfectly as nature intended,” Monsantone assured me.

The woman – whose name is actually Monique McFelderhoff, as a brief session with the Glasgow telephone book taught me – is the last of her species: a natural redhead.

There is some debate about the decline in the number of fiery haired people in the world. The production of red hair involves a recessive gene, meaning both parents must have it to have redheaded children. Some researchers have pointed out that as redheads procreated with the general population, they diluted the gene pool, to the point where they are now teetering on the brink of extinction.

Jarmusch and Monsantone took a different, more poetic approach to the problem in an article they contributed to The Journal Of Redhead Studies D.

“We did not worship redheads as they deserved,” the two researchers wrote, “and, as a result, they abandoned us.”

When I interviewed her, McFelderhoff claimed not to know anything about being the subject of academic research.

“Middle aged men watching me through binoculars from a house across the street?” she mused. “That’s kind of creepy, don’t you think?”

When I pointed out that, as the last of her species, McFelderhoff should expect to be studied so that the lessons of her extinction could be passed on to future generations, she angrily replied, “Hey! Just because I’m a natural redhead doesn’t mean I’m into the kinky stuff! You tell those perverts that if they come near me, I’m calling the cops!”

It wasn’t quite the spirit of enquiry that one might hope for, but at least her response was, unlike most academic writing, clear and to the point.

Some argue that redheads, while perhaps fewer in number than at any time in human history, are not going extinct. Stylist to the stars and amateur sociobotanical optometrist Jie Matar pointed out that because the gene was recessive, it could skip generations, meaning that somebody with red hair could be born 20 or 40 years from now. “Besides,” Matar added, “I know it’s a heretical thought, but there’s always hair dye.”

“Sacrilege!” Monsantone shouted. “It’s like shaving a regular eagle to make a bald eagle! Sociobiological Thanatosism doesn’t work that way!”

Spirits were high on my last day with the researchers, who had just been awarded a substantial grant from the Edinburgh Academy of Ephemera which would have allowed their research to continue for another three years. That came to an abrupt end when Officer Fleugal MacDougal appeared, telling them that there had been a complaint and asking them what their business in the neighbourhood was.

Officer MacDougal seemed unimpressed with their explanations, even when they offered to show him their degrees. He was a little more impressed with the pie charts and graphs that they had been developing, but not enough to keep him from asking them to accompany him to the station for “routine questioning.”

On his way to the police cruiser, Monsantone shrugged and commented: “The things we do for science.”

Excerpted from Alternate Reality Ain’t What It Used To Be. Copyright 2008 by Ira Nayman.

Print versions of Alternate Reality Ain’t What It Used To Be can be purchased through Amazon.com and major bookstores. A complete digital version of the book (except for the amazing cover – sigh) can be found on the Web site Les Pages aux Folles, which also features three new Alternate Reality News Service stories every third week.

The Alternate Reality News Service: “If you don’t like this reality, try another one!”