Month: June 2018

AI Sector Blurring

As the applications of machine learning grow, the interactions between companies and nation states will grow in complexity. Consider for example road transportation, where we are gradually moving towards on demand, autonomous cars. This will increasingly blur the line between publicly funded mass transportation and private transport. If this leads to a new natural monopoly in road transportation should it be managed by the state or by a British company, or by a multinational company like Uber?

Kish-Kash

Moroccan-style couscous is clearly the star here, and a slim menu supporting the fluffy grain. It takes over 2 hours for Admony to make a batch in a method rarely seen in New York City — she learned how to make it as a child from her Moroccan neighbor — and the final product is no comparison to the grocery version. “I’m going to show New Yorkers how they eat couscous all wrong. People ask if it’s going to be Israeli couscous, and I get really upset. That’s pasta. Couscous is a fine semolina. You need to steam it twice, pass it through the sieve twice. You have this horrible aftertaste in instant stuff. There is no comparison; I can’t eat that.”

NYC is boring

But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here — a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.

As New York enters the 3rd decade of the 21th century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.

When the Next Plague Hits

Despite advances in antibiotics and vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo sapiens is still locked in the same epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we’ve been fighting since the beginning of our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict. Down through the centuries, diseases have always excelled at exploiting flux.

Mindless Consciousness

Speaking of actual geniuses, Noam Chomsky was there. It’s unclear why, because he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering — and he left MIT last year for the University of Arizona, so it’s not like he has to fly in for the gig. During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current state of neuroscience to a marionette: We can examine the puppet and its strings, but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him, citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

Netflix production

“2 layers beneath Cindy have full greenlight” authority. The only way that we can do what we do at the quality and volume we’re doing it is to give power to my executives to make those choices.” That translates to “5 or 6” scripted-development executives you can pitch knowing they have the authority to make a project a reality. The heads of Netflix’s other big divisions — international, unscripted, documentary, stand-up comedy — are similarly able to give an idea the go-ahead. “Most of my team have more buying power than anyone has selling power in Hollywood. My direct-report team can greenlight any project without my approval. They can greenlight it against my approval!”.

Bocce

Bocce, where diners can play games of bocce and also eat pizza and share plates. The pizzas come from executive chef Tim Meyers and pizza consultant Anthony Falco, who both used to work at Roberta’s. “They can’t replicate Roberta’s wood-burning brick ovens on Bocce’s electric grill, but are still pretty tasty”. But he was particularly surprised by the share plates, like the calamari-and-shrimp fritto misto, which “was perfectly battered and succulent.”

Drone Warrior PTSD

When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove can be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fire at an enemy who has the capacity to fire back at them. They kill by putting their own lives at risk. What happens when the risks are entirely one-sided? Remote warfare erodes “the warrior ethic,” which holds that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer. Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you — you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”