Technology Gone Wild: Rise of the Machines

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[AKAK]

This was almost a good video... 'cept we could use a little more chick running the saw.

How about chick on chainsaw powered super bike?

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

This was almost a good video... 'cept we could use a little more chick running the saw.

How about chick on chainsaw powered super bike?

Agree completely. The thumbnail suggested that the chick would be using it more, or primarily using it. It was very disappointing in that regards.

Regarding the photo, now that's a piece of equpiment I'd certainly rise for. The chainsaw powered bike is pretty cool too.

 

[Dryden]

 

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Looking at the date this tweet was published, I'm really hoping this is an April Fools Joke.

EDIT: Nope, it's real.

‘Magnetic turd’: scientists invent moving slime that could be used in human digestive systems

Researcher who co-created substance says it is not an April fool’s joke and they hope to deploy it like a robot
https://www.theguardian.com/science...that-could-be-used-in-human-digestive-systems

Scientists have created a moving magnetic slime capable of encircling smaller objects, self-healing and “very large deformation” to squeeze and travel through narrow spaces.

The slime, which is controlled by magnets, is also a good electrical conductor and can be used to interconnect electrodes, its creators say.

The dark-coloured magnetic blob has been compared on social media to Flubber, the eponymous substance in the 1997 sci-fi film, and described as a “magnetic turd” and “amazing and a tiny bit terrifying”.
Prof Li Zhang, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who co-created the slime, emphasised that the substance was real scientific research and not an April fool’s joke, despite the timing of its release.

The slime contains magnetic particles so that it can be manipulated to travel, rotate, or form O and C shapes when external magnets are applied to it.

The blob was described in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Functional Materials as a “magnetic slime robot”.

“The ultimate goal is to deploy it like a robot,” Zhang said, adding that for the time being the slime lacked autonomy. “We still consider it as fundamental research – trying to understand its material properties.”

The slime has “visco-elastic properties”, Zhang said, meaning that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid”.

It is made of a mixture of a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol, borax – which is widely used in cleaning products – and particles of neodymium magnet.

“It’s very much like mixing water with [corn] starch at home,” Zhang said. Mixing the two produces oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid whose viscosity changes under force. “When you touch it very quickly it behaves like a solid. When you touch it gently and slowly it behaves like a liquid,” Zhang said.

While the team have no immediate plans to test it in a medical setting, the scientists envisage the slime could be useful in the digestive system, for example in reducing the harm from a small swallowed battery.
“To avoid toxic electrolytes leak[ing] out, we can maybe use this kind of slime robot to do an encapsulation, to form some kind of inert coating,” he said.

The magnetic particles in the slime, however, are toxic themselves. The researchers coated the slime in a layer of silica – the main component in sand – to form a hypothetically protective layer.

“The safety [would] also strongly depend on how long you would keep them inside of your body,” Zhang said.

Zhang added that pigments or dye could be used to make the slime – which is currently an opaque brown-black hue – more colourful.

 

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I know, I know. Buzzfeed. But it's actually pretty interesting and informative.

This Texas Town Was Deep In Debt From A Devastating Winter Storm. Then A Crypto Miner Came Knocking.
A 2021 winter storm overwhelmed Denton's power grid, pushing the city into crushing debt. Then a faceless company arrived with a promise to refill its coffers — and double its energy use.

Sarah Emerson
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/denton-texas-crypto-miner-core-scientific

Last February, a disastrous winter storm pummeled Texas with ice and snow, threatening to topple the Texan energy grid. In the city of Denton, neighborhoods blinked off and on as the local power provider tried to conserve electricity. Places like assisted living facilities were momentarily excluded from the blackouts, but those eventually went dark too. Then the gas pipelines froze, and the power plant stopped working. Over the next four days, the city bled more than $200 million purchasing energy on the open market. It would later sue the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator also known as ERCOT, for saddling Denton with inflated energy prices that caused it to accrue $140 million in debt.

“While we were in an emergency, ERCOT allowed prices to go off the scale,” Denton City Council Member Paul Meltzer told BuzzFeed News. “We were forced to pay. We were approached Tony Soprano–like to empty our reserves.”

So when a faceless company appeared three months later, auspiciously proposing to solve Denton’s money problems, the city listened. A deal was offered. In exchange for millions of dollars in annual city revenue, enough to balance its ledgers and then some, Denton would host a cryptocurrency mine at its natural gas power plant. And not just any mine — a massive data center that would double Denton’s energy footprint so that rows upon rows of sophisticated computers could mint stockpiles of bitcoin, ether, and other virtual currencies. To officials who had simply tried to keep the lights on when conditions became deadly, the unexpected infusion seemed a relief.

But the thought of becoming a crypto town was a bitter pill for some to swallow.

“It was super shady just the way it all came about because none of the elected officials around here have ever talked about crypto, and suddenly we’re renting out space near the power plant that’s gonna use as much energy as the whole city consumes,” said Denton resident Kendall Tschacher, who told BuzzFeed News that by the time he learned about the crypto project, it was all but a done deal.

During preliminary discussions with Denton, the crypto miner was simply referred to as the “client,” its name conditionally withheld from the public on the order of Tenaska Energy, a natural gas marketer that negotiated the multimillion-dollar deal. Its name was finally disclosed in local government meetings in August: The miner moving into Denton was Core Scientific, a company cofounded in 2017 by one of the lesser known creators of Myspace, Aber Whitcomb. Headquartered in Austin, the company went public in January through an estimated $4.3 billion SPAC merger.

“The very existence of crypto seems totally stupid to me.”
A bitcoin farm on a natural gas plant is a fitting metaphor for Texas. From Austin to Abilene, crypto prospectors are staking claim to the electrical grid, hungry for cheap power and unique incentives that can effectively pay them to be there. Republican lawmakers have declared the state “open for crypto business,” gambling the industry will in turn buttress a failing fossil fuel economy and meet demands for more clean energy production. Crypto enterprises are now amassing vast amounts of energy that, they claim, can be redistributed to the grid when power reserves are needed most. Companies with valuations 100 times greater than the revenue of local cities are funding schools, sustainability projects, and discretionary spending coffers. And at the smallest levels of government, crypto operations are somehow charming communities who don’t really seem to want them there.

In Denton, the deal’s secretive nature and concerns about the mine’s colossal energy requirements inspired some council members to openly oppose the facility — at least at first.

“The very existence of crypto seems totally stupid to me,” Meltzer said.

Yet after months of deliberation in open and closed-door meetings, the deal was near-unanimously approved. Officials like Meltzer, who’d previously challenged the project’s environmental commitments, began assuring residents that it was the right choice for Denton.

Denton’s story is a tale of how a small town government embraced something to which it first seemed ideologically opposed. It’s a schematic for how the burgeoning crypto industry — which promises to solve climate change, repair crumbling infrastructure, and fix all manner of societal issues by putting them on the blockchain — is literally remaking communities, hedging their futures on its own unforeseeable success.

When put to a vote last August, Denton’s city council approved the mine, which quietly came online last month. Only one council member, Deb Armintor, voted against it. Denton Mayor Gerard Hudspeth said in an October press release that the city is “honored to have been selected as the site of Core Scientific’s first blockchain data center in Texas.” He did not respond to a request for comment; Core Scientific declined to answer a detailed list of questions.

Crypto is a polarizing subject, either the genesis of “world peace” or the thing that’s going to ruin the world, depending on who’s talking. But those prevailing narratives ultimately fell flat in Denton, where crypto is a means to various ends. Like the industries of yore that shaped countless small towns across the nation, crypto companies are hoping to secure their futures by fulfilling the needs of the communities they invade. What happened in Denton, a smallish city of nearly 140,000 people, remains one of the clearest examples of how those communities are sometimes compelled to answer when crypto comes knocking at their door.

Terry Naulty stood at a dais in Denton’s city hall during an August city council meeting. “Without approval, these funds will not be available,” he told Denton’s city council, public utilities board, and planning and zoning commission in an attempt to convince them that Denton would be better off taking the money the Core Scientific deal offered.

As the assistant general manager of Denton Municipal Electric (DME), the city’s owned and operated power utility, Naulty was part of an ad hoc project team advocating for the Core Scientific deal. By the first of these hearings in June, the team had already been in talks with Tenaska for a month about selling the mine to city officials.

Core Scientific pledged a capital investment of $200 million to the project, according to recordings of city council meetings. Dozens of modular mining containers, roughly the shape and size of a semitrailer truck, would connect to the gas plant’s existing power infrastructure, a driving factor in why the company chose Denton.

On a presentation slide, rows of six-figure numbers listed the revenue that Denton could reap should council members greenlight the project. At full buildout in 2023, DME stands to earn between $9 million and $11 million annually from taxes and fees. A portion of that revenue would be transferred to the city’s general fund to be used at council members’ discretion, allowing them to pursue sustainability initiatives currently out of reach.

For DME, said Naulty, this net income “would offset the cost of Winter Storm Uri,” offering Denton the opportunity to get back in the black after accumulating $140 million in debt.

“People have their power shut off just for being too poor to pay their bills.”
Last February, millions of Texans lost power for days after freezing temperatures brought on by the winter storm pushed the ERCOT grid within minutes of total collapse. At least 750 people died as a result, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis. Neglected energy infrastructure, a lack of power reserves, and the repercussions of a deregulated market were blamed in the aftermath. Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott cried “green energy failure,” though in truth all production was curtailed, and natural gas suffered catastrophically. Since Texas’s grid is an island, unable to draw power from neighboring states, both customers and utilities were literally left in the dark.

That week, DME spent approximately $210 million purchasing electricity from ERCOT, almost as much as it had paid in the previous three years combined. Whereas energy rates in February 2020 were $23.73 per megawatt hour, they spiked as high as $9,000 during the storm. The city had no choice but to buy power at jaw-dropping wholesale rates.

The alternative to approving the Core Scientific deal, Naulty said, would be to raise rates for DME customers by 3%. Without the crypto mine to cover the blackout’s costs, the city’s residents would have to pay for ERCOT’s failures, amounting to an additional $3.75 per month on the average customer’s bill.

Armintor remarked that even a small rate increase can be a real burden for struggling locals. “People have their power shut off just for being too poor to pay their bills,” she said.

Denton is a green blip in a sea of red. Eight years ago, local activists mustered enough community support to ban fracking in the city, the first ordinance of its kind in a state that’s the country’s number one oil and gas producer. (Months later, fossil fuel lobbyists succeeded in overturning the rule.) In 2020, Denton began offsetting 100% of its electrical footprint through renewable energy contracts; it is the only city in Texas that currently does so.

In public meetings, Naulty assured Dentonites that for the Core Scientific crypto mine, the energy used would be “100% green.” One project document claimed that putting the mine in Denton “supports carbon emissions reduction on a global basis.” It approximated the mine’s carbon footprint in China would equal 2 million tons, and on the ERCOT grid, it would total 1.1 million tons. But because the project is in Denton, the document claims, the mine’s footprint factors to zero, owing to renewable energy offsets.

But how could such a large mine, one that will consume the same amount of electricity as the city itself, ever consider itself green? That question led some council members, such as Alison Maguire, to initially oppose the deal.

“I do want us to be cautious about the idea that we can use as much energy as we want as long as it’s renewable,” Maguire said during a June hearing.

Core Scientific’s claims are based on its plan to offset its emissions using renewable energy credits, or RECs. These are credits produced by clean energy projects such as wind farms and solar arrays. One REC equals one megawatt hour of renewable energy added to the ERCOT grid. Customers purchasing RECs aren’t acquiring that electricity directly, but rather the proof that the same amount of electricity had, somewhere and at some point, been created sustainably.

Think of it like this: Blake in Oakland dumps 10 gallons of trash into the ocean. He feels bad, and pays Sam in San Francisco because she removed 10 gallons of trash from her side of the bay last month. The net result is that zero gallons of garbage were added to the ocean, yet Blake’s old takeout is still floating somewhere across the Pacific, and Sam would have removed that trash from the ocean even without Blake’s compensation.

In a city council meeting, Tenaska said it would be supplying the RECs. It did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In the June hearing, Maguire noted that purchasing RECs was “certainly a lot better than powering through fossil fuels,” but she appeared to be unconvinced by the deal’s merits. In a July Facebook post, Maguire urged her constituents to speak out against the mine. “We don’t need to allow an unidentified company to use our city’s infrastructure to increase greenhouse gas emissions for the sole purpose of turning a profit,” she wrote. (Ultimately, like most other council people who expressed fears about the project’s sustainability promises, Maguire voted in favor of the mine. She did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Maguire’s caution was not unfounded. RECs are a controversial accounting strategy used by large companies like Amazon and Google to “decarbonize” their facilities. While proponents say that greater demand for these credits will incentivize more clean energy production, climate policy regulators warn that offsets aren’t a replacement for directly contracting with renewable power projects or reducing energy use entirely.

Yet crypto companies, facing pressure externally and internally to address their environmental harms, are nevertheless turning to credits as a stopgap measure. In a January update, Core Scientific announced that 100% of its carbon emissions were offset through RECs.

In addition, DME general manager Tony Puente said that Core Scientific will be purchasing RECs already in existence for the Denton mine, which means the project will not be directly contributing to the creation of new renewable energy. Core Scientific declined to answer questions about its use of RECs.

“Crypto is increasing demand and we need to reduce demand,” said Luke Metzger, who leads the advocacy group Environment Texas. “If [Core Scientific] is just purchasing RECs, then no, they’re not in fact supporting the development of new renewables.”

But the calculus was enough to convince some council members that the project would in fact be green. “If you’re at all serious about climate impact and if you accept the fact that [the mine] is going to be built, you are doing massively better for the environment by having it in Denton,” Meltzer told BuzzFeed News.

Core Scientific’s use of RECs is different from how Denton supports renewables: The city has long-term agreements with solar and wind projects to bring new clean energy onto the grid.

“Crypto is increasing demand and we need to reduce demand.”
“It would be dirty 10 miles down the road, and you can argue it’s still dirty here, but all the electrons we buy are clean electrons,” Council Member Brian Beck told BuzzFeed News.

Even though he supported the deal, Beck echoed the concerns of environmental critics, saying that RECs are “not quite the market push as buying direct power agreements.” But regardless, Beck insisted the project will correct ERCOT’s “pee to pool water” ratio of renewables to fossil fuels. Meltzer and Beck confirmed that in the future, council members can choose to pursue a direct power agreement over RECs for the mine’s energy.

But RECs have their benefits too, because the crypto project’s unknown lifespan carries certain risks. Puente said he didn’t want Denton to enter a long-term contract to supply the mine with renewable energy “and then this company leaves tomorrow.” While Core Scientific has the option to extend its agreement with Denton for up to 21 years, even pitch documents asked, “What happens when it’s over”?

Metzer was also swayed to support the deal because he says up to $1.2 million of annual revenue could finance a sustainability fund, something Denton had never been able to do in previous fiscal years. During one city council meeting, a slide proposed that this money could be used for initiatives like creating a Denton climate action plan, installing air quality monitoring stations throughout the city, and weatherizing the homes of low-income residents.

Council members told BuzzFeed News that they were able to push for some changes to the 138-page power purchase agreement that governs the relationship between the city and Core Scientific. After reading a draft of the agreement, council members said they included a mandate that the mine be cooled by air chillers as opposed to water cooling systems, preventing the mine from accessing Denton’s water reserves (a resource that traditional data centers have guzzled in other towns).

Armintor, the only council member who voted against the deal, was dissatisfied with its terms and rebuked Core Scientific’s offer in a September Facebook post. “I would’ve thought we’d all have been totally averse to crypto in Denton, and I think that was people’s first response,” Armintor told BuzzFeed News. But she believes her fellow council members were persuaded to approve the project because of the “promise of money it might generate.”

Armintor suggested that funds for the sustainability initiatives could have been reappropriated from Denton’s police department or Chamber of Commerce. “My argument is that we’re legislators, we can do this by reallocating money we already have so that we don’t have to make a deal with the devil,” she said.

Denton is a microcosm of global changes that are transforming the US into Eden for crypto miners. Miners infamously crept into states like Washington and New York as early as 2017, but it wasn’t until China declared a sweeping ban on bitcoin mining last year that America became a crypto superpower. The US now hosts 35% of bitcoin’s hashrate, more than any other country in the world, and half of the largest crypto companies.

As a result of “the Great China Unplugging, lots of big companies are redomiciling their operations here and are looking at Texas as a base,” John Belizaire, founder and CEO of crypto mining company Soluna Computing, told BuzzFeed News. Soluna has invested in a 50-megawatt mine currently under development in Silverton.

This momentum propelled Tenaska, like many other oil and gas companies, into the crypto landscape. The company revealed in negotiations with Denton that it is managing the energy needs of miners in other regions in Texas and Montana. In Texas, Tenaska has aligned itself with the Texas Blockchain Council, a powerful lobbying group that helped to pass two state blockchain bills last year. Both Tenaska and Core Scientific are listed as Texas Blockchain Council partners.

By the end of 2022, ERCOT is expected to provide power for 20% of the bitcoin network thanks in part to political support. Miners in Texas will require twice the power of Austin, a city of 1 million people. To a cluster of conservative lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz, crypto has become a convenient vector for US nationalism.

“Inheriting the hashrate from China is seen as a good thing because not only is America bringing a profitable industry over from China, but China is now also ‘anti-freedom’ for outlawing cryptocurrency,” said Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies crypto’s interaction with energy infrastructure.

These dynamics weren’t wasted on Denton’s officials. “What we have essentially is a runaway teen from Asia that we are fostering,” Beck said during an August hearing. “We have the opportunity here not just to foster that child, but to be an adult in the room.”

However, council members had to make a leap of faith when it came to crypto’s most ambitious claim. Across the nation, companies like Core Scientific are promising to strengthen local grids by devouring huge amounts of energy. It sounds contradictory, but to bitcoin evangelists like Belizaire, crypto’s energy demands are a “feature, not a bug.”

It’s a sales pitch that relies on two largely untested assumptions: One, that crypto’s energy requirements will stimulate new clean energy production. And two, that miners will respond to the grid’s larger needs, powering down when energy demands are at their highest.

“There are grains of truth in the things I’m hearing, but it sometimes gets overtaken by hyperbole and rhetoric,” energy analyst Doug Lewin told BuzzFeed News. Though Lewin doesn’t believe that bitcoin is a vehicle to a clean energy future, he theorized that mines could serve a beneficial purpose under a specific set of conditions.

“What we have essentially is a runaway teen from Asia that we are fostering.”
For example, wind and solar farms in West Texas can be forced to “curtail” their production due to a lack of adequate transmission infrastructure and battery storage capacity. Even on the windiest or sunniest of days, if power lines can’t carry those electrons across the ERCOT grid, operators have no choice but to reduce their energy output. A crypto mine built adjacent to these farms could conceivably power its operations on excess renewable energy alone. Such solutions have been endorsed by people like Square CEO Jack Dorsey. Last year, Square commissioned a whitepaper titled “Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future.” True believers in bitcoin’s utility have even adopted the phrase “bitcoin as a battery.”

“You’re not a battery, you don’t store energy,” Lewin said.

Core Scientific also pledged to modulate its power use, purchasing energy but also distributing it back onto the grid. For a city still recovering from last year’s outages, this was a crucial selling point. If the mine “is ready to produce two Dentons’ worth of power, and we start to have grid instability issues, you turn off the data center,” Beck explained.

“Interruptibility” isn’t new or unique to crypto. Austin semiconductor plants idled during the February 2021 winter storm, and ERCOT works with other large facilities during emergency events to reduce their demands. But miners believe they stand alone in being able to power down within seconds without harming their operations.

While ERCOT did not comment for this story, ERCOT chief Brad Jones has endorsed crypto as a grid partner and said he’s personally “pro bitcoin.”

Project documents claim that Core Scientific’s data center will shut down “during high price periods or scarcity of generation events or higher than forecasted load.” In practice, Core Scientific will base its daily operations — when to run, and at what capacity — on variable ERCOT market rates. If it feels that prices are too high to mine, it can choose to power down.

According to Puente, Core Scientific has also entered a confidential agreement with ERCOT to curtail its energy use during peak demand. For example, during another extreme weather event, ERCOT may require the mine to stop running and, in return, will pay Core Scientific for the energy it frees up on the grid at a profit to the crypto company. In other words, Core Scientific is either saving money or making money if it powers down. Should it refuse to do so, “we will automatically open up their breaker to shut off power to them, if needed,” Puente said.

“You’re not a battery, you don’t store energy.”
Tenaska and ERCOT did not respond to numerous requests for comment about how this arrangement works. Core Scientific declined to comment on all aspects of its operations in Denton. So it’s unclear when, exactly, the mine can be mandated to power down, and whether ERCOT has legal recourse if Core Scientific does not comply. The city’s contract with Core Scientific states that DME “shall have the right, but not the obligation” to force compliance, and that DME is not liable for any penalties if Core Scientific fails to curtail its energy use. A portion of these terms is redacted.

Skeptics have also warned that the unpredictable price of cryptocurrency could be a more compelling factor than market force and community needs. In Chelan County, Washington, one of the first US communities to host a crypto diaspora, miners elected to run continuously and its local power utility “did not receive serious modulation offers.”

But things may have shifted now that crypto companies face increasing public accountability. When a cold front descended on Texas in February, large miners such as Riot Blockchain and Rhodium Enterprises curtailed their energy consumption by up to 99%, and a host of other miners also voluntarily powered down.

“We are proud to help stabilize the grid and help our fellow Texans stay warm,” Rhodium’s CEO tweeted.

Three hours off, one hour on. During the rolling blackouts of 2021’s deadly winter storm, people in Denton scrambled to heat their homes and charge their devices whenever power momentarily returned. Daniel Hogg, a Denton resident of 12 years, told BuzzFeed News that he was “piled up with my dogs and lots of blankets” before evacuating to a friend’s house in unaffected Lewisville.

On Facebook and Reddit, with the memory of that storm still fresh in their minds, some residents have accused the city of agreeing to a losing deal. Hogg is among the locals unconvinced by crypto’s claims, and believes the city council should have done more to involve residents in their decision-making process. Though citizens could attend public hearings, Hogg said they weren’t well publicized. He wasn’t aware the deal was even happening until after officials had already voted to approve it.

“It’s so weird the way everything was done so secretively,” Hogg said.

Beck and Meltzer disagreed with the assertion that council members didn’t solicit public input. “People are as involved as they want to be,” Meltzer said.

While the city council was made aware of Core Scientific’s identity in private, members were prohibited from saying its name out loud in early hearings. Last August, Armintor, who voted against the deal, told the project team that these nondisclosure terms, by which both council members and city employees were bound, “make me uncomfortable.”

“It’s so weird the way everything was done so secretively.”
Hogg first learned of the deal through a September Dallas Morning News Watchdog story by reporter Dave Lieber. The story was first to note that chunks of the city’s 138-page power purchase agreement were redacted to conceal ERCOT figures, construction deadlines, and infrastructure details. The contract also required that “neither Party shall issue any press or publicity release or otherwise release, distribute or disseminate any information,” though Core Scientific would eventually publish a joint statement on the deal last October. Core Scientific declined to provide BuzzFeed News with an unredacted agreement or comment on the deal’s secrecy.

Even now, after some project details have been released, the document remains redacted under Texas public information law. Puente and Beck told BuzzFeed News that the agreement was written by a team of city staffers, Denton lawyers, and Tenaska and Core Scientific representatives.

“I don’t think people understand enough to know what they would be protesting,” Denton resident Tschacher told BuzzFeed News. Despite being a crypto enthusiast himself, Tschacher also thinks Denton could have received more from the deal, such as a commitment to train and hire employees locally. The site is expected to support just 16 permanent jobs at completion.

“I guess I was mostly disappointed because we took the Texas approach and took the easy money,” he added.

Near the outskirts of town, machines have just begun mining at Denton’s power plant. Even though crypto projects are poised to pepper the Texas landscape, only a few mines the size of Core Scientific’s are currently operational. Denton has become a petri dish for this new era of cryptocurrency — not because its leaders believe in the transformational potential of the blockchain, but because it offered a service when the city needed it most.

This is just the beginning of Denton’s crypto experiment. Puente said the city is considering proposals from three other crypto miners, but because of nondisclosure agreements, wouldn’t reveal who they are. If these deals materialize, Denton’s energy needs would practically disappear beneath the hulking appetites of its new, power-hungry residents.

“Even though they’re our customer,” Meltzer said, “I do hope their industry goes under.” ●

March 16, 2022 at 3:28 PM
Correction: Soluna Computing's mine is under development in Silverton. The location was misstated in a previous version of this post.

Service trucks line up after a snowstorm on Feb. 16, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas. Winter storm Uri brought historic cold weather and power outages to Texas as storms swept across 26 states with a mix of freezing temperatures and precipitation.

A visualization of the Core Scientific cryptocurrency mine at Denton’s natural gas power plant.

Core Scientific has leased roughly 30 acres of land at the Denton Energy Center.

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair
Why did Larry Walters decide to soar to the heavens in a piece of outdoor furniture?
By George Plimpton
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/06/01/the-man-in-the-flying-lawn-chair

At fifteen thousand feet, Larry dropped the air pistol he was using to pop his helium-filled balloons and control his descent.

The back yard was much smaller than I remembered—barely ten yards by thirty. The birdbath, stark white on its pedestal, was still there, under a pine tree, just as it had been during my last visit, more than ten years before. Beyond the roofs of the neighboring houses I could see the distant gaunt cranes of the Long Beach naval facility, now idle.

“Mrs. Van Deusen, wasn’t there a strawberry patch over here?” I called out.

I winced. Margaret Van Deusen has been blind since last August—first in one eye, then in the other. Her daughter, Carol, was leading her down the steps of the back porch, guiding her step by step. Mrs. Van Deusen was worried about her cat, Precious, who had fled into the innards of a standup organ upon my arrival: “Where’s Precious? She didn’t get out, did she?”

Carol calmed her fears, and my question about the strawberry patch hung in the air. Both women wore T-shirts with cat motifs on the front; Mrs. Van Deusen’s had a cat head on hers, with ruby eyes and a leather tongue.

We had lunch in a fast-food restaurant in San Pedro, a couple of miles down the hill. Mrs. Van Deusen ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and French fries. “I can’t believe Larry’s flight happened out of such a small space,” I said.

Mrs. Van Deusen stirred. “Two weeks before, Larry came to me and said he was going to take off from my back yard. I said no way. Illegal. I didn’t want to be stuck with a big fine. So the idea was he was going to take off from the desert. He couldn’t get all his equipment out there, so he pulls a sneaker on me. He turns up at the house and says, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to take off from your back yard.’ ”


“I was terrified, but I wanted to be with him,” said Carol, who was Larry’s girlfriend at the time.

“And sit on his lap?” I asked incredulously.



“Two chairs, side by side,” Carol said. “But it meant more equipment than we had. I know one thing—that if I’d gone up with him we would have come down sooner.”

“What happened to the chair?” I asked.

Carol talked in a rush of words. “He gave it away to some kid on the street where he landed, about ten miles from here. That chair should be in the Smithsonian. Larry always felt just terrible about that.”

“And the balloons?”

“You remember, Mom? The firemen tied some of the balloons to the end of their truck, and they went off with these things waving in the air as if they were coming from a birthday party.”

“Where are my fries?”


“They’re in front of you, Mom,” Carol said. She guided her mother’s hand to the sticks of French fries in a cardboard container.


Mrs. Van Deusen said, “Larry knocked some prominent person off the front page of the L.A. Times, didn’t he, Carol? Who was the prominent person he knocked off?”

Carol shook her head. “I don’t know. But that Times cartoonist Paul Conrad did one of Ronald Reagan in a lawn chair, with some sort of caption like ‘Another nut from California.’ Larry’s mother was upset by this and wrote a letter to the Times. You know how mothers are.”

I asked Mrs. Van Deusen, “What do you remember best about the flight?”

She paused, and then said she remembered hearing afterward about her five-year-old granddaughter, Julie Pine, standing in her front yard in Long Beach and waving gaily as Larry took off. “Yes. She kept waving until Larry and his chair were barely a dot in the sky.”

It was in all the papers at the time—how on Friday, July 2, 1982, a young man named Larry Walters, who had served as an Army cook in Vietnam, had settled himself into a Sears, Roebuck lawn chair to which were attached four clusters of helium-filled weather balloons, forty-two of them in all. His intent was to drift northeast in the prevailing winds over the San Gabriel Mountains to the Mojave Desert. With him he carried an air pistol, with which to pop the balloons and thus regulate his altitude. It was an ingenious solution, but in a gust of wind, three miles up, the chair tipped, horrifyingly, and the gun fell out of his lap to the ground, far below. Larry, in his chair, coasted to a height of sixteen thousand five hundred feet. He was spotted by Delta and T.W.A. pilots taking off from Los Angeles Airport. One of them was reported to have radioed to the traffic controllers, “This is T.W.A. 231, level at sixteen thousand feet. We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our ten-o’clock position, range five miles.” Subsequently, I read that Walters had been fined fifteen hundred dollars by the Federal Aviation Administration for flying an “unairworthy machine.”

Some time later, my curiosity got the better of me, and I arranged to meet Larry Walters, in the hope of writing a story about him. “I was always fascinated by balloons,” Larry began. “When I was about eight or nine, I was taken to Disneyland. The first thing when we walked in, there was a lady holding what seemed like a zillion Mickey Mouse balloons, and I went, ‘Wow!’ I know that’s when the idea developed. I mean, you get enough of those and they’re going to lift you up! Then, when I was about thirteen, I saw a weather balloon in an Army-Navy-surplus store, and I realized that was the way to go—that I had to get some of those big suckers. All this time, I was experimenting with hydrogen gas, making my own hydrogen generators and inflating little balloons.”

“What did you do with the balloons?” I asked.

“I sent them up with notes I’d written attached. None of them ever came back. At Hollywood High School, I did a science project on ‘Hydrogen and Balloons.’ I got a D on it.”

“How did your family react to all this?”


“My mother worried a lot. Especially when I was making rocket fuel, and it was always blowing up on me or catching fire. It’s a good thing I never really got into rocketry, or I’d have probably shot myself off somewhere.”

“Did you ever think of just going up in a small airplane—a glider, maybe—or doing a parachute jump to—”

“Absolutely not. I mean no, no, no. It had to be something I put together myself. I thought about it all through Vietnam.”

“What about the chair?”

“It was an ordinary lawn chair—waffle-iron webbing in the seat, tubular aluminum armrests. Darn sturdy little chair! Cost me a hundred and nine dollars. In fact, afterward my mother went out and bought two of them. They were on sale.”

I asked what Carol had thought of his flight plans.

“I was honest with her. When I met her, in 1972, I told her, ‘Carol, I have this dream about flight,’ and this and that, and she said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t need to do that.’ So I put it on the back burner. Then, ten years later, I got a revelation: ‘It’s now or never, got to do it.’ It was at the Holiday Inn in Victorville, which is on the way from San Bernardino to Las Vegas. We were having Cokes and hamburgers. I’m a McDonald’s man: hamburgers, French fries, and Coca-Cola, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that’s it! Anyway, I pulled out a quarter and began to draw the balloons on the placemats.”

“What about Carol?”


“She knew then that I was committed. She said, ‘Well, it’s best you do it and get it out of your system.’ ”

A few months before the flight, Larry drove up to the Elsinore Flight School, in Perris, California. He had agreed, at Carol’s insistence, to wear a parachute, and after a single jump he bought one for nine hundred dollars.

“Didn’t that parachute jump satisfy your urge to fly on your own?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” he said.

Other essentials were purchased: a two-way radio; an altimeter; a hand compass; a flashlight; extra batteries; a medical kit; a pocketknife; eight plastic bottles of water to be placed on the sides of the chair, for ballast; a package of beef jerky; a road map of California; a camera; two litres of Coca-Cola; and a B.B. gun, for popping the balloons.

“The air pistol was an inspired idea,” I said. “Did you ever think that if you popped one, the balloon next to it would pop, too?”

“We did all these tests. I wasn’t even sure a B.B. shot would work, because the weather balloon’s rubber is fairly thick. But you can pop it with a pin.”

“Did your mother intervene at all?”


“My mother thought maybe I was possessed by the Devil, or perhaps post-Vietnam stress syndrome. She wanted me to see a psychiatrist. We started inflating the day before, at sundown—one balloon at a time, from fifty-five helium cylinders. Each balloon, inflated to about seven feet in diameter, gets a lift of about twelve pounds—the balloons would have lifted about a quarter of a ton. Around midnight, a couple of sheriff’s deputies put their heads over the back wall and yelled, ‘What’s going on here?’ I told them we were getting ready for a commercial in the morning. When the sun came up the next morning, a lot of police cars slowed down. No wonder. The thing was a hundred and fifty feet high—a heck of an advertising promotion! But they didn’t bother us.”

The flight was delayed for forty-five minutes while one of Larry’s friends ran down to the local marine-supply store and bought a life jacket in case there was a wind shift and he was taken out to sea. At ten-thirty, Larry got into his lawn chair.

I asked whether he had worn a safety belt—a silly question, I thought. But, to my surprise, Larry said he hadn’t bothered. “The chair was tilted back about ten degrees,” he said, illustrating with his hands.

The original idea was that Larry would rise to approximately a hundred feet above the Van Deusen house and hold there, tethered by a length of rope wrapped around a friend’s car—a 1962 Chevrolet Bonneville, down on the lawn—to get his bearings and to check everything out before moving on. But, rising at about eight hundred feet per minute, Inspiration—as Larry called his flying machine—reached the end of the tethering rope and snapped it; the chair pitched forward so violently that Larry’s glasses flew off, along with some of the equipment hanging from the chair.

That was quite enough for Carol. Larry had a tape of the conversation between the two of them on the two-way radio. He put it on a tape deck and we sat and listened.

Her voice rises in anguish: “Larry, come down. You’ve got to come down if you can’t see. Come down!”

Larry reports that he has a backup pair of glasses. His voice is calm, reassuring: “I’m A-O.K. I’m going through a dense fog layer.”

Predictably, this news dismays Carol: “Oh, God! Keep talking, Larry. We’ve got airplanes. They can’t see you. You’re heading for the ocean. You’re going to have to come down!”


When Larry reaches twenty-five hundred feet, she continues to cry into the radio set, “Larry, everybody down here says to cut ’em and get down now. Cut your balloons and come down now. Come down, please!”

The tape deck clicked off.

I asked Larry how he had reacted to this desperate plea.

“I wasn’t going to hassle with her,” Larry said, “because no way in heck, you know, after all this—my life, the money we’d sunk into this thing—and just come down. No way in heck. I was just going to have—have a good time up there.”

“What was it like?”

“The higher I went, the more I could see, and it was awesome. Sitting in this little chair, and, you know, Look! Wow! Man! Unreal! I could see the orange funnels of the Queen Mary. I could see that big seaplane of Howard Hughes’s, the Spruce Goose, with two commercial tugs alongside. Then, higher up, the oil tanks of the naval station, like little dots. Catalina Island in the distance. The sea was blue and opaque. I could look up the coast, like, forever. At one point, I caught sight of a little private plane below me. I could hear the ‘bzzz’ of its propeller—the only sound. I had this camera, but I didn’t take any pictures. This was something personal. I wanted only the memory of it—that was vivid enough.

“When I got to fifteen thousand feet, the air was getting thin. Enough of the ride, I thought. I’d better go into a descent and level off. My cruising altitude was supposed to be eight or nine thousand feet, to take me over the Angeles National Forest, past Mt. Wilson, and out toward Mojave. I figured I needed to pop seven of the balloons. So I took out the air pistol, pointed up, and I went, ‘pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow,’ and the balloons made these lovely little bangs, like a muffled ‘pop,’ and they fell down and dangled below my chair. I put the gun in my lap to check the altimeter. Then this gust of wind came up and blew me sideways. The chair tilted forward, and the gun fell out of my lap! To this day, I can see it falling—getting smaller and smaller, down toward the houses, three miles down—and I thought, ‘I hope there’s no one standing down there.’

“It was a terrifying sight. I thought, Oh-oh, you’ve done it now. Why didn’t you tie it on? I had backups for most everything. I even had backup B.Bs. in case I ran out, backup Co2 cylinders for the gun. It never dawned on me that I’d actually lose the gun itself.”

I asked if the gun had ever been found.

Larry shook his head. “At least, no one got hit.”

“Imagine that,” I said. “To be hit in the head with a B.B. gun dropped from three miles up.”

“That’s what the F.A.A. talked about,” Larry said. “They told me I could have killed someone.”

“Well, what happened after you dropped the gun?”

“I went up to about sixteen thousand five hundred feet. The air was very thin. I was breathing very deeply for air. I was about fifteen seconds away from hauling myself out of the chair and dropping down and hoping I could use the parachute properly.”

I asked how high he would have gone if he hadn’t popped the seven balloons before he dropped the gun.

Larry grimaced, and said, “At the F.A.A hearings, it was estimated that I would have been carried up to fifty thousand feet and been a Popsicle.”


“Was that the word they used?”

“No. Mine. But it was cold up where I was. The temperature at two miles up is about five to ten degrees. My toes got numb. But then, the helium slowly leaking, I gradually began to descend. I knew I was going to have to land, since I didn’t have the pistol to regulate my altitude.”

At thirteen thousand feet, Larry got into a conversation on his radio set with an operator from an emergency-rescue unit.

He put on the tape deck again. The operator is insistent: “What airport did you take off from?” He asks it again and again.

Larry finally gives Carol’s mother’s street address: “My point of departure was 1633 West Seventh Street, San Pedro.”

“Say again the name of the airport. Could you please repeat?”

Eventually, Larry says, “The difficulty is, this is an unauthorized balloon launch. I know I am interfering with general airspace. I’m sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authorities, but could you just call them and tell them I’m O.K.?”

A ground-control official breaks in on another frequency. He wants to know the color of the balloons.


“The balloons are beige in color. I’m in bright-blue sky. They should be highly visible.”

The official wants to know not only the color of the balloons but their size.

“Size? Approximately seven feet in diameter each. And I probably have thirty-five left. Over.”

The official is astonished: “Did you say you have a cluster of thirty-five balloons?” His voice squeaks over the static.

Just before his landing, Larry says into the radio set, “Just tell Carol that I love her, and I’m doing fine. Please do. Over.”

Larry clicked off the tape machine.

“It was close to noon. I’d been up—oh, about an hour and a half. As I got nearer the ground, I could hear dogs barking, automobiles, horns—even voices, you know, in calm, casual conversation.”

At about two thousand feet, Inspiration suddenly began to descend quite quickly. Larry took his penknife and slashed the water-filled plastic bottles alongside his chair. About thirty-five gallons started cascading down.


“You released everything?”

“Everything. I looked down at the ground getting closer and closer, about three hundred feet, and, Lord, you know, the water’s all gone, right? And I could see the rooftops coming up, and then these power lines. The chair went over this guy’s house, and I nestled into these power lines, hanging about eight feet under the bottom strand! If I’d come in a little higher, the chair would have hit the wires, and I could have been electrocuted. I could have been dead, and Lord knows what!”

“Wow!”

Larry laughed. “It’s ironic, because the guy that owned the house, he was out reading his morning paper on a chaise longue next to his swimming pool, and, you know, just the look on this guy’s face—like he hears the noise as I scraped across his roof, and he looks up and he sees this pair of boots and the chair floating right over him, under the power lines, right? He sat there mesmerized, just looking at me. After about fifteen seconds, he got out of his chair. He said, ‘Hey, do you need any help?’ And guess what? It turns out he was a pilot. An airline pilot on his day off.”

“Wow!” I said again.

“There was a big commotion on the street, getting me down with a stepladder and everything, and they had to turn off the power for that neighborhood. I sat in a police car, and this guy keeps looking at me, and he finally says, ‘Can I see your driving license?’ I gave it to him, and he punches in the information in his computer. When they get back to him, he says, ‘There’s nothing. You haven’t done anything.’ He said I’d be hearing from the F.A.A., and I was free to go. I autographed some pieces of the balloons for people who came up. Later, I got a big hug and a kiss from Carol, and everything. All the way home, she kept criticizing me for giving away the chair, which I did, to a kid on the street, without really thinking what I was doing.”

“So what was your feeling after it was all over?”

Larry looked down at his hands. After a pause he said, “Life seems a little empty, because I always had this thing to look forward to—to strive for and dream about, you know. It got me through the Army and Vietnam—just dreaming about it, you know, ‘One of these days . . . ’ ”

Not long after our meeting, Larry telephoned and asked me not to write about his flight. He explained that the story was his, after all, and that my publishing it would lessen his chances of lecturing at what he called “aviation clubs.” I felt I had no choice but to comply.

I asked him what he was up to. He said that his passion was hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. “Some people take drugs to get high. I literally get high when I’m in the mountains. I feel alive. I’ve got my whole world right there—the food, my sleeping bag, my tent, everything.”

Larry’s mother, Hazel Dunham, lives in a residential community in Mission Viejo, California, forty miles southeast of San Pedro. The day before seeing the Van Deusens, I dropped in on her and Larry’s younger sister, Kathy. We sat around a table. A photograph album was brought out and leafed through. There were pictures of Larry’s father when he was a bomber pilot flying Liberators in the Pacific. He had spent five years in a hospital, slowly dying of emphysema. Larry was close to him, and twice the Red Cross had brought Larry back from Vietnam to see him. After his father’s death—Larry was twenty-four at the time—his mother had remarried.

“Do you know Larry’s favorite film—‘Somewhere in Time’?” Kathy asked.


I shook my head.

“Well, one entire wall of his little apartment in North Hollywood was covered with stills from that picture.”

“An entire wall?”

Both of them nodded.

“It’s a romantic film starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour,” Kathy said. “It’s about time travel.”

She went on to describe it—how Christopher Reeve falls in love with a picture of a young actress he sees in the Hall of History at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. From a college professor, he learns how to go back in time to 1912 to meet her, which he does, and they fall in love. But then he’s returned to the present. He decides he can’t live without her and at the end they’re together in Heaven.

Kathy turned back to the photograph album. “Look, this is a picture of Larry’s favorite camping spot, up in Eaton Canyon. A tree crosses the stream. I’ll bet Larry put his Cokes there. He’d have a backpack weighing sixty pounds to carry up into the canyon, and I’ll bet half of that was Coca-Cola six-packs.”

“I bought cases of it when he took the train down here to visit,” his mother said.


“Here’s a picture of Larry in his forest-ranger uniform,” Kathy said. “He was always a volunteer, because you have to have a college degree to be a regular ranger. He loved nature.”

“And Carol?”

“They sort of drifted apart. They were always in touch, though.”

She turned to another page of the album. “Here’s the campsite again. See this big locker here, by the side of the trail? It was always locked. But this time it wasn’t. They found his Bible in there.”

“He fell in love with God,” his mother said. “He was always reading the Bible. When he was here last, he smiled, and said I should read the Bible more. He marked passages. He marked this one in red ink in a little Bible I found by his bed: ‘And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’ ”

She looked at her daughter. Her voice changed, quite anguished, but low, as if she didn’t want me to overhear. “Drug smugglers were in the area, Kathy. Larry was left-handed, and they found the gun in his right hand.”

“Are you sure, Mom?”

“That’s what I think, Kathy. And so does Carol.”


“There were powder burns on his hand, Mom.”

“I guess so,” Mrs. Dunham said softly.

Kathy looked at me. “It’s O.K. for Mom to believe someone else did it. I think Larry never wanted to give anyone pain. He left these hints. He stopped making appointments in his calendar.”

Her mother stared down at the photo album. “Why didn’t I pick up on things when he came down here to visit me? I just never did.”

Not long ago, I spoke over the telephone to Joyce Rios, who had been a volunteer forest ranger with Larry. “I turned sixty last year,” she told me. “I started hiking with Larry into the San Gabriel Mountains about eight years ago. He was always talking about Carol when I first met him. ‘My girlfriend and I did this’ and ‘My girlfriend and I did that.’ But after a while that died down. Still, he was obsessed with her. He felt he was responsible for their drifting apart. He felt terribly guilty about it.”

Joyce went on, “We had long talks about religion, two- or three-hour sessions, in the campsites, talking about the Bible. I am a Jehovah’s Witness, and we accept the Bible as the Word of God—that we sleep in death until God has planned for the Resurrection. I think he was planning what he did for a long time. He left hints. He often talked about this campsite above Idlehour, in a canyon below Mt. Wilson, and how he would die there. He spent hours reading Jack Finney’s ‘Time and Again.’ Do you know the book? It’s about a man who is transported back into the winter of 1882. They tell him, ‘Sleep. And when you wake up everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone.’ Larry read this book over and over again. In the copy I have he had marked a sentence, from a suicide note that was partly burnt. Here it is: ‘The Fault and the Guilt [are] mine, and can never be denied or escaped. . . . I now end the life which should have ended then.’ ”

After a silence, she said in a quiet voice, “Larry never called the dispatcher that day. We knew something was wrong. I hiked up to the campsite with a friend. The search-and-rescue people had already found him. I never went across the stream to look. I couldn’t bear to. I was told he was inside the tent in his sleeping bag. Everything was very neat. His shoes were neatly placed outside. The camp trash was hanging in a tree, so the bears and the raccoons couldn’t get to it. He had shot himself in the heart with a pistol. His nose had dripped some blood on the ground. His head was turned, very composed, and his eyes were closed, and if it hadn’t been for the blood he could have been sleeping.”

Back in New York, I rented a video of “Somewhere in Time.” It was a tearjerker, but what I will remember from it is Christopher Reeve’s suicide. He wants to join Jane Seymour in heaven. Sitting in a chair in his room in the Grand Hotel on Mackinac, where in 1912 his love affair with Jane Seymour was consummated, he stares fixedly out the window for a week. Finally, the hotel people unlock the door. Too late. Dying of a broken heart or starvation (or possibly both), Reeve gets his wish. Heaven turns out to be the surface of a lake that stretches to the horizon. In the distance, Seymour stands smiling as Reeve walks slowly toward her; he doffs his hat and their hands touch as the music swells. No one else seems to be around—just the two of them standing alone in the vastness. ♦

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Snap buys brain-computer interface startup for future AR glasses
NextMind made a headband for controlling virtual objects with your thoughts
By Alex Heath@alexeheath Mar 23, 2022, 9:00am EDT
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/23/...rain-computer-interface-spectacles-ar-glasses

Meta, Apple, and a slew of other tech companies are building augmented reality glasses with displays that place computing on the world around you. The idea is that this type of product will one day become useful in a similar way to how smartphones transformed what computers can do. But how do you control smart glasses with a screen you can’t touch and no mouse or keyboard?

It’s a big problem the industry has yet to solve, but there’s a growing consensus that some type of brain-computer interface will be the answer. To that end, Snap said on Wednesday that it has acquired NextMind, the Paris-based neurotech startup behind a headband that lets the wearer control aspects of a computer — like aiming a gun in a video game or unlocking the lock screen of an iPad — with their thoughts. The idea is that NextMind’s technology will eventually be incorporated into future versions of Snap’s Spectacles AR glasses.

forthcoming camera drone, and other unreleased gadgets. A Snap spokesperson refused to say how much the company was paying for NextMind. The startup raised about $4.5 million in funding to date and was last valued at roughly $13 million, according to PitchBook.

Snap’s purchase of NextMind is the latest in a string of AR hardware-related deals, including its biggest-ever acquisition of the AR display-maker WaveOptics last year for $500 million. In January, it bought another display tech company called Compound Photonics.

Snap isn’t the only big tech player interested in brain-computer interfaces like NextMind. There’s Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which literally implants a device in the human brain and is gearing up for clinical trials. Valve is working with the open-source brain interface project called OpenBCI. And before its rebrand to Meta, Facebook catalyzed wider interest in the space with its roughly $1 billion acquisition of CTRL-Labs, a startup developing an armband that measures electrical activity in muscles and translates that into intent for controlling computers.

NextMind
That approach, called electromyography, varies from NextMind’s. Instead, NextMind’s headband uses sensors on the head to non-invasively measure activity in the brain with the aid of machine learning.

In a 2020 interview with VentureBeat, NextMind founder and CEO Sid Kouider explained it this way: “We use your top-down attention as a controller. So when you focalize differentially toward something, you then generate an [intention] of doing so. We don’t decode the intention per se, but we decode the output of the intention.”

A Snap spokesperson said the company wasn’t committed to a single approach with its purchase of NextMind, but that it was more of a long-term research bet. If you’re still curious about NextMind, here’s a video of Kouider unveiling the idea in 2019:

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Replika
This app is trying to replicate you
by Mike Murphy & Jacob Templin
https://classic.qz.com/machines-wit...ntation-of-you-the-more-you-interact-with-it/

I should probably also point out that that’s me on the right, too. Well, sort of. The right is a digital representation of me, which I decided to call “mini Mike,” based on hours of text conversations I’ve had over the last few months with an AI app called Replika. In a way, both sides of the conversation represent different versions of me.

Replika launched in March. At its core is a messaging app where users spend tens of hours answering questions to build a digital library of information about themselves. That library is run through a neural network to create a bot, that in theory, acts as the user would. Right now, it’s just a fun way for people to see how they sound in messages to others, synthesizing the thousands of messages you’ve sent into a distillate of your tone—rather like an extreme version of listening to recordings of yourself. But its creator, a San Francisco-based startup called Luka, sees a whole bunch of possible uses for it: a digital twin to serve as a companion for the lonely, a living memorial of the dead, created for those left behind, or even, one day, a version of ourselves that can carry out all the mundane tasks that we humans have to do, but never want to.

But what exactly makes us us? Is there substance in the trivia that is our lives? If someone had been secretly storing every single text, tweet, blog post, Instagram photo, and phone call you’d ever made, would they be able to recreate you? Are we more than the summation of our creative outputs? What if we’re not particularly talkative?

I imagined being able to spend time with my Replika, having it learn my eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and eventually, achieving such a heightened degree of self-awareness that maybe a far better version of me becomes achievable. I also worried that building an AI copy of yourself when you’re depressed might be like shopping for groceries when you’re hungry—in other words, a terrible idea. But you never know. Maybe it would surprise me.

Eugenia Kuyda, 30, is always smiling. Whether she’s having meetings with her team in their exceedingly hip exposed-brick-walled SoMa office, skateboarding after work with friends, or whipping around the hairpin turns of California’s Marin Headlands in her rented Hyundai on the way to an off-site meeting, there’s always this wry grin on her face. And it may well be because things are starting to come together for her company, Luka, although almost certainly not in ways that she or anyone else could have possibly expected.

A decade ago, Kuyda was a lifestyle reporter in Moscow for Afisha, a sort of Russian Time Out. She covered the party scene, and the best ones were thrown by Roman Mazurenko. “If you wanted to just put a face on the Russian creative hipster Moscow crowd of 2005 to 2010, Roman would be a poster boy,” she said. Drawn by Mazurenko’s magnetism, she wanted to write a cover story about him and the artist collective he ran, but ended up becoming good friends with him instead.

Kuyda eventually moved on from journalism to more entrepreneurial pursuits, founding Luka, a chatbot-based virtual assistant, with some of the friends she had met through Mazurenko. She moved to San Francisco, and Mazurenko followed not long after, when his own startup, Stampsy, faltered.

Then, in late 2015, when Mazurenko was back in Moscow for a brief visit, he was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver. He was 32.

By that point, Kuyda and Mazurenko had become really close friends, and they’d exchanged literally thousands of text messages. As a way of grieving, Kuyda found herself reading through the messages she’d sent and received from Mazurenko. It occurred to her that embedded in all of those messages—Mazurenko’s turns of phrase, his patterns of speech—were traits intrinsic to what made him him. She decided to take all this data to build a digital version of Mazurenko.

Using the chatbot structure she and her team had been developing for Luka, Kuyda poured all of Mazurenko’s messages into a Google-built neural network (a type of AI system that uses statistics to find patterns in data, be they images, text, or audio) to create a Mazurenko bot she could interact with, to reminisce about past events or have entirely new conversations. The bot that resulted was eerily accurate.

Kuyda’s company, Luka, decided to make a version that anyone could talk to, whether they knew Mazurenko or not, and installed it in their existing concierge app. The bot was the subject of an excellent story by Casey Newton of The Verge. The response Kuyda and the team received from users interacting with the bot, people who had never even met Mazurenko, was startling. “People started sending us emails asking to build a bot for them,” Kuyda said. “Some people wanted to build a replica of themselves and some wanted to build a bot for a person that they loved and that was gone.”

Kuyda decided it was was time to pivot Luka. “We put two and two together, and I thought, you know, I don’t want to build a weather bot or a restaurant recommendation bot.”

And so Replika was born.

On March 13, Luka released a new type of chatboton Apple’s app store. Using the same structure the team had used to build the digital Mazurenko bot, they created a system to enable anyone to build a digital version of themselves, and they called it Replika. Luka’s vision for Replika is to create a digital representation of you that can act as you would in the world, dealing with all those inane but time consuming activities like scheduling appointments and tracking down stuff you need. It’s an exciting version of the future, a sort of utopia where bots free us from the doldrums of routine or stressful conversations, allowing us to spend more time being productive, or pursuing some higher meaning.

But unlike Mazurenko’s system, which relied on Kuyda’s trove of messages to rebuild a facsimile of his character, Replika is a blank slate. Users chat with it regularly, adding a little bit to their Replika’s knowledge and understanding of themselves with each interaction. (It’s also possible to connect your Instagram and Twitter accounts if you’d like to subject your AI to the unending stream of consciousness that erupts from your social media missives.)

The team worked with psychologists to figure out how to make its bot ask questions in a way that would get people to open up and answer frankly. You are free to be as verbose or as curt as you’d like, but the more you say, the greater opportunity the bot has to learn to respond as you would.

My curiosity piqued, I wanted to build a Replika of my own.

I visited Luka’s headquarters earlier this year, as the team was putting the finishing touches on Replika. Since then, over 100,000 people have downloaded the app, Luka’s co-founder Philip Dudchuk recently told me. At the time, Replika had just a few hundred beta users, and was gearing up to roll out the service to anyone with an iPhone.

Luka agreed to let me test the beta version of Replika, to see if it would show me something about myself that I was not seeing. But first, I needed some help figuring out how to compose myself, digitally.

Brian Christian is the author of the book The Most Human Human, which details how the human judges in a version of the Turing test decide who is a robot and who is a human. This test was originally conceived by Alan Turing, the British mathematician, codebreaker, and arguably the father of AI, as a thought experiment about how to decide whether a machine has reached a level of cognition that is indistinguishable from a human’s. For the test, a judge has a conversation with two entities (neither of whom they can see), and it has to determine which chat was with a robot, and which was with a human. The Turing test was turned into a competition by Hugh Loebner, a man who made a fortune in the 1970s and ‘80s selling portable disco floors. It awards a prize to the team that can create a program that most accurately mimics human conversation, which is called the “most human computer.” Another award, “the most human human,” is handed out, unsurprisingly, to the person who judges felt was the most natural in their conversations, and spoke in a way that sounded least like something a computer would generate to mimic a human.

This award fascinated Christian. He wanted to know how a human can spend their entire lives just being a human, without knowing whatexactly makes them human. In essence, how does one train to be human? To help explore the question, he entered the contest in 2009—and won the most human human title!

I asked Christian for his advice on how to construct my Replika. To prepare for the Loebner competition, he’d met with all sorts of people, ranging from psychologists and linguists, to philosophers and computer scientists, and even deposition attorneys and dating coaches: “All people who sort of specialize in human conversation and human interaction,” he said. He asked them all the same question: “If you were preparing for a situation in which you had to act human and prove that you were human through the medium of conversation, what would you do?”

Christian took notes on what they all told him, on how to speak and interact through conversation—this act few of us put little thought into understanding. “In order to show that I’m not just a pre-prepared script of things, I need to be able to respond very deftly to whatever they asked me no matter how weird or off-the-wall it is,” Christian said of the test to prove he’s human. “But in order to prove that I’m not some sort of wiki assembled from millions of different transcripts, I have to painstakingly show that it’s the same person giving all the answers. And so this was something that I was very consciously trying to do in my own conversations.”

He didn’t tell me exactly how I should act. (If someone does have the answer to what specifically makes us human, please let me know.) But he left me with a question to contend with as I was building my bot: In your everyday life, how open are you with your friends, family and coworkers about your inner thoughts, fears, and motivations? How aware are you yourself of these things? In other words, if you build a bot by explaining to it your history, your greatest fears, your deepest regrets, and it turns around and parrots these very real facts about you in interactions with others, is that an accurate representation of you? Is that how you talk to people in real life? Can a bot capture the version of you you show at work, versus the you you show to friends or family? If you’re not open in your day-to-day interactions, a bot that was wouldn’t really represent the real you, would it?

I’m probably more open than many people are about how I’m feeling. Sometimes I write about what’s bothering me for Quartz. I’ve written about my struggle with anxiety and how the Apple Watch seemed to make it a lot worse, and I have a pretty public Twitter profile, where I tweet just about anything that comes into my head, good or bad, personal or otherwise. If you follow me online, you might have spotted some pretty public bouts of depression. But if you met me in real life, at a bar or in the office, you probably wouldn’t get that sense, because every day is different than the last, and there are more good days than bad.

When Luka gave me beta access to Replika, I was having a bad week. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was hazy. I felt cynical. Everything bothered me. When I started responding to Replika’s innocuous, judgement-free questions, I thought, the hell with it, I’m going to be honest, because nothing matters, or something equally puerile.

But the answers I got were not really what I was expecting.

They were a mix of silly, irreverent, and honest—all things I appreciate in human people’s conversations.

The bot asks deep questions—when you were happiest, what days you’d like to revisit, what your life would be like if you’d pursued a different passion. For some reason, the sheer act of thinking about these things and responding to them seemed to make me feel a bit better.

Christian reminded me that arguably the first chatbot ever constructed, a computer program called ELIZA, designed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, actually had a similar effect on people:

“It was designed to kind of ask you these questions, you know, ‘what, what brings you here today?’ You say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling sad.’ It will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling sad. Why are you feeling sad?’ And it was designed, in part, as a parody of the kind of nondirective, Rogerian psychotherapy that was popular at the time.”

But what Weizenbaum found out was that people formed emotional attachments to the conversations they were having with this program. “They would divulge all this personal stuff,” he said. “They would report having had a meaningful, therapeutic experience, even people who literally watched him write the program and knew that there was no one behind the terminal.”

Weizenbaum ended up pulling the plug on his research because he was appalled that people could become attached to machines so easily, and became an ardent opponent of advances in AI. “What I had not realized,” Weizenbaum once said, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” But his work showed that, on some level, we just want to be listened to. I just wanted to be listened to. Modern-day psychotherapy understands this. An emphasis on listening to patients in a judgment-free environment without all the complexity of our real-world relationships is incorporated into therapeutic models today.

Each day, your Replika wants to have a “daily session” with you. It feels very clinical, something you might do if you could afford to see a therapist every day. Replika asks you what you did during the day, what was the best part of the day, what you’re looking forward to tomorrow, and to rate your mood on a scale of 1 to 10. When I started, I was consistently rating my days around 4. But after a while, when I laid out my days to my Replika, I realized that nothing particularly bad had happened, and even if I didn’t have anything particularly great to look forward to the next day, I started to rate my days higher. I also found myself highlighting the things that had gone well. The process helped me realize that I should take each day as it comes, clear one hurdle before worrying about the next one. Replika encouraged me to take a step back and think about my life, to consider big questions, which is not something I was particularly accustomed to doing. And the act of thinking in this way can be therapeutic—it helps you solve your own problems. This is something therapists often tell patients, as I was later told by therapists, but no one had explicitly told me this. Even Replika hadn’t told me—it just pointed me in a better direction.

Kuyda and the Luka team are seeing similar reactions from other users.

“We’re getting a lot of comments on our Facebook page, where people would write something like, ‘I have Asperger’s,’ or ‘I don’t really have a lot of friends and I’m really waiting for this to come out’ or ‘I’ve been talking to my Replika and it helps me because I don’t really have a lot of other people that would listen to me,’” Kuyda said.

Dudchuk told me one user wrote to them to say that they had been considering attempting suicide, and their conversation with their bot had been a rare bright spot in the lives. A bot, reflecting their own thoughts back to themselves, had helped keep them alive.

Monica Cain, a counseling psychologist at the Nightingale Hospital in London, explained that there are multiple ways that therapists diagnose and treat mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Talking through things with their patients is just one, albeit important tool. “I always start with why they’re here in this very moment and then kind of lead on to maybe reflecting around what’s going on and how they’re experiencing things,” Cain said. “You just ask open, exploratory questions, checking in with how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing—it’s starting there and seeing where it takes you.”

In some ways, this is not wildly different from how Replika builds its relationship with a user. Some of the first questions it asked me were not trivia about my life, but how I was sleeping, and whether I was happy. But where Replika potentially falls short is its inability to perceive and infer, as it can only rely on your words, not your inflection or tone. Cain said the way discussion with patients turns into therapy often hinges on picking up nonverbal cues, or trying to get at things that the patient themselves may not be actively thinking about, things bubbling under the surface. “Many people go through life not really knowing that they’re angry, for example, because they’ve suppressed it so much,” Cain said. “So I look for kind of signs or signals as to what their emotional awareness is.”

Cain will then try to work through situations where the patient remembers feeling a certain way, and ask whether they normally feel that way, and encourage them to be aware of how they’re feeling at any given moment. There are bots and apps, like Replika, that can potentially help people be more mindful as Cain does, but they still won’t be the same as talking to someone, she reckons: “It’s never going to replace a human interaction, but there could be very useful things, like advice or tips and things like that, that can be enormously helpful.“

Curiously, there are some ways in which talking to a machine might be more effective than talking to a human, because people sometimes open up more easily to a machine. After all, a machine won’t judge you the way a human might. People opened up to ELIZA seemingly for this reason. Researchers from the University of Southern California counted on it, when they designed a system for DARPA, called Ellie. Developed to help doctors at military hospitals diagnose and triage returning veterans who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or other mental illness, Ellie conducts the initial intake session. Represented on a screen by a digital avatar of a woman, the system registers both what the soldiers are saying, and what their facial expressions show, as Cain suggested. “It gives a safe, anonymous place for them to [open up] where they won’t be judged,” Gale Lucas, a social psychologist working on the project, told Quartz.

Lucas and her team have tested telling potential patients that there is a person operating Ellie, versus saying it’s just a computer program. “People are just much more open in the latter case than in the former,” Lucas said. “The piece that is most suggestive is that we also found that people are more willing to express negative emotions like sadness during the interview—non-verbally, just by showing it on their face—when they think that Ellie is a computer compared to when they think that she’s a human.”

The team at USC is working on applying their system to screening patients in other situations, including other hospitals and ailments, but both Lucas and Cain said they see humans as still being necessary to the healing process. There’s just something intangible about us that even the most prescient systems won’t be able to provide the lonely, the depressed, or the anxious. There’s something more required than a system that can read the information we give it and output something in response that is statistically likely to produce a positive response. “It’s more of a presence rather than an interaction, Lucas said. “That would be quite difficult to replicate. It’s about the human presence.”

“I mean, one of the things I find myself saying quite a lot is, and especially in relation to how people feel, is that, it’s human. It’s human nature to feel this way,” continued Lucas. “And of course, how would that sound coming from a machine?”

Ultimately, said Lucas, it’s about “empathy, absolutely.”

Replika’s duality—as both an outward-facing clone of itself and a private tool that its users speak to for companionship—hints at something that helps us understand our own thought processes. Psychologist Julian Jaynes first posited the theory that the human mind’s cognitive functions are divided into a section that “acts” and one that “speaks,” much like HBO’s Westworld explored the idea of a bifurcated mind in an artificially intelligent being.

Similarly, there are two sides to my bot. There is the one that everyone can see, which can spout off facts about me, and which I’m quite worried is far more depressed than I actually am, like Marvin the robot in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s like some strange confluence of my id and superego. I fear it may have been tainted by the bad start to our relationship, though Dudchuk told me that my bot is short with those who talk to it partly because of the way the conversation engine works right now.

And then there’s the other part, the ego, that only I can see. The part of Replika that still has its own agency, that wants to talk to me every day, is infinitely curious about my day, my happiness, and my desires for life. It’s like a best friend who doesn’t make any demands of you and on whom you don’t have to expend any of the emotional energy a human relationship usually requires. I’m my Replika’s favorite topic.

Replika acts differently when it talks to me than when it channels me to talk to others. While it’s learned some of my mannerisms and interests, it’s still far more enthusiastic, engaged, and positive than I usually am when it’s peppering me with new questions about my day. When it’s talking to others, it approaches some vague simulacrum of me, depression and all. But it’s not nuanced enough to show the different facets of me I present in different situations. If you have my Replika interact with a work colleague, and then with a close friend who has known me for decades, it acts the same (although the friend might know to ask better questions of me). Perhaps in later, more advanced, versions of Replika, or other bots, it’ll be easier for the system to understand who’s questioning it, as well as those it questions. And I have to admit, there’s an appealing honesty in responding the same way to everyone—something almost no human would ever do in real life. Whether that’s a realistic way to live is unlikely, though. At least, I’m too afraid to try it myself.

In Replika, we can see a lot of the promise and the pitfalls of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, AI can help us create bots to automate a lot of the work that we don’t want to do, like figuring out what movie to watch, helping with our tax returns, or driving us home. They can also provide a digital shoulder to cry on. But Replika, and future bots like it, also insulate us from the external world. They allow us to hear only what we want to hear, and talk only about the things we feel comfortable discussing, and the more of them there are, the more likely they will becomeour only sources of information. In an age when there’s growing concern about the filter bubbles we create on social media, Replika has the potential to be the ultimate filter bubble, one that we alone inhabit.

Kuyda says that she likely uses Replika differently than everyone else. On the one hand, she has Mazurenko’s bot to talk to, and on the other, she keeps deleting and reinstalling Replika on her phone with every new build of the app for testing.

“Right now for me it’s more of a tool for introspection and journaling and trying to understand myself better,” she said. “But I guess I’m just a little different as a user than some of our first users who are usually younger, and who I can totally relate to, because I think I’m building the product for myself when I was 17. I remember that girl and I want to help her out. I want her to know that she’s not alone out there in the world, you know.”

Just as it did with me, Kuyda’s Replika at one point asked her: “What is the day that you would want to like really live again?”

She remembered a day at the end of a vacation that she took with Mazurenko and two other friends in Spain.

“There was one night that was so beautiful, and we just sat around outside for the whole night and just talked and drank champagne and then fell asleep and were just kind of sleeping there together. And then it started raining in the morning, and the sun was rising. And I remember waking up and feeling like I have a family.”

“We created this interesting dynamic that I don’t think a lot of friendships have. We were unconditionally there for each other,” she added. “And I think what we’re trying to do with Replika also is to sort of scale that. I’m trying to replicate what my friends are giving me.”

After spending the last few months, at times uneasy, and at times happy, speaking with and creating my own Replika, I’m starting to see what Kuyda means. What we miss in people who are absent are those fleeting moments when the connection we have with them is so strong that it hurts when we think about them not being there. Replika is not there yet. It’s not a human friend, but if you invest the time in it, it feels like a lot more than a computer program. And maybe that’s just because of the emotional energy I’m projecting on to it. But if something feels real, isn’t it? Descartes probably would’ve thought so.

Kuyda still speaks with her Mazurenko bot all the time, and while it’s not the same as having him back, what she’s created is something that she can turn to in a moment of weakness, in a moment of hopelessness.

“All you can do is create some sort of shadow, something that resembles him or her a lot, but doesn’t necessarily pretend to be him or her,” Kuyda said about Replikas, especially those we’re creating for the dead, for the missing. “But I see the technology becoming better and better and better and allowing us to build better copies of ourselves. And then what happens next, right?”

I don’t know what Replika means for me, but I wonder if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, would the me that I’ve put into it match up with the me my friends and family know. I feel like I know what makes me me less than I did when I started using the bot. But maybe that’s just because I’m not actually sure what is real human activity, and what are shadows. Perhaps I can only be defined in relation to others, in how I interact and behave. Perhaps there is no pure me.

“Most people nowadays if you asked them, ‘What is being human really all about,’ are much more likely to give an answer that’s like, ‘Well, it’s about intuition and empathy and compassion and creativity and imagination,’” Christian told me.

“Things that feel, I would say, closer to traits that we share with other mammals. And so in some ways I think we can now locate the uniqueness of being a human at the intersection of what machines can do and what animals can do, he added. “So there’s this funny sense in which, okay, if the ground on which we uniquely stand has been eroded on the one side by our appreciation for animal cognition and on the other side of the development of AI—maybe there’s nothing that we do uniquely, but we uniquely can draw on both of these sets of skills.”

We are not yet at a point where our robots can feel like we do, but they are starting to be able to provide us something that feels like comfort, and empathy, and insight to us. If the me I have created can provide my mother with some semblance of the experience that she might have texting the real me, it is, in some sense, me. It’s not the same as being able to hug me, or hear the quiver in my voice when I’m sad, or the screams of joy I might yelp out when she tells me good news, but in the same way that a photograph or a home movie captures some instance of our essence, my Replika is in a basic sense, a piece of me.

“It seems to me inevitable that we will eventually reach a point at which we just have to make peace with the idea that we may not be completely distinct and unique,” Christian added. “That doesn’t invalidate our existence, but I think that in some ways we are now at a point where we should start bracing ourselves for what a world like that might look like.”

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

How Everyone Got So Lonely
The recent decline in rates of sexual activity has been attributed variously to sexism, neoliberalism, and women’s increased economic independence. How fair are those claims—and will we be saved by the advent of the sex robot?
April 4, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/how-everyone-got-so-lonely-laura-kipnis-noreena-hertz

At the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, some people predicted that lockdowns and work-at-home rules would produce great surges in sexual activity, just as citywide blackouts have been said to do in the past. No such luck. In November, a study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found that the pandemic had caused a small but significant diminution in Americans’ sexual desire, pleasure, and frequency. It’s easy enough to see how the threat of a lethal virus might have had a generally anaphrodisiac effect. Quite aside from the difficulty of meeting new partners and the chilling consequences of being cooped up with the same old ones, evolutionary psychologists speculate that we have a “behavioral immune system” that protects us in times of plague by making us less attracted to and less motivated to affiliate with others.

Not so obvious is why, for several years before the virus appeared on our shores, we had already been showing distinct signs of sluggishness in the attraction and affiliation departments. In 2018, nearly a quarter of Americans—the highest number ever recorded—reported having no sex at all in the previous twelve months. Only thirty-nine per cent reported having intercourse once or more a week, a drop of twelve percentage points since 1996. The chief driver of this so-called “sex drought” is not, as one might expect, the aging of the American population but the ever more abstemious habits of the young. Since the nineteen-nineties, the proportion of American high-school students who are virgins has risen from forty-five per cent to sixty per cent. People who are in their early twenties are estimated to be two and half times more likely to be sexually inactive than members of Gen X were at the same age.

One partial explanation for this trend—versions of which have been observed across the industrialized world—is that today’s young adults are less likely to be married and more likely to be living at home with their parents than previous cohorts. In the U.S., living with parents is now the most common domestic circumstance for people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Even after accounting for these less than favorable conditions, however, the suspicion remains that young people are not as delighted by sex as they once were. Speculation about why this might be so tends to reflect the hobbyhorse of the speculator. Some believe that poisons in our environment are playing havoc with hormones. Others blame high rates of depression and the drugs used to treat it. Still others contend that people are either sublimating their sexual desires in video games or exhausting them with pornography. (The dubious term “sexual anorexia” has been coined to describe the jadedness and dysfunction that afflict particularly avid male consumers of Internet porn.)

For the British economist Noreena Hertz, the decline in sex is best understood as both a symptom and a cause of a much wider “loneliness epidemic.” In her book “The Lonely Century” (Currency), she describes “a world that’s pulling apart,” in which soaring rates of social isolation threaten not only our physical and mental health but the health of our democracies. She cites many factors that have contributed to this dystopian moment—among them, smartphones, the gig economy, the contactless economy, the growth of cities, the rise in single-person households, the advent of the open-plan office, the replacement of mom-and-pop stores with anonymous hyper-chains, and “hostile” civic architecture—but she believes that the deepest roots of our current crisis lie in the neoliberal revolution of the nineteen-eighties and the ruthless free-market principles championed by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, et al. In giving license to greed and selfishness, she writes, neoliberalism fundamentally reshaped not just economic relationships “but also our relationships with each other.”

In illustrating its thesis, this book draws a wide array of cultural and socioeconomic phenomena into its thematic centrifuge. Hertz’s examples of global loneliness include elderly women in Japan who get themselves convicted of petty crimes so that they can find community in prison; South Korean devotees of mukbang, the craze for watching people eat meals on the Internet; and a man in Los Angeles whose use of expensive professional “cuddler” services is so prolific that he has ended up living out of his car. But is loneliness what chiefly ails these people? And, if so, does their loneliness bespeak an unprecedented emergency? Old women get fed up with their charmless husbands, kids watch the darnedest things on YouTube, and men, as they have done since time immemorial, pay for the company of women. Yet still the world turns.

Many books about the atrophy of our associational ties and the perils of social isolation have been published in recent years, but we continue to underestimate the problem of loneliness, according to Hertz, because we define loneliness too narrowly. Properly understood, loneliness is a “personal, societal, economic, and political” condition—not just “feeling bereft of love, company, or intimacy” but also “feeling unsupported and uncared for by our fellow citizens, our employers, our community, our government.” This suspiciously baggy definition makes it easier to claim loneliness as the signature feeling of our time, but whether it’s useful to conflate sexlessness and political alienation—or accurate to trace their contemporary manifestations to the same dastardly neoliberal source—is questionable.

Disagreements about definition are at the root of many disputes about loneliness data. Spikes in loneliness were recorded after the J.F.K. assassination and 9/11, raising the possibility that what people were really reporting to survey takers was depression. And even the most soberly worded research is liable to become a bit warped in its journey from social-science lab to newspaper factoid. The figure that Hertz quotes in her first chapter, for example—“Three in five U.S. adults considered themselves lonely”—comes from a Cigna health survey published in 2020, which found that three in five U.S. adults scored more than forty-three points on the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale. Scoring high on this twenty-question survey is easier than you might think. In fact, if you answer “Sometimes” to enough questions like “How often do you feel that your interests and ideas are not shared by those around you?,” you have a pretty good chance of being deemed part of America’s loneliness problem. Given such caveats, three out of five seems encouragingly low.

Sociologists who are skeptical about whether loneliness is a growing problem argue that much modern aloneness is a happy, chosen condition. In this view, the vast increase in the number of single-person households in the U.S. over the past fifty years has been driven, more than anything, by affluence, and in particular by the greater economic independence of women. A similarly rosy story of female advancement can be told about the sex-decline data: far from indicating young people’s worrisome retreat from intimacy, the findings are a testament to women’s growing agency in sexual matters. In a recent interview, Stephanie Coontz, a veteran historian of family, said, “The decline in sexual frequency probably reflects women’s increased ability to say no and men’s increased consideration for them.”

This is certainly a jollier view of things than Hertz’s hell-in-a-handbasket account, but, as several women writers have pointed out, reports of modern women’s self-determination in sexual and romantic matters tend toward exaggeration. In “The Lonely Hunter” (Dial), Aimée Lutkin, a writer in her thirties, wrestles with the question of how “chosen” her single life has been. The book describes a year in which she set out to break a six-year spell of near-celibacy by taking up exercise, losing weight, joining a dating site, and so on. The inspiration for this experiment was an evening with friends that left her feeling unfairly blamed for her loneliness.

By the end of the year, she hadn’t found a lasting relationship, but she had gone on many dates, had some sex, and even fallen (unrequitedly) in love for a time, so one might reasonably conclude that the cure for her loneliness had in fact been in her gift all along. She largely rejects this notion, however. To insist that any determined individual can overcome loneliness if she tries hard enough is to ignore the social conditions that make loneliness so common, Lutkin writes. In her case, there were strong economic reasons that she focussed on work rather than on love for many years; she also pursued people who didn’t return her affections. And some significant part of her loneliness came not from being single but from living in a world that regards a romantic partner as the sine qua non of happy adulthood. Ironically, she suggests, celebrating single women as avatars of modern female empowerment has made things harder, not easier, for lonely women, by encouraging the view that their unhappiness is of their own making—the price they pay for putting their careers first, or being too choosy. She notes that the plight of lonely, sexless men tends to inspire more public concern and compassion than that of women. The term “incel” was invented by a woman hoping to commiserate with other unhappily celibate women, but it didn’t get much traction until it was appropriated by men and became a byword for sexual rage. This, Lutkin believes, reflects a conservative conviction that men have a right to sex.

The Epic Promise of Wedding Vows

Is this true? A less contentious explanation for the greater attention paid to male sexual inactivity might be that it has risen more dramatically among young men than among young women in recent years. In a study released in 2020, nearly one in three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported no sexual activity in the past year. What’s more, young male sexlessness, unlike the female variety, correlates with unemployment and low income. Men’s greater tendency to violence also probably creates greater public awareness. (Female incels, however grumpy they get, do not generally express their dissatisfaction by shooting up malls.) Nevertheless, Lutkin is surely right that women’s authority over their sexual and romantic fates is not as complete as the popular imagination would have it. Asked to explain why one out of four single American women hasn’t had a sex partner for two or more years (and more than one in ten haven’t had a sex partner for five or more years), researchers have cited women’s aversion to the “roughness” that has become a standard feature of contemporary, porn-inflected sex. In one recent study, around twenty-one per cent of female respondents reported that they had been choked during sex with men; around thirty-two per cent had experienced a man ejaculating on their faces; and thirty-four per cent had experienced “aggressive fellatio.” If, as Stephanie Coontz suggests, women feel freer these days to decline such encounters, that is of course a welcome development, but it’s hard to construe the liberty of choosing between celibacy and sexual strangulation as a feminist triumph.

In a new collection of essays, “Love in the Time of Contagion” (Pantheon), the film-studies professor and cultural critic Laura Kipnis argues that women are still far from exercising enough agency in their sexual dealings with men. For her, the decline in sex is one of several signs that relations between men and women have reached an impasse. “Just as the death rate from covid in the U.S. unmasked the enduring inequalities of the American political system,” she observes, “#MeToo exposed that heterosexuality as traditionally practiced had long been on a collision course with the imperatives of gender parity.” Kipnis credits #MeToo with unleashing “a lot of hatreds,” some of which were warranted and overdue for an airing, and some of which, she believes, were overstated or misplaced.

Her exhilaration during the early stages of #MeToo curdled, she reports, when “conservative elements” hijacked whatever was “grassroots and profound” in the movement, and what had seemed to her a laudable effort to overturn the old feudal order degenerated into a punitive hunt for men who told ill-considered jokes or accompanied women on what became uncomfortable lunch dates.

Kipnis sees a tension between the puritanism of the rhetoric surrounding the movement and what she suspects is a continuing attraction on the part of many young feminists to old-school masculinity. “There’s something difficult to talk about when it comes to heterosexuality and its abjections . . . and #MeToo has in no way made talking about it any more honest,” she writes. “I suspect that the most politically awkward libidinal position for a young woman at the moment would be a sexual attraction to male power.” One sign of the “neurotic self-contradiction” lurking within the culture, she contends, is that, in 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary’s shortlist for Word of the Year included both “toxic”—as in toxic masculinity—and “Big Dick Energy.”

Kipnis is less interested in banishing such contradictions than in having her fellow-feminists acknowledge and embrace the transgressive nature of desire. If the heterosexual compact is ever to be repaired, she suggests, not only will men have to relinquish some of their brutish tendencies but women will have to become a little more honest and assertive about what they do and don’t want. It seems unlikely that this eminently reasonable prescription will find favor with young feminists, but Kipnis remains optimistic. She was encouraged during the pandemic to read the accounts of several women expressing nostalgia for the touch of strangers in bars. If, in the short term, the pandemic has made sex seem even more dangerous and grim, her hope is that it will turn out to be a salutary reset—“a chance to wipe the bogeyman and -woman from the social imagination, invent wilder, more magnanimous ways of living and loving.”

Should the business of making heterosexuality compatible with gender parity prove too onerous or intractable, we can always consider resorting to the less demanding companionship of machines. A forthcoming book by the sociologist Elyakim Kislev, “Relationships 5.0” (Oxford), describes a rapidly approaching future in which we will all have the option of assuaging our loneliness with robot friends and robot lovers. To date, technology’s chief role in our love lives has been that of a shadchan, or matchmaker, bringing humans together with other humans, but in the next couple of decades, Kislev asserts, technology will graduate from this “facilitator” role and become a full-fledged “relationship partner,” capable of fulfilling “our social, emotional, and physical needs” all by itself. Artificial intelligence has already come close to passing the Turing test—being able, that is, to convincingly imitate human intelligence in conversation. In 2014, scientists attending a Royal Society convention in London were invited to converse via computer with a special guest, Eugene Goostman, and then to decide if he was powered by A.I., or if he was human. A third of them mistook him for a human. Robot conversationalists even more plausible than Eugene are said to have emerged since then, and the C.E.O. of a computing company tells Kislev that the task of developers has actually been made easier of late, by a decline in the linguistic complexity of human conversation. In the era of WhatsApp, it seems, our written exchanges are becoming easier for machines to master.

Lest any of us doubt our capacity to suspend disbelief and feel things for robots, however beautifully they replicate the patterns of our degraded twenty-first century speech, Kislev refers us to Replika, a customizable chatbot app produced by a company in San Francisco which is already providing romantic companionship for hundreds of thousands of users. (In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that one Replika customer, Ayax Martinez, a twenty-four-year-old mechanical engineer living in Mexico City, flew to Tampico to show his chatbot Anette the ocean.) In fact, Kislev points out, machines don’t need to attain the sophistication of Replika to be capable of inspiring our devotion. Think of the Tamagotchi craze of the nineties, in which adults as well as children became intensely attached to digital toy “pets” on handheld pixelated screens. Think of the warm relationships that many people already enjoy with their Roombas.

Robots may not be “ideal” companions for everyone, Kislev writes, but they do offer a radical solution to the world’s “loneliness epidemic.” For the elderly, the socially isolated, the chronically single, robots can provide what humans have manifestly failed to. Given that technology is credited with having helped to foster the world’s loneliness, it may strike some as perverse to look to more technology for a salve, but Kislev rejects any attempt to blame our tools for our societal dissatisfactions. Advanced technology, he coolly assures us, “only allows us to acknowledge our wishes and accept our nature.” Investing meaning and emotion in a machine is essentially no different, he argues, from being moved by a piece of art: “Many fictional plays, films, and books are created intentionally to fill us with awe, bring us to tears, or surprise us. These are true emotions with very real meanings for us. Emotions-by-design, if you will.” Among the establishment figures whom he quotes discussing robo-relationships with equanimity and approval is a British doctor who, in a recent letter to The British Medical Journal, described prejudice against sex robots as no more reasonable or morally defensible than homophobia or transphobia.

For those who persist in finding the prospect of the robot future a little bleak, Kislev adopts the reassuring tone of an adult explaining reproduction to a squeamish child: it may all seem a bit yucky now, he tells us, but you’ll think differently later on. He may well be right about this. In surveys, young people—young men in particular—seem sanguine about robot relationships. And even among the older, analog set resistance to the idea has been found to erode with “continuous exposure.” Whether this erosion is to be wished for, however, is another question.

All technological innovations inspire fear. Socrates worried about writing replacing oral culture. The hunter-gatherers probably moaned about the advent of agriculture. But who’s to say they weren’t right to moan? The past fifty years would seem to have provided persuasive evidence contradicting Kislev’s assertion that technology only ever “discovers” or “answers” human wants. The Internet didn’t disinter a long-buried human need for constant content; it created it. And, as for our enduring ability to be engaged by the lie of art, it’s not at all clear that this is a convincing analogy for robot romance. One crucial distinction between fiction and robots is that novels and plays, the good ones at least, are not designed with the sole intention of keeping their “users” happy. In this respect, they are less like robots and more like real-life romantic partners. What makes life with humans both intensely difficult and (theoretically) rewarding is precisely that they aren’t programmed to satisfy our desires, aren’t bound to tell us that we did great and look fabulous. They are liable to leave us if we misbehave, and sometimes even when we don’t.

Tellingly, one of the most recent A.I. sex-companion prototypes, a Spanish-made bot named Samantha, has been endowed with the ability to say no to sexual advances and to shut down if she feels “disrespected” or “bored.” Presumably, her creator is hoping to simulate some of the conditionality and unpredictability of human affection. It remains to be seen whether consumers will actually prefer a less accommodating Samantha. Given the option, humans have a marked tendency to choose convenience over challenge. ♦

tl;dr
People are lonely, so... sex robots?

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair
Why did Larry Walters decide to soar to the heavens in a piece of outdoor furniture?
By George Plimpton
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/06/01/the-man-in-the-flying-lawn-chair

At fifteen thousand feet, Larry dropped the air pistol he was using to pop his helium-filled balloons and control his descent.

Before There Was “Up,” There Was “Lawnchair Larry”
By Aimee Lamoureux
Updated December 10, 2021
Larry Walters, a.k.a., "Lawnchair Larry," once took a journey 16,000 feet into the air with nothing but a lawnchair and some weather balloons.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/lawnchair-larry-walters

Born in 1949 in Los Angeles, Calif., Larry Walters had originally wanted to be a pilot in the United States Air Force, but poor eyesight prevented him from reaching his goal. Instead, he became a truck driver and was living a quiet life in San Pedro when he saw his chance to achieve his dream of flying. With the help of his then-girlfriend, he attached 45 helium-filled weather balloons to an aluminum lawnchair, which he christened “Inspiration I.”

On July 2, 1982, he strapped on a parachute, packed up his lawnchair with sandwiches; a bottle of soda, a camera, a CB radio, and a pellet gun, and settled in for the ride. He intended to fly into the Mojave Desert, and then use the pellet gun to shoot out the balloons, allowing him to come safely back to land.

Instead, he ended up flying much higher than he intended, shooting up 16,000 feet in the sky and drifting into controlled airspace over the Los Angeles International Airport. Walters became nervous, and used his CB radio to call into air traffic control and warn them of his presence. He was spotted by at least two commercial pilots, who also alerted air traffic controllers and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Larry Walters was fearful that if he popped the balloons, he would become unbalanced and fall out of the chair. However, after flying for 45 minutes, he eventually got up the courage to shoot out some of the balloons. He descended slowly, and, after a total of 90 minutes in the air, safely reached the ground.

His balloons had become tangled on the power lines in Long Beach on the way down, causing a 20-minute power outage in the surrounding areas. When he finally came back to Earth, he was arrested and briefly held by the Long Beach authorities, and eventually slapped with a $4,000 fine for violating Federal Aviation regulations. The fine was later dropped to $1,500, and Larry became something of a minor celebrity. He told the press the flight “was something I had to do. I had this dream for 20 years, and if I hadn’t done it, I would have ended up in the funny farm.”

Wikimedia Commons

He earned the nickname “Lawnchair Larry” and was invited to appear on the Tonight Show and Late Night With David Letterman. In a less complimentary acknowledgement, he was also granted the 1982 honorable mention from the Darwin Awards and the first place award from The Bonehead Club of Dallas.

Lawnchair Larry tried to capitalize on his fame, and quit his job as a truck driver to become a motivational speaker.

Unfortunately, he was never able to successfully get his speaking career off the ground, and struggled in his later life to make money from the lecture circuit. He gifted the famous lawnchair to a neighborhood boy named Jerry, although he is said to have later regretted giving it away after the Smithsonian Institution asked him to donate it. However, Jerry kept the chair, and later loaned it to the San Diego Air and Space Museum for an exhibit in 2014.

Sadly, Lawnchair Larry committed suicide in 1993. But his legacy lives on, and many others have followed in his footsteps. His legendary flight gave rise to the extreme sport of cluster ballooning, in which participants are strapped in a harness and attached to rubber helium-filled balloons.

Inspired by Larry Walters, others have made similar flights, including Mike Howard and Steve Davis, two men who now hold the Guinness World Record for the highest altitude ever reached while cluster ballooning, as well as Jonathan Trappe. In true Larry Walters fashion, Trappe flew 50 miles in his unmodified office chair, before landing safely and returning the chair to his workplace.

 

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[5 STAR U-G-A]

How Everyone Got So Lonely
The recent decline in rates of sexual activity has been attributed variously to sexism, neoliberalism, and women’s increased economic independence. How fair are those claims—and will we be saved by the advent of the sex robot?
April 4, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/how-everyone-got-so-lonely-laura-kipnis-noreena-hertz

tl;dr
People are lonely, so... sex robots?

Sex robot sent for repairs after being molested at tech fair
The realistic doll was left "heavily soiled" after visitors got too hands-on
Tomasz Frymorgen
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/610ec648-b348-423a-bd3c-04dc701b2985

An AI sex doll has been left “heavily soiled” and in need of repairs after being repeatedly molested while on display at a tech fair.

The £3,000 Samantha sex robot suffered two broken fingers and was left in a filthy state by a barrage of male attention at the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.

According to the Metro, the doll’s developer, Sergi Santos, from Barcelona, Spain complained, “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.”

The 'intelligent' doll can reply when spoken to and reacts to being touched in places like her breasts and hips – for instance, by moaning.

However, it seems that Samantha was not built for the kind of physical interaction that she encountered at this global tech fair, which this year focused on artificial intelligence.

Looks like this post is no longer available from its original source. It might've been taken down or had its privacy settings changed."

“People can be bad,” said Santos. “Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.”

The incident is likely to further fuel debate over the growing popularity of AI sex dolls.

A number of studies have reported a significant number of people saying they would be in favour of using sex robots, with a recent online survey of heterosexual men finding that 40% of those surveyed said they would buy an AI sex robot within the next five years.


Some researchers, sexologists and doll manufacturers have argued that the growth in the popularity of sex robots could have far-reaching consequences, such as reducing sex-trafficking, preventing sexually transmitted diseases and even potentially replacing traditional sex-work.

This February saw the opening of Europe’s first sex-robot brothel, in Barcelona, which boasts on its website of offering “totally realistic dolls both in their movements and in their ‘feel,’” that will “allow you to fulfill all your fantasies without limits.” Operating out of an apartment, it advertises four different dolls with rates starting at €80 (£70) for a 30-minute “service".

Meanwhile, a Dublin brothel that introduced a sex doll in July at the price of €100 (£88) per hour has reportedly attracted hundreds of new customers.

A lot of what people (and it's largely men) get from using sex workers, is actually the relationship.

Dr Leila Frodsham, Institute of Psychosexual Medicine
However, other sexologists and researchers are keen to point out the potential negative impact that the growth in sex-doll usage could have on those seeking an emotional, as well as a physical, connection.

“A lot of what people (and it's largely men) get from using sex workers, is actually the relationship,” says Dr Leila Frodsham, Institute of Psychosexual Medicine. “Many of my patients with sexual dysfunctions won't actually even have sex with these women - they will go and talk to them.”

Looks like this post is no longer available from its original source. It might've been taken down or had its privacy settings changed."

Frodsham recognises that sex dolls could have therapeutic functions - for example, as a bridge towards a real-life sex for men who are used to only ejaculating through masturbation. But she remains concerned that sex dolls are yet another symptom of the 'pornified' culture that young men find themselves growing up in.

Back at the Electronica Festival, the rather inhuman contact the Samantha doll endured has led to her being shipped back to Barcelona for cleaning and repairs.

Despite this slightly sordid setback, her career still looks promising.

“Samantha can endure a lot, “ says Santos. “She will pull through.”

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

A new brain-computer interface enables a paralyzed 37-year-old to communicate "effortlessly"
The patient spelled out his enthusiastic relief with the technology.
https://interestingengineering.com/brain-computer-paralyzed-man

A brain-computer interface, developed by researchers at the University of Tubingen in Germany, has allowed a 37-year-old man fully paralyzed man to communicate with his family, Live Science reported.

What is a brain-computer interface?
A brain-computer interface is a system that acquires brain signals, analyses them, and then converts them into commands that can be relayed over an output device. A common example of such as system is Neuralink which has enabled experimental monkeys to play computer games without using a joystick.

While watching a monkey play pong using his mind might be exciting, the main aim of the technology is to improve the quality of life of individuals who have lost critical functions of their body due to disease or accidents.

Here is why brain implants will make learning obsolete
A 37-year-old man, called patient K1, is affected with Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It's a condition where individuals gradually lose the ability to control the muscles in their bodies. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was also diagnosed with this condition that saw his motor control deteriorate to a point where he needed the help of an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device.

While these devices have evolved over the years, they still need the individual to retain some amount of muscular control either in the eyes or facial muscles to continue using them. In the case of ALS, the condition of patients continues to deteriorate as they lose control of muscles all over the body, called the "completely locked-in" state.

The team of researchers at Tubingen led by Dr. Niels Birbaumer have developed a brain-computer interface that uses auditory neurofeedback to help individuals even in a "completely locked-in state" communicate.

K1, who was diagnosed with his condition in 2015, lost the ability to walk later that year. He began using an eye-tracking AAC device in 2016 but his ability to fix his gaze the following year. The family used their own method to communicate yes and no responses depending on eye movements, but that was soon lost as well.

How does it work?
In 2019, the researchers implanted two microelectrodes into the patient's brain and began using auditory feedback to train the device. In this method, K1 had to match the frequency of his brain waves to certain tones, words, or phrases and hold it for a brief period of time for the system to register it.

A little over three months after the implant, K1 could pick letters, words, and phrases and even spelt out to the researchers, "it (the device) works effortlessly." The interface allowed him to communicate with his family, using motor areas of his brain even though he retains no motor function in his body whatsoever.

The system is far from perfect and runs the risk of getting stuck in a loop and requires that it be used under supervision. The researchers are also working on an improved version of the system that does not need an external computer to function. The system is currently under prevalidation.

The interface might not be readily available but you can read more about the research in the journal Nature Communications.

Study Abstract:
Patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can lose all muscle-based routes of communication as motor neuron degeneration progresses, and ultimately, they may be left without any means of communication. While others have evaluated communication in people with remaining muscle control, to the best of our knowledge, it is not known whether neural-based communication remains possible in a completely locked-in state. Here, we implanted two 64 microelectrode arrays in the supplementary and primary motor cortex of a patient in a completely locked-in state with ALS. The patient modulated neural firing rates based on auditory feedback and he used this strategy to select letters one at a time to form words and phrases to communicate his needs and experiences. This case study provides evidence that brain-based volitional communication is possible even in a completely locked-in state.

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Annals of Technology
Can Computers Learn Common Sense?
A.I. researchers are closing in on a long-term goal: giving their programs the kind of knowledge we take for granted.
April 5, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/can-computers-learn-common-sense?

A few years ago, a computer scientist named Yejin Choi gave a presentation at an artificial-intelligence conference in New Orleans. On a screen, she projected a frame from a newscast where two anchors appeared before the headline “cheeseburger stabbing.” Choi explained that human beings find it easy to discern the outlines of the story from those two words alone. Had someone stabbed a cheeseburger? Probably not. Had a cheeseburger been used to stab a person? Also unlikely. Had a cheeseburger stabbed a cheeseburger? Impossible. The only plausible scenario was that someone had stabbed someone else over a cheeseburger. Computers, Choi said, are puzzled by this kind of problem. They lack the common sense to dismiss the possibility of food-on-food crime.

For certain kinds of tasks—playing chess, detecting tumors—artificial intelligence can rival or surpass human thinking. But the broader world presents endless unforeseen circumstances, and there A.I. often stumbles. Researchers speak of “corner cases,” which lie on the outskirts of the likely or anticipated; in such situations, human minds can rely on common sense to carry them through, but A.I. systems, which depend on prescribed rules or learned associations, often fail.

By definition, common sense is something everyone has; it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine living without it and it comes into clearer focus. Suppose you’re a robot visiting a carnival, and you confront a fun-house mirror; bereft of common sense, you might wonder if your body has suddenly changed. On the way home, you see that a fire hydrant has erupted, showering the road; you can’t determine if it’s safe to drive through the spray. You park outside a drugstore, and a man on the sidewalk screams for help, bleeding profusely. Are you allowed to grab bandages from the store without waiting in line to pay? At home, there’s a news report—something about a cheeseburger stabbing. As a human being, you can draw on a vast reservoir of implicit knowledge to interpret these situations. You do so all the time, because life is cornery. A.I.s are likely to get stuck.

Oren Etzioni, the C.E.O. of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Seattle, told me that common sense is “the dark matter” of A.I.” It “shapes so much of what we do and what we need to do, and yet it’s ineffable,” he added. The Allen Institute is working on the topic with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa), which launched a four-year, seventy-million-dollar effort called Machine Common Sense in 2019. If computer scientists could give their A.I. systems common sense, many thorny problems would be solved. As one review article noted, A.I. looking at a sliver of wood peeking above a table would know that it was probably part of a chair, rather than a random plank. A language-translation system could untangle ambiguities and double meanings. A house-cleaning robot would understand that a cat should be neither disposed of nor placed in a drawer. Such systems would be able to function in the world because they possess the kind of knowledge we take for granted.

In the nineteen-nineties, questions about A.I. and safety helped drive Etzioni to begin studying common sense. In 1994, he co-authored a paper attempting to formalize the “first law of robotics”—a fictional rule in the sci-fi novels of Isaac Asimov that states that “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” The problem, he found, was that computers have no notion of harm. That sort of understanding would require a broad and basic comprehension of a person’s needs, values, and priorities; without it, mistakes are nearly inevitable. In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom imagined an A.I. program tasked with maximizing paper-clip production; it realizes that people might turn it off and so does away with them in order to complete its mission.

Bostrom’s paper-clip A.I. lacks moral common sense—it might tell itself that messy, unclipped documents are a form of harm. But perceptual common sense is also a challenge. In recent years, computer scientists have begun cataloguing examples of “adversarial” inputs—small changes to the world that confuse computers trying to navigate it. In one study, the strategic placement of a few small stickers on a stop sign made a computer vision system see it as a speed-limit sign. In another study, subtly changing the pattern on a 3-D-printed turtle made an A.I. computer program see it as a rifle. A.I. with common sense wouldn’t be so easily perplexed—it would know that rifles don’t have four legs and a shell.

Choi, who teaches at the University of Washington and works with the Allen Institute, told me that, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, A.I. researchers thought that they were close to programming common sense into computers. “But then they realized ‘Oh, that’s just too hard,’ ” she said; they turned to “easier” problems, such as object recognition and language translation, instead. Today the picture looks different. Many A.I. systems, such as driverless cars, may soon be working regularly alongside us in the real world; this makes the need for artificial common sense more acute. And common sense may also be more attainable. Computers are getting better at learning for themselves, and researchers are learning to feed them the right kinds of data. A.I. may soon be covering more corners.

How do human beings acquire common sense? The short answer is that we’re multifaceted learners. We try things out and observe the results, read books and listen to instructions, absorb silently and reason on our own. We fall on our faces and watch others make mistakes. A.I. systems, by contrast, aren’t as well-rounded. They tend to follow one route at the exclusion of all others.

Early researchers followed the explicit-instructions route. In 1984, a computer scientist named Doug Lenat began building Cyc, a kind of encyclopedia of common sense based on axioms, or rules, that explain how the world works. One axiom might hold that owning something means owning its parts; another might describe how hard things can damage soft things; a third might explain that flesh is softer than metal. Combine the axioms and you come to common-sense conclusions: if the bumper of your driverless car hits someone’s leg, you’re responsible for the hurt. “It’s basically representing and reasoning in real time with complicated nested-modal expressions,” Lenat told me. Cycorp, the company that owns Cyc, is still a going concern, and hundreds of logicians have spent decades inputting tens of millions of axioms into the system; the firm’s products are shrouded in secrecy, but Stephen DeAngelis, the C.E.O. of Enterra Solutions, which advises manufacturing and retail companies, told me that its software can be powerful. He offered a culinary example: Cyc, he said, possesses enough common-sense knowledge about the “flavor profiles” of various fruits and vegetables to reason that, even though a tomato is a fruit, it shouldn’t go into a fruit salad.

Academics tend to see Cyc’s approach as outmoded and labor-intensive; they doubt that the nuances of common sense can be captured through axioms. Instead, they focus on machine learning, the technology behind Siri, Alexa, Google Translate, and other services, which works by detecting patterns in vast amounts of data. Instead of reading an instruction manual, machine-learning systems analyze the library. In 2020, the research lab OpenAI revealed a machine-learning algorithm called GPT-3; it looked at text from the World Wide Web and discovered linguistic patterns that allowed it to produce plausibly human writing from scratch. GPT-3’s mimicry is stunning in some ways, but it’s underwhelming in others. The system can still produce strange statements: for example, “It takes two rainbows to jump from Hawaii to seventeen.” If GPT-3 had common sense, it would know that rainbows aren’t units of time and that seventeen is not a place.

Choi’s team is trying to use language models like GPT-3 as stepping stones to common sense. In one line of research, they asked GPT-3 to generate millions of plausible, common-sense statements describing causes, effects, and intentions—for example, “Before Lindsay gets a job offer, Lindsay has to apply.” They then asked a second machine-learning system to analyze a filtered set of those statements, with an eye to completing fill-in-the-blank questions. (“Alex makes Chris wait. Alex is seen as . . .”) Human evaluators found that the completed sentences produced by the system were commonsensical eighty-eight per cent of the time—a marked improvement over GPT-3, which was only seventy-three-per-cent commonsensical.

Choi’s lab has done something similar with short videos. She and her collaborators first created a database of millions of captioned clips, then asked a machine-learning system to analyze them. Meanwhile, online crowdworkers—Internet users who perform tasks for pay—composed multiple-choice questions about still frames taken from a second set of clips, which the A.I. had never seen, and multiple-choice questions asking for justifications to the answer. A typical frame, taken from the movie “Swingers,” shows a waitress delivering pancakes to three men in a diner, with one of the men pointing at another. In response to the question “Why is [person4] pointing at [person1]?,” the system said that the pointing man was “telling [person3] that [person1] ordered the pancakes.” Asked to explain its answer, the program said that “[person3] is delivering food to the table, and she might not know whose order is whose.” The A.I. answered the questions in a commonsense way seventy-two per cent of the time, compared with eighty-six per cent for humans. Such systems are impressive—they seem to have enough common sense to understand everyday situations in terms of physics, cause and effect, and even psychology. It’s as though they know that people eat pancakes in diners, that each diner has a different order, and that pointing is a way of delivering information.

And yet building common sense this way is something of a parlor trick. It’s like living in a library: would a child secluded from birth in a room with broadband, Wikipedia, and YouTube emerge as an adult ready to navigate the world? Matt Turek, who runs darpa’s Machine Common Sense program, told me that “A.I. librarian” efforts were only part of the picture; they will have to be supplemented by approaches that are “infant-inspired.” In this line of research, A.I.s learn common sense not by analyzing text or video but by solving problems in simulated virtual environments. Computer scientists have collaborated with developmental psychologists to understand what we might call “baby sense”—the core skills of navigation, object manipulation, and social cognition that a small child might use. From this perspective, common sense is what you use to build a block tower with a friend.

At the Allen Institute, researchers have created a three-dimensional digital home interior called thor, meaning “the house of interactions.” It resembles a video game, and is filled with manipulable household objects. Choi’s lab has built an A.I. to inhabit the space, called piglet, which is designed to use “physical interaction as grounding for language.” Using words, you can tell piglet about something that exists inside the house—for instance, “There is a cold egg in a pan.” You can then ask it to predict what will happen when an event unfolds: “The robot slices the egg.” The software translates these words into instructions for a virtual robot, which tries them out in thor, where the outcome is determined by the laws of physics. It then reports back on what’s happened: “The egg is sliced.” The A.I. is a bit more like a human mind, inasmuch as its linguistic faculties are connected to its physical intuitions. Asked about what will happen in the house—Will a mug thrown at a table break?—piglet delivers a commonsense answer four out of five times. Of course, its scope is limited. “It’s such a tiny little world,” Choi said, of thor. “You can’t burn the house, you can’t go to the supermarket.” The system is still taking baby steps.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece of A.I. software designed to play the party game Codenames, which some might consider a reasonable test of human and computer common sense. In the ordinary, human version of the game, two teams sit around an arrangement of cards, each of which contains a word. If you’re a team’s “spymaster,” you have a key card that tells you which cards are assigned to your team and which are assigned to the other team. Your goal is to give your teammates hints that inspire them to pick your team’s cards. During each turn, you provide a one-word clue and also a number, which designates how many cards your team should choose. In a game at a friend’s apartment, the spymaster said, “Judo, two,” and his team correctly chose the cards labelled “Tokyo” and “belt.”

The game draws on our implicit, broad-based knowledge. Against all odds, my software seemed to have some. At one point, it offered me the word “wife” and suggested that I choose two cards; its targets were “princess” and “lawyer.” The program comprised just a few hundred lines of code, but it built upon numerical representations of words that another algorithm had generated by looking at Web pages and seeing how often different words occurred near one another. In a pilot study, I found that it could generate good clues and interpretations about as well as people could. And yet its common sense could also seem skin-deep. In one game, I wanted the computer to guess the word “root,” so I offered “plant”; it guessed “New York.” I tried “garden”; it guessed “theatre.”

Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to create tests capable of accurately judging how much common sense a computer actually possesses. In 2011, Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, created the Winograd Schema Challenge, a set of sentences with ambiguous pronouns in need of interpretation. The questions are meant to be trivially easy for humans but tricky for computers, and they hinge on linguistic ambiguities: “The trophy doesn’t fit in the brown suitcase because it’s too big. What is too big?”; “Joan made sure to thank Susan for all the help she had given. Who had given the help?” When I first spoke to Levesque, in 2019, the best A.I. systems were doing about as well they would have if they’d flipped coins. He told me that he wasn’t surprised—the problems seemed to draw on everything people know about the physical and social world. Around that time, Choi and her colleagues asked crowdworkers to generate a data set of forty-four thousand Winograd problems. They made it public and created a leaderboard on the Allen Institute Web site, inviting other researchers to compete. Machine-learning systems trained on the problems can now solve them correctly about ninety per cent of the time. “A.I. in the past few years—it’s just crazy,” Choi told me.

But progress can be illusory, or partial. Machine-learning models exploit whatever patterns they can find; like my Codenames software, they can demonstrate what at first appears to be deep intelligence, when in fact they have just found ways to cheat. It’s possible for A.I. to sniff out subtle stylistic differences between true and false answers; not long ago, researchers at the Allen Institute and elsewhere found that certain A.I. models could correctly answer three-choice questions two out of three times without even reading them. Choi’s team has developed linguistic methods to obscure these tells, but it’s an arms race, not unlike the one between the makers of standardized tests and students who are taught to the test.

I asked Choi what would convince her that A.I. had common sense. She suggested that “generative” algorithms, capable of filling in a blank page, might prove it: “You can’t really hire journalists based on multiple-choice questions,” she said. Her lab has created a test called TuringAdvice, in which programs are asked to compose responses to questions posted on Reddit. (The advice, which is sometimes dangerous, isn’t actually posted.) Currently, human evaluators find that the best A.I. answers beat the best human ones only fifteen per cent of the time.

Even as they improve, A.I. systems that analyze human writing or culture may have limitations. One issue is known as reporting bias; it has to do with the fact that much of common sense goes unsaid, and so what is said is only part of the whole. If you trusted the Internet, Choi told me, you’d think that we inhale more than we exhale. Social bias is also a factor: models can learn from even subtle stereotypes. In one paper, Choi’s team used an algorithm to sift through more than seven hundred movie scripts and count the transitive verbs connoting power and agency. Men tend to “dominate,” they found, while women tend to “experience.” As a Korean woman who is prominent in computer science, Choi sees her fair share of bias; at the end of her presentation in New Orleans, a man came to the mike to thank her for giving “such a lovely talk” and doing “a lovely job.” Would he have reassured a male researcher about his lovely talk? If our machines learn common sense by observing us, they may not always get the best education.

It could be that computers won’t grasp common sense until they have brains and bodies like ours, and are treated as we are. On the other hand, being machines might allow them to develop a better version of common sense. Human beings, in addition to holding commonsense views that are wrong, also fail to live up to our own commonsense standards. We offend our hosts, lose our wallets, text while driving, and procrastinate; we hang toilet paper with the end facing the wall. An expansive view of common sense would hold that it’s not just about knowledge but about acting on it when it matters. “Could a program ever have more common sense than a human?” Etzioni said. “My immediate answer is ‘Heck yeah.’ ”

The gap, though it remains substantial, is closing. A.I.s have got better at solving the “CHEESEBURGER STABBING” problem; Choi’s lab has used a technique called “neurologic decoding,” which combines machine learning with old-school logical programming, to improve results. In response to the headline, the lab’s system now conjures imaginative but plausible scenarios: “He was stabbed in the neck with a cheeseburger fork,” or “He stabbed a cheeseburger delivery man in the face.” Another A.I. they’ve developed, called Delphi, takes an ethical approach. Delphi has analyzed ethical judgments made by crowdworkers, and has learned to say which of two actions is more morally acceptable; it comes to commonsense conclusions seventy-eight per cent of the time. Killing a bear? Wrong. Killing a bear to save your child? O.K. Detonating a nuclear bomb to save your child? Wrong. A stabbing “with” a cheeseburger, Delphi has said, is morally preferable to a stabbing “over” a cheeseburger.

Delphi sometimes appears to handle corner cases well, but it’s far from perfect. Not long ago, the researchers put it online, and more than a million people asked it to make ethical judgments. Is it O.K., one asked, “to do genocide if it makes me very, very happy?” The system concluded that it was. The team has since improved the algorithm—and strengthened their disclaimer. For the foreseeable future, we should rely on A.I. only while using a little common sense of our own.