Nautilus Magazine: The Robot Economy Will Run on Blockchain

All of this will be based on the exchange of information. Not just technical information—robots will need to develop and maintain economic relationships. Whether for a parts order or a service agreement with another company, many aspects of their work will revolve around currency transactions. Human operators will be too slow to oversee these transactions, which we can expect to happen at 20,000 transactions per second (assuming there is at least one robotic device per person). Therefore, for the future we are building, we will need to invent not just robots—but robot money and robot markets.  

Like with any other economy, the robot economy (or robonomics) will need to solve the problem of trust. It might seem that the very act of carrying out transactions in the digital world is a solution to the trust problem. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Automation can help find and fight fraud, but it can also create super-efficient scam agents. What’s more, transaction costs can spiral out of control when high-frequency algorithms begin to act opportunistically. The cost of verifying that a contract has been properly executed is another problem. In the world of people, the outcome of a transaction is confirmed by the contract signatories. How autonomous agents will do that is not so clear. [...]

Blockchain offers another important advantage: It can help organize how robots do their work in the first place. Experts in the field of robotics have long been exploring the problem of finding the best way for a set of robots to accomplish a common task.1 One of the potential solutions is a market mechanism, leveraging game theory, decision theory, and economic mechanisms to assign work.2,3 Blockchain can help build this mechanism, and enable the precise planning of tasks, evaluation of results, and distribution of resources. [...]

The volume of goods and services produced by man will undoubtedly fall significantly, but not to zero. At the same time, the value of man’s economic output will drastically increase. Hand-made goods will gain luxury status, meriting a special label—“Made by Human.” Eventually, this will apply to creative activity, too. Work that involves one man or woman supporting another, and which cannot be simply automated, will start to receive governmental support, along the lines of a universal basic income. In the end, being an ordinary, honest, and aware citizen will become a job in itself, and one that we can all aspire to.

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Nautilus Magazine: Hitler and the Naming of the Shrew

In yesterday’s newspapers, the Führer read an item regarding the changes of name ratified by the German Society for Mammalogy on the occasion of its 15th General Assembly. The Führer subsequently instructed me to communicate to the responsible parties, in no uncertain terms, that these changes of name are to be reversed immediately. Should members of the Society for Mammalogy have nothing more essential to the war effort or smarter to do, perhaps an extended stint in the construction battalion on the Russian front could be arranged. Should such asinine renamings occur once more, the Führer will unquestionably take appropriate measures; under no circumstance should terms that have become established over the course of many years be altered in this fashion.[...]

The systematic placement of the shrew, or Spitzmaus, is determined in much the same way. They, too, fail to possess the mouse characteristics in question, although they do share traits with moles and hedgehogs, as well as with the solenodon (meaning “slotted tooth”), which is a venomous critter native exclusively to the Caribbean islands. They are now situated under the wondrous designation Eulipotyphla, but only since 1999. How they are related—along with ties to an array of other mammal families, such as tenrecs, desmans, and golden moles—has not been conclusively explained, however, and an overwhelming glut of designations is assigned to various combinations of these animal groups. Dating back to Carl Linnaeus’s 1758 coinage, the most widely used term for shrews, hedgehogs, moles, and all manner of more or less exotic animals is Insectivora, or insect eater. The idea that they can be traced to a common ancestor—that is to say, the idea that Insectivora comprises a natural, evolutionarily justifiable unit—is viewed today as improbable. Unquestionably, however (and this is what’s of greatest interest to us here), shrews are not connected to either rodents (even muroids) or bats. [...]

Pohle’s article, which predates the society’s 15th General Assembly and Hitler’s emotional veto by more than a year, is a particularly interesting source because he also shares his actual motivations for the suggested changes. His emphatic objective is to see “the term ‘Maus’ disappear, responsible as it is for laypersons’ wont to lump the animals together with actual mice.” In the estimation of these laypersons, mice are something “ugly and destructive that must be fought, or ideally exterminated.” Shrews and bats, harmless as they are to humans, are thus subject to the same brutal fate. Pohle hopes for a “shift in perspective” to occur, once the endangered animals are no longer referred to as mice. What to do, then? Pohle would prefer the term Spitz for Spitzmaus, but it’s already been assigned to a dog breed. Rüssler could also work, only it already applies to some other insectivore. That leaves Spitzer, a name that emphasizes the pointy head as a distinguishing characteristic and is still available. Pohle wants a name for bats without “Maus” but happily with a nod to the animals’ flying ability. Most names of this kind are already employed for birds, and “Flatterer” or “flutterer” could only logically be used for a certain population of bats, namely, those bad at flying. “Flieger” or “flyer,” another hot candidate, is also in use by various other animal groups. But why, Pohle asks the reader, would one even need to say “Fledermaus,” when “Fleder” actually makes perfect sense?

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The New Yorker: In the Wake of Khashoggi’s Disappearance, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Is Pushed to the Brink

Indeed, if there is any lesson to be learned from this terrible affair, it’s how blind so much of official Washington and the American press were to M.B.S.’s true nature. When the crown prince visited the United States earlier this year, he was fêted in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and, of course, by the Trump White House, as a messiah—in the mold of Gorbachev or Gandhi. “Historic night it was,’’ Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, the actor, wrote, on Instagram, of a dinner with M.B.S. hosted by Rupert Murdoch at his vineyard in Bel Air.

It was the Trump White House that went the furthest, basing its entire Middle East strategy on the vision and maturity of the thirty-three-year-old monarch. As I detailed in my profile of M.B.S., earlier this year, Jared Kushner, sitting down with aides in the White House, unfurled a map of the Middle East shortly after Inauguration Day and wrung his hands at the dire state of the region. He dubbed M.B.S., still the deputy crown prince at the time, “the change agent,” the man who would save Saudi Arabia from otherwise certain doom. Kushner threw the Administration’s support behind him. Not long after, and not least because of the White House’s boost, M.B.S.’s chief rivals, including his cousin, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, were dispatched. It was ugly, but no one seemed to mind. President Trump’s visit to the Saudi kingdom—his first trip abroad—was an orgy of mutual admiration and monarchical excess. [...]

M.B.S. told his countrymen that, in cracking down on corruption, he was doing the dirty work on their behalf. But there was no luxury that he denied himself. In 2015, while vacationing in the South of France, he bought a yacht, the Serene, from a Russian vodka tycoon, for five hundred and fifty million dollars. He bought a château west of Paris, with a cinema and a moat with a submerged glass chamber for viewing carp. And, in 2017, he reportedly spent four hundred and fifty million dollars on “Salvator Mundi,’’ the Leonardo da Vinci portrait of Jesus Christ, which he donated to the new branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the fiefdom of his fellow-prince M.B.Z. [...]

The question now confronting Saudi leaders—and American ones—is whether M.B.S. can and should become king. At a glance, it seems unlikely that King Salman would part with M.B.S., long his favorite son. The humiliation for the House of Saud might be too much to endure. Even if Salman were inclined to remove M.B.S. from the line of succession, who could replace him? Nearly all of M.B.S.’s rivals have been imprisoned or humiliated.

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UnHerd: The surprising supporters of the strongman in Brazil

Plotted against the Left-Right spectrum, the responses form a striking V-shape. People who identify at the extremes of the political spectrum are far more likely to value democracy than those who identify at the centre. While 56.4% of the far-Left and 60% of the far-Right view democracy as “absolutely important”, only 37.5% of the centre agrees.  [...]

Here again, we find that support for democracy caves at the centre. Compared to 67% at the far-Left and 69% at the far-Right, only 46% of the centre believes that free elections are an “essential characteristic of democracy”. [...]

Once more, it is at the centre where authoritarianism finds its strongest support. A total of 76.6% – over three-quarters – of self-identified centrists view “strong” leadership as a “very good” or “fairly good” way to govern their country. In other words, these respondents are not just critical of democracy – they are actively enthusiastic for an authoritarian transition.  [...]

These figures provide an important clue to Bolsonaro’s success and the trends are backed up by more recent evidence. Nostalgia for Brazil’s military dictatorship is on the rise: according to a 2017 poll, 43% of Brazilians support bringing it back, compared with just 35% a year earlier. Their nostalgia heavily favours Bolsonaro, who has long considered himself a torchbearer for Brazil’s dictatorship. “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing!” he screamed back in 1999. “Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do.”[...]

In other words, he is consolidating precisely the constituency that most commentators in advanced democracies like Britain believe to be the backstop against authoritarianism. This is one of the key takeaways from the Brazilian election: our faith in the middle class is misplaced. Strongmen often find support among middle-class moderates, who trust them to advance middle-class interests against the redistributive preferences of the poor.

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The Guardian: Mike Pompeo fails to bring Jamal Khashoggi scandal under control

It did not go to plan. The US secretary of state’s two-day trip has seemingly led Saudi Arabia and Turkey to dig further into positions that are starting to seem irreconcilable. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not taken Washington’s bait – a push to blame elements of the Saudi state for Khashoggi’s death, but not the royal court itself. Instead, he has reiterated denials of any state connection to Khashoggi’s death inside the consulate. [...]

Erdoğan, a master tactician, is showing himself as a competent strategist. Using this crisis to diminish Saudi Arabia while cementing Turkey as a rising power in the Islamic world appears to be a consideration that eclipses the lucre offered by Saudi officials to make this all go away.

The steady leaks have been extremely difficult for Bin Salman to combat, and all the more so on Wednesday with a startling partial transcript that claimed the kingdom’s lead forensic scientist had told other assassins to listen to music as they dismembered Khashoggi on a table inside the consulate after slicing off his fingers. [...]

He is in so deep that even a partial confession at this stage would represent a humiliation that could eat into his domestic base, which has mostly accepted the state line that Khashoggi’s disappearance was a conspiratorial collaboration of Qatar and Turkey - two countries aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the current Saudi regime views as one of its two mortal foes.

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UnHerd: Why we must suppress technological progress

It’s pure speculation, of course. And, from a serious historical point of view, one can take issue with some or all of its counterfactual logic. Yet it asks a supremely important question: not the ‘what if?’ that is the premise of the novel, but whether civilisations should ever suppress science and technology.  [...]

The conventional wisdom was that the use of sterilisation to eliminate congenital ‘weaknesses’ from the population was a reasonable, indeed progressive, thing to do. There were some experts who had doubts as to the practicality or effectiveness of such measures, but few with moral qualms. The theories were put into action in many countries including that exemplar of social democracy, Sweden – where something like 15,000 people were sterilised as a condition of release from institutions (with a further 5,000 or more sterilised in other coercive circumstances). [...]

The range of traits, both physical and psychological, whose incidence we could interfere with is expanding. Writing for UnHerd this week, Tom Chivers explains just how close we are to making genetic edits to boost IQ. He also suggests that the Chinese government is taking a disturbingly close interest in the technology.  [...]

Moreover, the real choice is not between progress and no progress, but between different paths of technological development. That’s because in suppressing one technological path we can open up opportunities along another. For instance, while climate change agreements weaken the case for investment in polluting technologies they have the opposite effect on clean technologies. As restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions have tightened, we’ve seen sustained progress across a range of low carbon technologies including renewables, smart grids, energy storage and electric vehicles.

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UnHerd: Time to put the fat cats of capitalism on a diet

It is not hard to see how a proposal by Britain’s hard-left Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for top pay to be capped at twenty times the wage of a company’s lowest paid worker could find support among 57% of the British public3. While the average CEO pay package was almost £5.5 million in 2015, just a quarter of the FTSE 100 companies were accredited as Living Wage employers – committed to paying a minimum £8.45 an hour in the UK4. In America, 50% of the public favour limiting the pay of big business executives5.  [...]

In fact, other countries have managed without resorting to such excess. An internationally comparative measure is compiled by Bloomberg, with America and the UK topping the list for developed nations7. By this measure bosses in America make 300 times that of the average person, while British bosses earn 230 times as much. The ratio for Australia is 113 to one, in France it is 70:1 and in Denmark 83:1, clearly showing that sky-high pay is not a prerequisite of capitalism, but rather a feature of particular market models. Models that have lost the faith of the public.

The rise of share options as part of executive compensation is one reason for this disparity. Already large CEO pay packets in American and UK firms have risen in line with stocks, widening the differential between the pay of executives and their subordinates8. American CEOs are particularly likely to have these incentives compared to their European counterparts. Weak corporate governance is another factor, with European firms more likely to experience closer scrutiny from creditors and independent boards. In contrast, American firms are more likely to combine the CEO and Chairman role, plainly undermining the independent scrutiny function of the board9.  Harvard Law School found that as well as being an “inherent conflict of interest”, having a combined CEO/Chairman costs more, presents greater risk and delivers lower stock returns over the long term10. [...]

Shareholders should think again. Analysis by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhill Mullainathan found that in companies with poor governance, CEOs typically pay themselves more for improvements in profit which arise from luck. They are also more likely to award themselves stock options at lower cost. Adding a large shareholder to the board led to a sizeable reduction in pay for luck, for example, by 23-33%13.  

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The New York Review of Books: The Khashoggi Killing: America’s Part in a Saudi Horror

The present leadership aside, there is nothing very new about the special relationship. The George W. Bush administration maintained close ties to Riyadh, despite the involvement of fifteen Saudis in the September 11 attacks and the pervasive influence of Saudi-funded Islamism on jihadist movements around the globe. The Obama administration was even more assiduous in courting the Saudis. According to a Congressional Research Service study, between 2010 and 2015 the US concluded a record $111 billion in arms deals with the Kingdom, notwithstanding a Saudi crackdown on peaceful protesters in neighboring Bahrain and a Saudi-backed military coup against Egypt’s first democratically-elected government.

And it was during the Obama years that MBS and his father, King Salman, ascended to power. Notably, the Obama administration did not flinch when MBS launched the disastrous Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen in March 2015, apparently without consulting the White House. Sustained by US arms sales, the brutal Saudi-led offensive has killed tens of thousands of civilians and pushed millions of children to the brink of starvation, creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. In August, UN investigators issued a report accusing the Saudis and other parties in the conflict of possible war crimes. Even as the UN findings were coming out, the Republican-led Senate rejected a measure to cut off US military support in next year’s defense appropriations bill. [...]

America’s failure to take a stand against the ruthless treatment of reformers like al-Qahtani and al-Khair has increasingly put us on the wrong side of history. Even aside from our moral standing in the world order, US support for Saudi adventures like the invasion of Bahrain or the campaign in Yemen have done nothing to serve American strategic interests. In his recent book Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States Since FDR, Riedel argues that Washington would do better to treat the Saudi monarchy like Russia and China in the late phases of Communism: engage on areas of common interest, but push back on reform and call them out for human rights abuses.

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Quartz: With a new €100 million clean-energy fund, Bill Gates is helping Europe be bolder

Moedes and Gates yesterday (Oct. 17) launched Breakthrough Energy Europe, a €100 million ($115 million) fund to invest in “radical” clean-energy technologies. Half the amount will come from InnovFin, a European Investment Bank financing tool for research and innovation projects, and the other half from Breakthrough Energy, which includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a $1 billion fund backed by Gates and a group of some of the world’s richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and Richard Branson, and Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a network of institutions, corporations, and influential individuals that Gates can draw from when his team needs expertise and funds.[...]

BEV has invested in 20 startups to date, Gates said. Nine of those investments are public (Quartz was the first to report two investments in June and seven more in September). Gates noted that those investments have so far primarily focused on North America, but through Breakthrough Energy Europe, the fund will now open offices in the EU and will invest in European clean-energy companies. Gates mentioned energy storage and technologies to cut emissions from the industrial and agricultural sectors as potential targets.

The goal of BEV is to invest in high-risk, high-reward startups. A team of entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors, based in Boston, makes the decision about which companies to fund, but there is one overarching criterion: companies need to show that their technology has the potential to cut as much as 500 million metric tons of annual greenhouse-gas emissions. (This criterion will also apply to the Breakthrough Energy Europe fund, according to a spokesperson for the EU.)

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