In Our Bunkers

Zoom conference screen (J Post image)

Videoconferencing has been used in business since the 1990's, but widespread consumer adaptation had been waiting for a catalyst. In March, 2020 it arrived with a vengeance.

Home WiFi + easy-to-use software + multiple devices + low cost/free + coronavirus = the Zoom explosion.

The WSJ asks if consumer videoconferencing will permanently alter our methods of interacting.

You’d be hard-pressed to name another technology that’s been so quickly and blindly adopted as Zoom. Television took years. Social media grew in fits and starts (some of you will remember Friendster). But in the past few weeks, I’ve been invited to Zoom work meetings, happy hours, poker games and Easter brunches. I have weekly Saturday-morning coffees with my buddy Joe who’s isolating a few blocks from me in Brooklyn. Friends have attended Zoom weddings and seders, court proceedings and dance parties. “SNL” even recorded its latest episode on the now-ubiquitous platform, with host Tom Hanks performing the monologue from his (surprisingly unglamorous) kitchen.

This pandemic too shall pass, but the professionally prescient are already debating what parts of this novel lifestyle will continue when it does. “We’re developing new habits and new comfort and new solace in these behaviors,” said Matt Klein, director of strategy for Sparks & Honey, a consultancy that studies trends. “But when we’re increasing the repetition of these things, over time, they’re going to become more normalized.”

Those of us who pressed the flesh for decades will go back to in-person meetings with eagerness. But the post-COVID19 generation probably won't. An historical example is e-mail, which didn't eliminate letter-writing for those who grew up writing letters. Four decades later, the texting-with-emojis cohort can barely compose an email, much less a real printed letter.

I have to put in an admiring word about Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), whose science fiction I read avidly in my youth. Sentient robots with vast powers are no longer thought to be impossible, and his three laws of robotics (1942) now are the starting point for discussion of intelligent-machine ethics. What Isaac Asimov wrestled with nearly 80 years ago is relevant today.

Another of the writer's creations, albeit minor, was the planet of Solaria (The Naked Sun - 1957), which was one of many Earth colonies that had lost touch with the home world in the Asimovian future history of the galaxy. Solaria is relevant today because it was a world of extreme social distancing. From a 2011 research paper: [bold added]

Solaria was a planet inhabited by Spacer descendants. The 50th and last Spacer world settled, it had perhaps the most eccentric culture of all of them. Originally, there were about 20,000 people living alone in vast estates. Solarians’ lives were marked by technology: citizens never had to meet, save for sexual contact for reproductive purposes. All other contact was accomplished by sophisticated holographic viewing systems, with most Solarians exhibiting a strong phobia towards actual contact, or even being in the same room as another human. All work was done by robots: there were indeed thousands of robots for every Solarian. As centuries went by, Solaria became even more rigidly and obsessively isolationist...

Solaria is a fictional planet in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series. The author draws on this metaphor to warn against the risks of dehumanization that may be brought about by an excessive and indiscriminate technical progress. In the 1950s, Asimov’s novel well embodied the common fear according to which technology would have progressively destroyed social interaction. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, our lives are marked by technology almost as those of Solarians. The widespread diffusion of the broadband, the internet revolution, and the true explosion of online networks like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter is worrying social scientists, who fear the risk of growing relational poverty.

Isaac Asimov had it right. In the name of health and safety authorities are justifying all sorts of actions that would have seemed extreme a few months ago. Let's hope that lifting the "temporary" rules will be as quick and easy as imposing them.

But it's not all Zoom and gloom. We can enjoy the creative ways in which Zoom is being used to stimulate and entertain us in our bunkers.

Progress in Education

Intelligent, sentient, machines have been a staple of science fiction since Isaac Asimov began writing about robots in 1939. His robots were for the most part benign because they were programmed to obey the Three Laws of Robotics, but most science fiction is not so rosy.

Sci-fi artificial life that is smarter, faster, and stronger than human beings is often shown as something to be dreaded (see, for example, Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica). In the real world we see glimmerings of this dystopian future in killer drones, sex with robots, and worries that more jobs will be lost than created by automation.

But surely there are positive applications for human-like machines in science, education, and medicine. SynDaver Labs uses

a library of polymers to craft synthetic cadavers that twitch and bleed like real suffering humans.

Hospitals and med schools use the fakes to teach anatomy and train surgeons, and the most lifelike model is the $95,000 SynDaver Patient. This exquisite corpse can be controlled wirelessly so practitioners can rehearse elaborate medical scenarios in which the patient goes into shock and even “dies.”

Unlike HBO's fantasy Westworld, an amusement park where human beings can torture, rape, and kill robots that look like humans, SynDaver's cadavers cannot think, feel, or remember anything.

At least we hope they can't.

Everything is Proceeding as Asimov Has Foreseen

"Big Data" is the plastics of the early 21st century. It's the next big thing. According to McKinsey [bold added],

"We project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively." What the industry needs is a new type of person: the data scientist. [snip]

Hilary Mason, chief scientist for the URL shortening service bit.ly, says a data scientist must have three key skills. "They can take a data set and model it mathematically and understand the math required to build those models; they can actually do that, which means they have the engineering skills…and finally they are someone who can find insights and tell stories from their data. That means asking the right questions, and that is usually the hardest piece."

Good at math, engineering, finding insights, and telling stories...if the data scientist is not the Übermensch, then he or she is at least someone who needs to have high SAT scores all around.

The late Isaac Asimov foresaw this future over a half-century ago.  His science fiction novel Foundation introduced the notion of psychohistory, in which future events could be predicted by applying statistical analysis to societal data on a vast scale. When Asimov wrote his novel in 1951, the computational technology to make psychohistory a reality seemed out of reach. That day is now here.

If the Graduate were re-imagined today:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say two words to you. Just two words.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Big Data.