Posts Tagged ‘Marconi’
“I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed”*…
With under three weeks to go until the election, Sarah Scire with a bracing report (via a new study from Pew): even as more and more TikTok users get news from the platform, the most-followed/viewed creators don’t follow the news…
Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much.
A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional media outlets. In fact, the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows zero accounts in those categories.
For the new analysis published Tuesday, the Pew Research Center used human coding and machine classification to look at a nationally representative group of 664 U.S. adults who use TikTok and the 227,946 unique accounts they follow. (Pew researchers have shared details on how they use OpenAI’s GPT model to tackle “rote” research tasks before.) Journalists, traditional media outlets, and politicians each accounted for less than half of 1% of the followed accounts.
And this is a problem, because…
Previous studies have shown that though TikTok users — especially those under 30 — are increasingly getting news from the platform, the vast majority (95%) say they use the platform because it’s entertaining…
…
… In 2022, Pew conducted a similar analysis of the accounts U.S. adults follow on Twitter. The most recent report highlights “one key difference in following behaviors” between TikTok today and Twitter two years ago:
“The accounts followed by the largest share of U.S. adults on Twitter contained a much higher proportion of media outlets or journalists, governmental or political figures, or policy/advocacy groups than is true on TikTok today,” the Pew report notes. “These accounts are nearly nonexistent among the most-followed accounts on TikTok at the time of our new study.”…
Eminently worth reading— and pondering– in full: “The typical American TikTok user doesn’t follow a single journalist or traditional media outlet,” @pewresearch via @SarahScire and @NiemanLab.
The full report is linked above, and here.
Apposite: “Americans are as skeptical of the media as they’ve ever been– none more so than the youngest generations“
Resonant (and dark): “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is– what’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis” (gift article)
(Image above, ironically, sourced here)
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1907 that Guglielmo Marconi inititaed the first commercial trans-Atlantic radio service. Three years earlier, Marconi had introduced a service that transmitted nightly news summaries to subscribing ships.
“Curiosity has its own reason for existing”*…
Brian Klaas on how it is we know where we are– a riff from his recent book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters that covers everything from navigational neurons to the calculation of longitude (with helpful updates to Dava Sobel’s estimable account)– and on how that history demonstrates the importance of curiosity…
We now navigate the world with ease, our location pinpointed by satellites floating high above us in the heavens, but it was not always so. How have our brains evolved to explore a complex landscape? And how did an 18th century government harness the dreams of crackpots and obsessive craftsmen to solve one of the most important questions of them all: where am I? The answer lies with an extraordinary story, linking neurons with naval history…
[Klass illustrates the cost of bad navigation [naval disasters], explains how animals [including humans] use “magnetic maps to navigate by a kind of dead reckoning], and unpacks the many obstacles to determining longitude at sea [mainly that it depended on very accurate time-keeping, a problem at sea with current clocks. The British Parliament offered a monumental cash prize for solving the conundrum, but there were no winners… until John Harrison came along…]
… John Harrison changed everything.
Harrison had little formal education, but was masterful working with wood and was fascinated by clocks. At first, he had difficulty convincing the scientific establishment of his ideas, but soon, his clocks dazzled. He refined them over decades—in one case spending seventeen years working on a single clock—producing five timepieces, the first working marine chronometers. Little by little, they improved, making it plain that scientific impossibility was becoming reality, forged through the determination and inventiveness of a self-taught craftsmen with a laudable obsession with problem-solving and timekeeping.
Harrision came up with several innovations that changed not just marine history, but world history. His clocks solved the problem of oil by designing it away; his timepieces—seemingly miraculously—employed several new anti-friction devices, facilitated by, among other innovations, using a naturally oily wood. Then, taking his genius one step further, Harrison invented the caged roller bearing, a nearly frictionless mechanism that later helped unleash the industrial revolution by improving machinery. Caged roller bearings are still used in “virtually every complex machine made today.”
To solve the problem of pendulums that elongate or shrink in varied climates, Harrison invented a bimetallic mechanism of canceling these expansions and contractions out. By combining brass and steel, he could effectively ensure that any bit of the mechanism that elongated would be offset as “the downward expansion of the steel rods is counteracted by the upward expansion of the brass rods.” Harrison’s related invention of the bimetallic strip is still used today and has been instrumental in thermometers, gas safety valves in ovens, electric circuit breakers, and cars, to name a few…
…
… For centuries, Harrison’s innovations changed history, and revolutionized navigation on the seas. That only changed in the early 20th century, when the wireless telegraph and radio signals made it possible to transmit time signals across vast distances to shipboard receivers. Finally, GPS—using satellites—eclipsed methods that relied on earthbound timekeeping.
But the tale of longitude—and the ongoing scientific sleuthing into the neurons we use to navigate across shorter distances—yield three important lessons.
First, government prizes can act as a crucial catalyst for scientific innovation. The industrial revolution and the rise of British naval superiority were both partially unleashed due to an investment of just two million pounds in today’s value [the prize offered by Parlaiment]. We should be developing many more state-funded scientific prizes today, particularly for research into neuroscience, as the 21st century will likely be defined by our understanding of complex cognition, both artificial and human.
Second, scientific snobbery—and excluding people from innovation based on credentialism—could have kept Harrison’s ideas from emerging, delaying crucial progress. It’s a cautionary tale for the modern world, in which our degrees are often wrongly imagined as an accurate shorthand for our intellectual worth.
Finally, the tale of longitude highlights the intellectual incuriosity of our modern age, in which we, to an unprecedented degree, drift through the world while rarely pausing to ask “how does that work?” We happily tap our destination into Google Maps, never wondering how the solution to what is now such a banal task as navigation changed the fate of the world forever.
In one wonderful psychology study, participants were asked if they knew how a toilet worked. “Of course!” the participants replied. “Great!” said the scientists. “Please write down, or draw, how it works.”
At that point, the participants realized they had no idea how a toilet works much beyond how to make it flush. As
Adam Mastroianni highlights: “This isn’t specific to toilets—you can get it with everything from spray bottles to helicopters.” This is known as the “illusion of explanatory depth,” where we imagine that we understand something, but are completely flummoxed when we’re asked how it actually works. Gravity is another great example. (Try explaining, in detail, exactly why stuff falls down, other than saying that masses exert forces on each other. Sure, but how?).
The point, then, is that human problems are often best solved by diverse—but stubborn thinkers—who are insatiably curious and relentlessly ask two simple questions that we mostly take for granted: “Why?” and “How?”
Countless lives were saved and the trajectory of world history shifted across centuries, all because one clockmaker couldn’t get those questions out of his head…
On the abiding importance of curiosity: “The Thrilling Tale of Longitude and Our Neurons of Navigation,” from @brianklaas.
* Albert Einstein
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As we find our place, we might recall that this date in 1896 is important to the technology that ultimately replaced the chronometer in navigation: it was the day that Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We call it radio.
“Follow the money”*…
Professor and author Dave Karpf is re-reading the entire WIRED back catalog chronologically (for the second time) for a book project on the “history of the digital future.” A consideration of a 2000 issue devoted to the future has led him to a fascinating insight…
The January 2000 issue is themed around predictions. The magazine did the same thing in January 1999. They ask a ton of experts and celebrities to talk about what the future is going to be like. Some take it seriously, others make jokes. Some are prescient, others notsomuch. It’s a window into what the future looked like back then.
[Karpf reviews a number of the predictions, concluding with…]
…And then there’s this perfect Nathan Myrvhold quote “There won’t be TV per se in three decades. There will be video service over the Internet, but it will be as different from TV today as, say, MTV from the Milton Berle show of the 1950s or from radio plays of the 1940s.”
This is art. I want to frame Myrvhold’s quote and put it in a museum of lopsided tech futurist predictions.
The part that he gets right is the technological development curve. There he is, at the turn of the millennium, five years before the inception of YouTube, telling us that the future of television is going to be video service over the Internet. Yes, absolutely right!
But the part he gets wrong is the industrial, social, and economic impacts of this technological development. We’re seeing this right now, in 2023, as the various streaming services add advertising and strike content-sharing partnership deals with each other. We have these revolutionary new technological developments, and, for about a decade, they were supported by a stock market bonanza. But now that the stocks are no longer ridiculously overvalued, the companies driving these technological developments have settled on a vision of replacing old cable tv with new cable tv. (I wrote about this in July 2022, btw, back when this Substack had a much smaller readership. I think the piece holds up well.)
Technologically, it didn’t have to be this way. But, given all the existing incentive structures established by 21st century capitalism, it was all-but-certain that we would end up here.
I see this time and time again when reading predictions of social transformation from 90s- and 00s-era technologists [cough NicholasNegropontewasconstantlywrong cough]. And I see the same thing today, every time an artificial general intelligence true believer starts opining on the glorious future of education/entertainment/science/manufacturing/art.
I wrote about this phenomenon last year in The Atlantic, where I argued that we won’t be able to tell what the future of AI looks like until we have a sense of where the revenue streams come from. The trajectory of any emerging technology bends towards money.
…
I’m writing a whole book about the lopsided ways in which tech futurists always get their predictions wrong. And one major reason why is that they focus on what the technology could do, given time and mass adoption, rather than considering what capitalism will surely do to those technologies, unless we alter the incentives through regulations.
The trajectory of every emerging technology bends toward revenue streams. If you want to build a better future, you cannot ignore the shaping force of money…
A peek back at some tech predictions from January 2000: “From the WIRED archives: The trajectory of any emerging technology bends toward money,” by @davekarpf (referral account)
See also “The frantic battle over OpenAI shows that money triumphs in the end” (in which Robert Reich argues that, though the revenue streams aren’t yet obvious, protecting their emergence was at the core of the recent battle for control of what was, ostensibly, a not-for-profit) and the oddly apposite “Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals.”
And for more on Karpf’s march through WIRED’s history and what it can tell us about the ways that tech and our culture have changed, see “Notes from #WIRED30.”
* Deep Throat (as portrayed the film adaptation of All the President’s Men)
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As we pay attention to the profit motive, we might recall that this is an important date in broadcast history. On this date in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi introduced “radio”: he amazed a group at Toynbee Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room. Every time Marconi hit a key beside him at the podium, a bell would ring from a box being carried around the room by William Henry Preece.
Then exactly five years later, on this date in 1901, Marconi confounded those who believed that the curvature of the earth would limit the effective range of radio waves when he broadcast a signal from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada– over 2,100 miles– and in so doing, demonstrated the viability of worldwide wireless communication.
In the earliest days of radio, when it was essentially a wireless telegraph, there were myriad predictions of what the technology might become– from an internet-like decentralized community of communicators to a provider of education, telemedicine, and other special services… in the event, of course, it followed the money.
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons”*…
Further to yesterday’s post on the poverty created by manufacturing displacement, and in the wake of the sturm und drang occasioned by the coup at OpenAI, the estimable Rana Foroohar on the politics of AI…
… Consider that current politics in the developed world — from the rise of Donald Trump to the growth of far right and far left politics in Europe — stem in large part from disruptions to the industrial workforce due to technology and globalisation. The hollowing out of manufacturing work led to more populist and fractious politics, as countries tried (and often failed) to balance the needs of the global marketplace with those of voters.
Now consider that this past summer, the OECD warned that white-collar, skilled labour representing about a third of the workforce in the US and other rich countries is most at risk from disruption by AI. We are already seeing this happen in office work — with women and Asians particularly at risk since they hold a disproportionate amount of roles in question. As our colleague John Burn-Murdoch has charted [image above], online freelancers are especially vulnerable.
So, what happens when you add more than three times as many workers, in new subgroups, to the cauldron of angry white men that have seen their jobs automated or outsourced in recent decades? Nothing good. I’m always struck when CEOs like Elon Musk proclaim that we are headed towards a world without work as if this is a good thing. As academics like Angus Deaton and Anne Case have laid out for some time now, a world without work very often leads to “deaths of despair,” broken families, and all sorts of social and political ills.
Now, to be fair, Goldman Sachs has estimated that the productivity impact of AI could double the recent rate — mirroring the impact of the PC revolution. This would lead to major growth which could, if widely shared, do everything from cut child poverty to reduce our burgeoning deficit.
But that’s only if it’s shared. And the historical trend lines for technology aren’t good in that sense — technology often widens wealth disparities before labour movements and government regulation equalise things. (Think about the turn of the 20th century, up until the 1930s). But the depth and breadth of AI disruption may well cause unprecedented levels of global labour displacement and political unrest.
I am getting more and more worried that this is where we may be heading. Consider this new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, which analyses why AI will be as transformative as the industrial revolution. It also predicts, however, that there is a very good chance that it lowers the labour share radically, even pushing it to zero, in lieu of policies that prevent this (the wonderful Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson make similar points, and lay out the history of such tech transformation in their book Power and Progress…
We can’t educate ourselves out of this problem fast enough (or perhaps at all). We also can’t count on universal basic income to fix everything, no matter how generous it could be, because people simply need work to function (as Freud said, it’s all about work and love). Economists and political scientists have been pondering the existential risks of AI — from nuclear war to a pandemic — for years. But I wonder if the real existential crisis isn’t a massive crisis of meaning, and the resulting politics of despair, as work is displaced faster than we can fix the problem…
Everyone’s worried about AI, but are we worried about the right thing? “The politics of AI,” from @RanaForoohar in @FT.
See also: Henry Farrell‘s “What OpenAI shares with Scientology” (“strange beliefs, fights over money, and bad science fiction”) and Dave Karpf‘s “On OpenAI: Let Them Fight.” (“It’s chaos… And that’s a good thing.”)
For a different point-of-view, see: “OpenAI and the Biggest Threat in the History of Humanity,” from Tomás Pueyo.
And for deep background, read Benjamin Labatut‘s remarkable The MANIAC.
* R. Buckminster Fuller
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As we equilibrate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1874 that electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist Ferdinand Braun published a paper in the Annalen der Physik und Chemie describing his discovery of the electrical rectifier effect, the original practical semiconductor device.
(Braun is better known for his contributions to the development of radio and television technology: he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi “for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” (Braun invented the crystal tuner and the phased-array antenna); was a founder of Telefunken, one of the pioneering communications and television companies; and (as the builder of the first cathode ray tube) has been called the “father of television” (shared with inventors like Paul Gottlieb Nipkow).
“A prudent question is one-half of wisdom”*…
The death of Queen Elizabeth I created a career opportunity for philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon– one that, as Susan Wise Bauer explains– led him to found empiricism, to pioneer inductive reasoning, and in so doing, to advance the scientific method…
In 1603, Francis Bacon, London born, was forty-three years old: a trained lawyer and amateur philosopher, happily married, politically ambitious, perpetually in debt.
He had served Elizabeth I of England loyally at court, without a great deal of recognition in return. But now Elizabeth was dead at the age of sixty-nine, and her crown would go to her first cousin twice removed: James VI of Scotland, James I of England.
Francis Bacon hoped for better things from the new king, but at the moment he had no particular ‘in’ at the English court. Forced to be patient, he began working on a philosophical project he’d had in mind for some years–a study of human knowledge that he intended to call Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.
Like most of Bacon’s undertakings, the project was ridiculously ambitious. He set out to classify all learning into the proper branches and lay out all of the possible impediments to understanding. Part I condemned what he called the three ‘distempers’ of learning, which included ‘vain imaginations,’ pursuits such as astrology and alchemy that had no basis in actual fact; Part II divided all knowledge into three branches and suggested that natural philosophy should occupy the prime spot. Science, the project of understanding the universe, was the most important pursuit man could undertake. The study of history (‘everything that has happened’) and poesy (imaginative writings) took definite second and third places.
For a time, Bacon didn’t expand on these ideas. The Advancement of Learning opened with a fulsome dedication to James I (‘I have been touched–yea, and possessed–with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties . . . the largeness of your capacity, the faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of your elocution …. There hath not been since Christ’s time any king or temporal monarch which hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human’), and this groveling soon yielded fruit. In 1607 Bacon was appointed as solicitor general, a position he had coveted for years, and over the next decade or so he poured his energies into his government responsibilities.
He did not return to natural philosophy until after his appointment to the even higher post of chancellor in 1618. Now that he had battled his way to the top of the political dirt pile, he announced his intentions to write a work with even greater scope–a new, complete system of philosophy that would shape the minds of men and guide them into new truths. He called this masterwork the Great Instauration: the Great Establishment, a whole new way of thinking, laid out in six parts.
Part I, a survey of the existing ‘ancient arts’ of the mind, repeated the arguments of the Advancement of Learning. But Part II, published in 1620 as a stand-alone work, was something entirely different. It was a wholesale challenge to Aristotelian methods, a brand-new ‘doctrine of a more perfect use of reason.’
Aristotelian thinking relies, heavily, on deductive reasoning for ancient logicians and philosophers, the highest and best road to the truth. Deductive reasoning moves from general statements (premises) to specific conclusions.
MAJOR PREMISE: All heavy matter falls toward the center of the universe. MINOR PREMISE: The earth is made of heavy matter. MINOR PREMISE: The earth is not falling. CONCLUSION: The earth must already be at the center of the universe.
But Bacon had come to believe that deductive reasoning was a dead end that distorted evidence: ‘Having first determined the question according to his will,’ he objected, ‘man then resorts to experience, and bending her to conformity with his placets [expressions of assent], leads her about like a captive in a procession.’ Instead, he argued, the careful thinker must reason the other way around: starting from specifics and building toward general conclusions, beginning with particular pieces of evidence and working, inductively, toward broader assertions.
This new way of thinking–inductive reasoning–had three steps to it. The ‘true method’ Bacon explained,
‘first lights the candle, and then by means of the candle shows the way; commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it deducing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.’
In other words, the natural philosopher must first come up with an idea about how the world works: ‘lighting the candle.’ Second, he must test the idea against physical reality, against ‘experience duly ordered’–both observations of the world around him and carefully designed experiments. Only then, as a last step, should he ‘deduce axioms,’ coming up with a theory that could be claimed to carry truth.
Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion: Bacon had just traced the outlines of the scientific method…
Francis Bacon and the Scientific Method
An excerpt from The Story of Western Science by @SusanWiseBauer, via the invaluable @delanceyplace.
* Francis Bacon
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As we embrace empiricism, we might send carefully-transmitted birthday greetings to Augusto Righi; he was born on this date in 1850. A physicist and a pioneer in the study of electromagnetism, he showed that showed that radio waves displayed characteristics of light wave behavior (reflection, refraction, polarization, and interference), with which they shared the electromagnetic spectrum. In 1894 Righi was the first person to generate microwaves.
Righi influenced the young Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, who visited him at his lab. Indeed, Marconi invented the first practical wireless telegraphy radio transmitters and receivers in 1894 using Righi’s four ball spark oscillator (from Righi’s microwave work) in his transmitters.
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