Author: Andrew Sullivan

Thinking about how driverless cars will influence how we think about driving, Eric Jaffe wonders if it would be possible to program one for road rage:

I posed that question to Chris Urmson, head of Google’s self-driving car program, when I rode in the car on city streets in late April. In a strict technical sense, sure, the car could be programmed for aggression. But in line with the safety points mentioned above, Urmson said it’s “probably not the right thing to emulate all the human behavior” in programming driverless cars. … Urmson believes self-driving cars might have a therapeutic effect on aggressive driving styles. Slowly you’ll stop noticing the things that once made you irate on the road, and eventually you’ll forget they even existed. That’s a huge change in how we travel. Riding in cars, in this case, would become more like riding on trains or subways: the occasional unexpected stop will be annoying, but largely outweighed by the chances for diversion.

John Michael McGrath expects self-driving buses to be a more promising innovation than self-driving personal cars:

I strongly suspect sitting in traffic isn’t actually going to be more amusing just because your car is a robot. (Or at least, not after the first few times.) We will still need to find ways to move people more efficiently than any single-passenger vehicle can. That’s why people are mistaken when they say autonomous vehicles are going to mean the end of traditional mass transit.

Rather, the same kind of technology that allows self-driving cars should also allow transit operators to introduce self-driving buses, if voters (and transit unions) will accept it. Buses will continue to make more efficient use of the road due to physics and geometry than even the slimmest self-driving cars. Voters can be leery of driverless transit, but it can offer much higher frequency in off-peak times than systems relying on higher labour costs.

T.C. Sottek posits that driverless cars could be a boon for privacy as well, by eliminating one of our most common encounters with the police:

Privacy is about more than just data collection. It’s also about feeling secure against someone searching through your belongings. While the Bill of Rights protects citizens against unreasonable searches, it’s no guarantee that your rights won’t be violated — just ask David Eckart. Eckart’s example is extreme, but the kind of traffic stops that led to his ordeal are very common. Forty-two percent of involuntary encounters with police in the United States happen in cars, and many of these encounters lead to searches. …

In total, violations based on driver behavior accounted for 68.1 percent of traffic stops by police. In other words, human beings were pulled over in most cases because they’re human: they break the rules of the road and sometimes make mistakes. In some cases, like obeying speed limits, there’s even a cultural expectation that most people will routinely break the law. As the ACLU’s senior policy analyst Jay Stanley tells The Verge, this means that roads are quasi-authoritarian spaces that give police huge discretion in choosing who to punish. But in a world with self-driving cars, things would look much different. “The latitude of the police to pull people over would be much reduced,” Stanley says. “People wouldn’t be subject to so much arbitrary enforcement.”

And Camille Francois hopes they will get people to pay more attention to surveillance:

It’s quite clear: for most people, the link between government surveillance and freedom is more plainly understood by cars, rather than personal computers. As more and more objects become connected to the Internet these questions will grow in importance. And cars in particular might become, as Ryan Calo puts it in a 2011 article on drones, “a privacy catalyst”; an object giving us an opportunity to drag our privacy laws into the 21st century; an object that restores our mental model of what a privacy violation is.

When my grandmother starts to consider technologically-enabled constraints on how she can drive; or people knowing exactly where she can go—abstract issues of “autonomy” and “privacy” become much more real. … And that is important because in order for our society to shape the rules that will make the future of self-driving cars one in which we want to live, we need all members of society to contribute to the conversation. We need to ask: what happens when cars become increasingly like computers? With self-driving cars, are we getting the best of the computer industry and the car industry, or the worst of both worlds?

Previous Dish on self-driving cars here and here.

Mission 31 is Now LIVE online Fabien Cousteau http://t.co/oTliUpJkvQ pic.twitter.com/J1jFdYtN7G

— Carlos Gavina (@CGShark) June 1, 2014

Fabien Cousteau (grandson of Jacques) and five other ocean scientists are spending 31 days living in an underwater habitat off the coast of the Florida Keys. Svati Kirsten Narula interviewed Cousteau about the project before he went under:

Ocean scientists have made enormous strides in underwater research, but the 20th century’s love affair with outer space means we know far more about the moon than we do about the sea floor. Cousteau sees Earth as a “little brown veneer,” compared with the vastness of the sea—and he gets frustrated when people marvel at the Earth’s oceans by saying that 70 percent of the planet is covered by water. “[That’s] talking about the world in a two-dimensional way, and the planet is three-dimensional,” he said. “So if you’re talking about a three-dimensional system, the oceans represent 99 percent of our world’s living space. And yet we’ve explored less than 5 percent of it.”

This is something of a sore subject for ocean scientists, who point out that public funding for space exploration dwarfs the money that undersea researchers get. …

Mission 31 is concerned with how the oceans are changing—namely, what we humans are doing to them. We’ve been using them as a carbon sink, a garbage dump, and simultaneously, a garden from which to harvest. Three broad subjects of study for the Mission 31 scientists are ocean acidification (as it relates to climate change), ocean pollution (with an emphasis on the effects of plastics), and declining biodiversity (attributed to overfishing). This is a bona fide research expedition, but it’s also a publicity stunt. Cousteau wants to drum up enthusiasm for the sea, which helps explain why he’s letting celebrities like rapper will.i.am and billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson dive down to Aquarius for short 45-minute visits, and auctioning off similar experiences to the highest bidders. The idea, Cousteau says, is to spark the interest of a population of people who haven’t previously gotten excited about the ocean—and to change the way they think about the planet.

“It’s really about engaging audiences young and old to dream, to aspire—the way we used to with the Apollo mission.”

Details of the brutal bombing in Urumqui last week:

Jiayang Fan maintains that “it has become clear that terrorism is no longer a foreign phenomenon”:

It was the deadliest massacre in recent memory, and the fourth in the past month—another sign of the increasingly volatile relations between Uighurs, the culturally distinct minority native to northwest China, and the Han majority, who constitute ninety-five per cent of the country’s population. Unlike many of the previous attacks, which took aim at state entities like police stations or security offices, the Urumqi bombing deliberately targeted civilians. If the assailants intended to maximize casualties, generate publicity, and radicalize Uighurs and Hans who had previously been ambivalent about this conflict, they succeeded spectacularly. …

Thirteen years ago, terrorism seemed almost exotic to the Chinese, entirely confined to a world outside their borders. Today, citizens are clamoring for recognition of its grave implications in their own nation. Yet the inherently political nature of the crime—particularly when it is framed as a violent protest against state injustice—makes its handling problematic. Especially in a country known for its imperious style of one-party rule, and censorship of opinions that run contrary to the official script.

It’s hard to pinpoint who is responsible for these acts of violence:

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is the group whose name is bandied about the most — though it’s sometimes referred to as the Turkestan Islamic Party. ETIM is thought to have links with terror groups elsewhere, particularly in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Chinese authorities say ETIM has ties to al-Qaeda and training camps in the tribal area along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Uighurs were among the hundreds of supposed foreign fighters swept up and detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay following the 2001 U.S.  invasion of Afghanistan.

But all this doesn’t amount to a direct causal link between organized transnational terror networks and the current epidemic of violence in Xinjiang. China blamed a bombing at a train station a month ago that killed three people on ETIM, but has now been more circumspect in pointing the finger at specific groups. It’s unclear what kind of real operational capacity ETIM and other like-minded outfits have inside China and to what degree attacks like Thursday’s are far more local actions.

James Millward discusses China’s problems with its Uighur population in depth, exploring how grievances over civil rights intersect with the rise of extremist ideologies:

Chinese policies and never-ending crackdowns, especially since the 2009 riots, have created a climate in which some Uyghurs are more likely to heed twisted, pseudo-religious ideologies that advocate killing innocents to send a political message. But even if we accept the Chinese position that religious extremism, leading to terrorism, is mainly an exogenous force, why then campaign domestically against features of Uyghur culture, nonreligious as well as religious, that have been part of Uyghur life and Xinjiang’s social landscape since long before the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged elsewhere? Why then the repeated gratuitous insults against Uyghur culture — false claims that Uyghur is a primitive language, thoughtless dismantling of Uyghur-language education, suspicion and persecution of private Uyghur-language instruction, compulsion of government workers to eat during Ramadan, prohibition of doppa caps and scarves?

I suspect that the Chinese leadership and some Chinese scholars who advise them are uncomfortable with Uyghur cultural uniqueness. They increasingly feel that this distinctiveness is itself a source of the problem.

Rachel Lu observes that Beijing is resurrecting its Mao-era reliance on volunteer patrols and informants in response to the threat of Uighur extremists:

“People’s war” is one of the core components of former Chairman Mao Zedong’s strategic theory and a tried-and-true tactic for the party, which used it to win China’s gruesome civil war in 1949. But in the ensuing decades under Mao, the rhetoric of a people’s war was often used against the so-called “class enemies” or “counterrevolutionaries” who had upset the party in one way or another. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, the phrase was often invoked by so-called red guards, mostly young Chinese then empowered to perpetrate massive destruction and strife. After subsequent leader Deng Xiaoping instituted market-oriented reforms in 1979, the mention of a people’s war became increasingly rare.

Now that the Chinese government is facing a new threat, it seems ready dust off the old trope. In a May 24 editorial, the Hong Kong-based pro-party Wen Wei Po newspaper called for the use of a people’s war to defeat terrorism by “mobilizing the masses to uncover the terrorists and their behind-the-scene puppet masters.” The minister of public security, Guo Shengkun, also vowed to use the power of the masses to avert terrorism in a May 22 speech in Xinjiang.

The Dish covered a previous attack attributed to Uighur separatists in March here and here.

Sujata Gupta profiles the Reid family, who faced an unexpected ethical quandary when they realized their daughter Ellie was deaf:

Parenting is full of big decisions. But in the first year or so of Ellie’s life, when other parents are focused on helping their kids to walk and talk, Christine and Derek had to think about an issue that many parents never even contemplate: They had to decide which culture their daughter should be a part of. Ellie could join their world, the hearing world, if she received cochlear implants. Yet implants don’t work perfectly. Everyday conversation can remain a challenge, for instance, especially when there’s a lot of background noise. What’s more, implants might cut Ellie off from a community that, some would argue, is her birthright: the Deaf world, where lack of hearing is an identity to be celebrated, not a disability to be cured. As Derek puts it: “How do you explain that she was fine the way she was born when the first thing we did was change her?”

Why many deaf people advocate resisting the technological fix:

For those in the Deaf world, many of whom were born with hearing loss, the very existence of cochlear implants wrongly presupposes that a deaf person is in need of fixing.

In 1993, when the technology was in its infancy, journalist Edward Dolnick explained the Deaf cause to the hearing world in an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Deafness as Culture.” Dolnick quoted Deaf Life magazine: “An implant is the ultimate invasion of the ear, the ultimate denial of deafness, the ultimate refusal to let deaf children be Deaf.” In this view, the Reids, should they implant Ellie, would be perpetrating a horrific crime.

Discrimination against the deaf is termed “audism.” When I ask members of the advocacy group Audism Free America how they feel about a “cure” for deafness, they equate it to a cure for being black or female or gay. I counter that the analogy might be a stretch, since deafness is the absence of a key sense. Karen Christie, one of the group’s founders, rejects the notion. “People aren’t absent of whiteness,” she writes to me over Skype. “I am a woman but I am not absent of a penis.”

Readers join Katie Crouch in sharing their stories:

My parents divorced when I was in my mid-30s and they were about 60. It wasn’t a mutual thing; my Dad fell in love with another woman. But as I approach my mid-40s, I understand more and more how limited our time is on this planet and how spending it trapped in a relationship that isn’t working makes little sense.

However: this may sound bratty, but I refused to call my father’s new wife my “step-mother.” I even went so far as to correct people – especially him – when that term was used. I felt that at 35+ years old, I got to determine who was in my family. She was his wife and I liked her a great deal, but it seemed insulting to my mother, who was there for the actual difficult child-raising years, to call this woman who I met as an adult my step-mother. If my dad had married her when I was eight years old, and she’d driven me to Little League and taken me to the emergency room when I broke my arm, that would be a different story.

On the other hand, my younger brother and sister can’t throw out that term enough, and it bothers me. This came to a head because she passed away, and the “sorry your stepmother died” e-mails and Facebook messages started in earnest. You don’t correct the Facebook message about a woman who just died of cancer in her early 60s, and of course I feel sorry for my father and her children and grandchildren. But she still wasn’t my stepmother – I will never have one.

Another:

As an adult of 42 when my parents divorced, my biggest reaction was absolute shock. My parents had always been Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and June Cleaver, or Mr. and Mrs. Baxter. Turned out my Dad had a mistress for some 15 years, and she was getting restless.

The divorce went rather amicably under the circumstances. Even the division of the considerable assets went well after I stepped in and did it for them. However, my mother absolutely refused to meet or even be in the same room with the mistress, until the fateful day when my niece was christened. Mom was not going to miss that and she saw the mistress for the first time. Mom, like me, had always been overweight and had struggled with it all her life. She knew Dad had left her for a much younger woman. However, the mistress was significantly heavier, by over 100 pounds, and, after learning this key fact, mom was OK. Dad could leave for a younger woman, just not a thinner one.

Mom developed Alzheimer’s about two years after the divorce and eventually didn’t really remember she and Dad were divorced. She’d show up at his house (which was on the same street as hers) and chat with the mistress and Dad like they were all family, even have breakfast together. The mistress was very good about the whole thing and we went from having two of every holiday back to one with everybody together like nothing had happened except there were all these new people (more or less, as far as Mom was concerned, like they had always been there).

However, when I was a kid, I had the safety and security of a completely intact, loving family. It didn’t stop me from screwing up my life, mind you, but I still had a great childhood, something I don’t think would have been the case if the whole thing had happened when I was 12, not 42.

A brief intermission:

I can’t help thinking of the joke about the elderly couple (he 93, she 92) who go to see the divorce attorney.

“You’ve been married over seventy years, raised five children together, and now you want a divorce?” said the attorney.

“Well,” said the wife, “the first few years weren’t bad, but things went downhill after that and we haven’t been happy in decades.”

“But why now?” asked the attorney.

Answered the man, “We wanted to wait until all the kids were dead.”

Another reader’s story:

My parents divorced when I was in my late 20s. After my brother left for college, they looked at each other and asked, “Who are you?” They had been married just out of college/law school and plunged into having four kids in five years. They lost track of each other over the next 20 years and couldn’t remake what they once had, perhaps, before the hullabaloo of our family arrived.

I made it clear that my affections could be purchased by the highest bidder, but neither took me up on the offer. To their great credit, we have remained a close family, now with four spouses and eight grandchildren. My father’s second wife and her child were folded into the mix a few years after the divorce and not a beat was missed. It was a bit unnerving that my stepmother was, and is, a Republican and a Catholic. We are a tribe of agnostic/atheist Dems, but we have all come around a bit – and it made conversations at dinners and the end of docks much less monochromatic.

My mother was liberated by the divorce, traveling to Washington, D.C. for a time, then Johannesburg and Addis Ababa, where she taught ethics to local government officials, until finally ending up in Traverse City near the lake that gives her, and me, such solace and energy. She has never remarried.

My three siblings and I are all on our first spouses, each of us a decade or two into our relationships. I think watching our parents divorce when we were old enough to have a mature perspective – where it wasn’t ruining our lives or tearing apart our homes – is part of why we’re all still together. We have talked about the importance of keeping in touch with our wives and husbands, of keeping the relationship new, of not subsuming our marriages into kids.

But who knows? We’re all approaching the age when our parents split. We, too, may harbor the unhappiness that they felt and that could not be fixed, but I don’t feel it. Time will tell.

DARPA is working on it:

The hope is to implant electrodes in different regions of the brain along with a tiny chip placed between the brain and the skull. The chip would monitor electrical signals in the brain and send data wirelessly back to scientists in order to gain a better understanding of psychological diseases like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The implant would also be used to trigger electrical impulses in order to relieve symptoms.

It’s just one facet of an emerging therapeutic field:

The program is inspired by deep brain stimulation, a surgery that implants a brain pacemaker to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s and essential tremor as well as paralysis and or patients who are missing limbs.

Similar implants have been used in small trials to treat disorders like major depression but have yet to be widely approved for wider use. SUBNETS plans on demonstrating the technology it develops and then submitting those devices for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Deep brain stimulation spans approximately 100,000 worldwide patients. But it still has its glitches. The treatment recently sparked headlines when a Dutch man being treated for severe obsessive compulsive disorder developed a strong urge to listen to American country singer Johnny Cash.

Patrick Tucker explains what the program hopes to accomplish:

If the DARPA program is successful, it will yield new brain-monitoring capabilities that are exponentially cheaper smaller, more useful and that collect data when the patient is most likely to actually encounter traumatic stimuli, not just when he or she is in a lab-making data collection much easier and the data more useful. “With existing technology, we can’t really record anxiety level inside the brain. We can potentially record adrenaline and cortisol levels in the bloodstream to measure anxiety. However, if a deep brain implant is to be used (as proposed in this project), it might be possible to monitor activity in the amygdala, and this would be a direct way of monitoring anxiety,” said [University of Arizona neuroscientist Charles] Higgins.

Using that data, the researchers hope to create models and maps to allow for a more precise understanding of the electrical patterns in the brain that signal anxiety, memory loss and depression. The data from devices, when they come online, will be made available to the public but will be rendered anonymous, so records of an individual test subject’s brain activity could not be traced back to a specific person.