Author: Andrew Sullivan

Isaac Asimov’s predictions from 50 years ago have gone viral. Brian Merchant pushes back on them:

Taken as a whole, Asimov’s vision for 2014 is wildly off. It’s just that ’Genius predicted the future 50 years ago’ makes for a great article hook. Asimov does hit a couple of his predictions pretty close to home: He ballparked the world population (6.5 billion); he anticipated automated cars (“vehicles with ‘robot brains’”); and he seems to have described the current smartphone/tablet craze (“sight-sound” telephones that “can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”)

But he also thought we’d have a colony on the moon, be living under a global population control regime, eating at multi-flavored algae bars, and letting machines prepare us personalized meals. Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.  … Asimov imagined that humanity would decide to distribute the wealth accrued by the automatons, and the problem wouldn’t be lost capital for workers, but lost meaning. Of course, in reality, it’s both—and therefore a much, much bleaker scenario.

Jerry Coyne points to the Internet as something Asimov didn’t see coming either:

[T]he world is becoming plugged in in a way Asimov simply couldn’t predict. When you walk down the street in an industrialized country, or ride in a plane or train, notice how many people are using their cellphones, iPads, iPods, or computers. Google Glass, the wearable computer, is next. This is the way the whole world will go. (My theory is that eventually the entire Earth will resemble New York City.) Connectivity has brought tremendous advantages: think of the ability to access information at your desk instead of a making a laborious trip to the library. And electronic journals and instant publication have markedly sped up the progress of science. Well, perhaps we won’t be as bored, but we may lose the skills of interpersonal communication.

Asimov made many other predictions. In general I think he did pretty well—certainly better than I would have—but it’s remarkable how many other people got stuff wrong, usually predicting a more technologically advanced or ideologically repressive society than we have now. Remember Nineteen Eighty Four (written in 1949), or The Jetsons cartoon series, which supposedly took place in 2062?

Adam Davidson argues (NYT) that better paid, better treated employees reap more benefits for their employers:

The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, [business professor Zeynep Ton] argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.

Along the same lines, Daniel Gross explains why Henry Ford doubled his employees wages in 1914:

Ford was playing a deeper, longer game. The Ford Motor Company was in the business of building an expensive durable good. The first cars he had built in number, the 1903 Model N, cost about $3,000, and so were accessible only to that era’s one percent. Henry Ford recognized that the automobile would be more successful as a volume business than as a niche product. “I would build a motorcar for the great multitudes,” he proclaimed. Through relentless innovation, vertical integration, and the obsessive development of an assembly line, Ford had already managed to bring the cost of the Model T, the first democratic car, down to about $500. And the company was moving about 250,000 cars a year. But per capita income was only $354 in 1913. The U.S. didn’t have a developed consumer credit industry. People paid for things with the wages they earned and their savings.

So this was Ford’s theory: Companies had an interest in ensuring that their employees could afford the products they produced. Put another way, employers had a role to play in boosting consumption. While paying higher wages than you absolutely needed to might lower profits temporarily, it would lead to a more sustainable business and economy over time. If the motorcar was going to be a mass-produced product for typical Americans, not a plaything for the rich, Ford would strive to pay his workers enough so they could afford the products they worked on all day.

Previous Dish coverage of Walmart’s labor practices here, here, and here.

Vaughan Bell quotes from a recent study that identified the “most accurately depicted psychopaths” in Hollywood films:

Among the most interesting recent and most realistic idiopathic psychopathic characters is Anton Chigurh in the 2007 Coen brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men.

Anton Chigurh is a well-designed prototypical idiopathic / primary psychopath. We lack information concerning his childhood, but there are sufficient arguments and detailed information about his behavior in the film to obtain a diagnosis of active, primary, idiopathic psychopathy, incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy. …

In terms of a ‘successful psychopath’, Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) is probably one of the most interesting, manipulative, psychopathic fictional characters to date. Manipulative psychopathic characters are increasingly appearing in films and series. … For the past few years, with the world economic crises and some high-profile trials (such as the Bernard Madoff trial), the attention of the clinicians is more focused on ‘successful psychopaths’, also called corporate psychopaths…. Films and series presenting characters such as brokers, dishonest traders, vicious lawyers, and those engaged in corporate espionage are emerging (e.g., Mad Men, The Wire) and are generally related to the global economy and international business. Again, we see a strong parallelism between what happens in our society and what happens in film.

Many readers discuss the wrenching decision to cut off a family member for good:

My mother is a borderline personality. She sees people as either wholly evil or wholly saintly, and her views can switch like lightning. Her rage is terrifying, unpredictable, and targeted, à la Mommie Dearest. After yet another very difficult Thanksgiving, I decided I was going to “divorce” her, since all the years and all the other techniques I had tried hadn’t eliminated the abuse.

The only complication has been her relationship with my siblings; she is the only topic my sisters and I cannot speak frankly about. They not only tolerate but refuse to acknowledge behavior that they would label domestic abuse if our significant others did it. Our mother married a manic-depressive man who also refuses to acknowledge his own disorder and take prescribed treatment. At what point does one decide that the mentally ill do not deserve the position of power they’ve taken for themselves?

Another reader:

Just today I had a conversation with a coworker about this very same issue. We both have sisters who are (or have been) in desperate need of help. In my case, one of my sisters developed some mental health issues that prevented her from being able to maintain a job.

She was never out of control or completely dysfunctional; she just found it impossible to keep a job. As a result, she struggled financially for years. Our parents helped her out for some time, largely because my mother needed to know that her grandchild – my sister’s daughter – always had a roof over her head. When that grandchild turned 18 and moved out, our mother no longer needed to help. We made one last-ditch effort to reach out to my sister as a family and she bit our mother’s head off, blaming all of her troubles on our her.

After our last effort failed, my sister moved out-of-state. The family has had almost nothing to do with her since. I think every once in a while about reaching out to her, to make sure she’s okay, but then I think of what the last 30 years have been like – again, nothing that’s really, really bad, but just bad enough – and I don’t reach out. Why should I open up myself and maybe the rest of the family to all of that again?

Another:

I won’t get too detailed because I doubt you want to read a ridiculously long email, but in short, she forged a document or two, manipulated the family court system – with which she was very familiar, having worked as a sort of social worker in the county courts – and wove a web of lies in an effort to gain primary custody of my 10-year-old sister and to extract maximum financial pain from my disabled father. This was an extremely difficult time, as I was 17, applying for college (as the first in the family to go), and not mature enough to deal with the almost sociopathic way that my own mother just invented memories – both recent and not-so-recent – out of thin air to justify her actions.

Bottom line: you just can’t get over some stuff people do. Especially when they not only do really bad things but never admit to having done anything wrong – and then insist that you are the bad person for not agreeing. In the end, I couldn’t have that sort of poison in my life, so I had to make a choice if I was to ever have healthy relationships and a healthy psyche.

Another:

I was adopted as an infant. The emphasis on blood kin is perplexing to me even now that I have a biological child, because for most of my life family has been other than biological in nature. Perhaps the blood fixation is simply a human prejudice.

That said: Who cares? If someone is dangerous, indifferent or simply too big of a pain in the ass to engage with regularly, why does it make a difference if they are family? You wouldn’t, I would hope, put up with such nonsense from people who weren’t related to you, right?

A new study shows that the “pupil of the eye in a photograph of a face can be mined for hidden information, such as reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders.” What this could mean for law enforcement:

The researchers say that in crimes in which the victims are photographed, such as hostage taking or child sex abuse, reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators. Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations could be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations. By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, Jenkins and co-researcher Christie Kerr of the School of Psychology, University of Glasgow were able to recover bystander images that could be identified accurately by observers, despite their low resolution.

Megan Garber explains how it’s done:

First, you have to zoom in (really, really zoom in) on images of eyes—since, as Jenkins notes, “a face image that is recovered from a reflection in the subject’s eye is about 30,000 times smaller than the subject’s face.” Then you have to enhance those zoom-ins to isolate the faces—the “bystander images“—that the human subjects’ pupils contain. But even if you do that, the question remains: Are the pupil-mirrored images, given their small size and curvature, even discernible as faces? If the reflection in the eyes is someone other than yourself, can you make out who it is?

To test that, the researchers presented a series of pixellated faces—an average of only 322 pixels each—as part of a face-matching task they administered to subjects. The subjects who were unfamiliar with the bystanders’ faces were able to match the pixellated faces to the standard images of them with 71 percent accuracy; when they were familiar with the faces (if the pixellated face belonged to, say, Barack Obama), they performed with 84 percent accuracy.

(Hat tip: Kottke)