Designing Our Own Demise: An interview with robotics expert Hans Moravec

Posted on 02/02/2012

interview by Brian Awehali

Hans Moravec is a leader in robotics research, founder of the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, and the author of several books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

Moravec is in firm belief that machines will acquire human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by the middle part of this century, they will be our intellectual superiors.

Also, says Moravec, humans—in hopes of immortality—will soon be transformed into what he calls “ex-humans,” as they upload themselves into an entirely new breed of supercomputer that allows one to “live” forever.

This interviews was originally conducted for Britannica.com.

Generally speaking, what is a robot?

Well, there are some industry definitions that are descriptive of existing things but really, for those of us who are less passionate, it’s a machine that does what living things do.

And what was the first real robot?

If you were born before the 20th century, you’d probably want to point to clockwork mechanisms and even industrial machinery. At least those things were animate, which is a very big distinction from things that just sit there.

So the progression from simple tools to complex machines?

To a self-powered machinery—whether it’s powered by springs or water or steam. But in the 20th century something new was added, namely, a sensory detector—sensors, basically, which allowed the machine to respond to things going on outside of it in a non-trivial way. I guess with mechanical machinery you have levers and things that could sense large forces. But once there was electronics, you could have things that could respond to light or to sound or to pressure.

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The River Vs. Water, Inc.: An interview with Vandana Shiva

Posted on 01/30/2012

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of hundreds of papers and articles and more than 15 books. She is the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in India. Her work runs the gamut from establishing community seed banks to defending farmers and everyone else who eats food from the dire socioeconomic, environmental, and health consequences of genetically modified crops; from writing and agitating about water privatization to writing and agitating about corporate thievery of natural knowledge. This interview by Antonia Juhasz, about the ongoing struggle over the privatization of common resources and the need for a “living democracy,” originally appeared in LiP magazine.

“I really hope that living democracy, articulated as the broader democracy of all life, will help us transcend these polarizations and work to protect all species while defending every human right of every excluded community.”

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.]

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]

Held Hostage to Hope: Derrick Jensen on Civilization & Its Discontents

Posted on 12/24/2011

“It’s not just false hope that’s the problem, it’s hope itself…’Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.’”

A free-ranging interview with the author of A Language Older Than Words, Welcome to the Machine, and The Culture of Make Believe about civilization, violence, activism, pacifism, reasons for optimism, and why hope is a bad thing.

A counterpoint interview about Malthusian economics and cults of catastrophism is also offered, with social historian Iain Boal, “We’re Not Doomed; That’s the Problem.”:

Many people believe, at least a little, that the end of human beings–whether by ecological disaster, the collapse of the oil economy, or nuclear extinction–is inevitable. For some, this projected collapse represents a just termination for a species they consider parasitic and pathologically unable to establish an equilibrium with the natural world and the creatures who depend upon it. Others laments the tragedy of our fate.

But what role do faith and belief play in all of this? What if the capitalist realities of scarcity and collapse have been mistakenly interpreted as natural inevitabilities?

>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 8 pages)

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.]

Litterbug World: Overproduction, Waste & the Limits of Recycling

Posted on 06/29/2011

Heather Rogers’ film and book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, explore the “sinister success” of capitalism by looking at the life cycle of our waste. They examine the realities of planned-in obsolescence and waste-by-design in our market economy, asking deep questions from a fresh perspective. Rogers contends that recycling is far from an actual solution, and is at best a band-aid approach—a much harder look, she argues, needs to be taken at our addiction to waste.

This interview by Ariane Conrad originally appeared in LiP magazine and was anthologized in Tipping the Sacred Cow. (AK Press) [PDF; available as of May 2011]

* * *

What inspired or motivated you to make Gone Tomorrow?

Heather Rogers: Two things: I wanted to know what happened to my garbage, because it seemed like it disappeared, but I knew that it didn’t. I wanted to find out where it went. I also realized that “waste disposal” is a process through which the market’s relations to labor and nature is made apparent. [Gone Tomorrow] is a way of understanding that garbage is something everyone makes—everyone can relate to it. It’s a way of connecting daily life and our daily interaction with waste to larger environmental crises.

In your film, you document several of the major shifts that occurred in the attitude towards garbage in the U.S.. Can you talk a little bit more about the most significant shifts?

It’s not so commonly known anymore, but in the 19th century there was a huge amount of re-use going on. A lot of it came from the fact that people couldn’t afford to buy manufactured goods because they were so expensive. One of the big shifts came with the Industrial Revolution, when commodities suddenly became much cheaper. The spatial component of the Industrial Revolution transformed the way people lived, so that suddenly people were leaving the countryside and concentrating in cities, to go work in the factories. They didn’t have places to save and store their waste like they had in the countryside, so it wasn’t as easy to save fat, for example, or scraps of materials to re-use and repair. That, in conjunction with commodities becoming cheaper, meant that people bought more of the things they needed instead of making them themselves.

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Madness & Mass Society: Pharmaceuticals, Psychiatry & the Rebellion of True Community

Posted on 06/06/2011

Brian Awehali interviews Dr. Bruce Levine

Author and clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wants to tell you that many forms of depression, discontent, and a whole raft of diagnosed mental illness are nothing more than natural responses to the oppression of institutional society. In his book, Commonsense Rebellion, Levine contends that the vast majority of mental disorders are, to put it simply, profit-driven fabrications with no established biochemical or genetic causes. This interview with Dr. Levine was conducted several years ago for publication in LiP: Informed Revolt, but the growth of corporate pharmaceutical “solutions” to deviant behaviors has only grown since then. Dr. Levine’s newest book, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeating, and Battling the Corporate Elite, (Chelsea Green, 2011) is an exploration of the political psychology of demoralization and the strategies and tactics used by oppressed peoples to gain power in the United States.

Awehali: Bruce, you’re a critic of both psychiatry—the medical science of identifying and treating mental illness with drugs—and psychology—the study of human behavior, thought, and development. Are there substantial differences between the two?

Bruce Levine: When I first started out as a psychologist in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was fairly commonplace to dissent from psychiatry—that’s why people became psychologists. They saw the pseudo-science of not only the treatments but of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) itself. Unfortunately, over the years, psychology itself has slowly aped psychiatry, and there isn’t that sharp a distinction between the two anymore. The American Psychological Association (APA)—the professional group for psychologists—now fights for prescription rights for psychologists. So I guess any psychologist who maintains a position that depression isn’t primarily an innate biochemical disease, and that the DSM is a nonscientific instrument of diagnosis, is a dissident!

I should say that back in the 1970s and 1980s, before psychiatrists had the backing of the drug companies, they had very little power. In fact, they were falling apart, as evidenced by so many movies that were making fun of them, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—which could never come out today. But back in those days, when [psychiatrists] weren’t in bed with the drug companies and didn’t have much political power, you saw movies like that come out. Now, psychiatrists have the media power; they’re able to describe the playing field of the controversy.

Let me ask you a blunt question, first: Do you think there’s ever any basis for diagnosing someone as mentally ill?

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Life After Death: A Gleefully Morbid Exploration of Cadavers, Body Donation & Human Composting

Posted on 06/03/2011

Erin Wiegand interviews Mary Roach

With one book written on cadavers (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) and another on ghosts (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife), you might expect Mary Roach to be a pretty disturbed individual. She’s not. While her subject matter tends towards the macabre, Roach is simply one of those writers who’s fascinated by the unusual, the unlikely, and the more-than-a-little-disturbing.

Whether she’s writing about post-death opportunities for employment or the origins of ectoplasm, she has the uncanny ability to satisfy the morbid curiosity you never knew you had…

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Words and Music with Chinese People’s Historian Liao Yiwu

Posted on 04/15/2011

I’m pleased to share that two versions of my profile of Chinese writer and people’s historian Liao Yiwu have been published this month, in the print edition of The Progressive (also featuring contributions from David Sedaris, Jim Hightower and Dave Zirin), and in expanded online form on Counterpunch.

Liao’s first book to be translated into English, The Corpse Walker, was a collection of 27 startlingly raw and unexpected literary interviews with mostly older people on the margins of Chinese society, who were directly impacted by the horrors of life under Mao Zedong. Several of his other books, including Earthquake Insane Asylum, chronicling the invisible and uncounted following the disastrous 2008 Sichuan earthquake, have been published in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Please do check out my expanded profile of Liao, on LOUDCANARY, here ».

Membership Has Its Disadvantages: Whiteness and the Social Entropy of Privilege

Posted on 02/24/2011

Brian Awehali interviews Tim Wise

I first saw Tim Wise on late-night cable access in Seattle, around 1998, in a debate in which he was demolishing conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. I immediately got in touch and asked him to be a contributing editor to my zine-turned-magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt, thus kicking off a very fruitful 7-year editorial collaboration that featured a series of interviews as well as several far-reaching features by Tim. [His current site, with archives and speaking schedule, lives here.]

In this interview, as relevant now as it was in pre-Obama America, we sat down to discuss, among other things, the ways in which privilege can atrophy a person’s ability to deal effectively with adversity, why the discussion around reparations can reap benefits far beyond the simple meting out of financial compensation, and why Americans, but particularly white Americans, have been led to believe in a fictional version of the real world.

“…people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church— can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words…If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.”

–James Baldwin

Tim, when I last interviewed you, we spoke a lot about “whiteness”—both as a concept and as a “mark of automatic advantage.” Racial or ethnic battle lines have been part of the United States since its very beginning, and these lines permeate every aspect of society. Yet they remain, in large part, uninterrogated and invisible. On the one hand, you’ve got white folks’ commonplace denial of their racism, which spares them from acknowledging not just their own bigotry, but also denies the reality of people of color. They don’t have to see them.

And on the other hand you’ve got the invisibility of whiteness itself, made possible by the fact that white perspectives are taken as the norm. They’re the dominant perspectives on everything, including the economy, education and crime.

As you explained, those are two ways white supremacy— the broad, institutionalized system that exploits people of color and defends the privilege of white people— is still allowed to remain hidden and incomprehensible to a lot of Americans.

While membership in the white system of privilege has its obvious advantages, I want to get into how membership has its disadvantages. What price does a person pay for accepting the benefits of a racist system?

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Africa in a Chinese Century: Radio Open Source interview with Howard French

Posted on 02/05/2011

In the imagination of many who look primarily to their nightly news, daily papers, or any other corporate US media to inform them, Africa is a disease-ridden hell cursed by a seemingly endless succession of murderous despots. The first two things likely to spring to many Westerner’s minds when they think about the continent, based largely on media coverage, are “aid” and “AIDS.” By contrast, an increasing tide of Chinese immigrants and businesspeople to Africa think: “opportunity.”

Journalist Howard French was recently interviewed on Radio Open Source, and his insights into differences between Western and Chinese attitudes and approaches toward Africa are fascinating and enlightening. Below is some of the introductory text for the interview from Radio Open Source, with a link to the full interview below:

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Art & Freedoms: Half a Day with Chinese People’s Historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武)

Posted on 12/24/2010

[This is a continuation of my post, "The Corpse Walker: Liao Yiwu's Notes from China's Underclass" To read my long-form profile of Liao, “Drift to Live,” click here. To read recent (July 2011) updates about Liao’s departure from China and his subsequent asylum in Germany, click here.]

Excerpts from “Massacre” (by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang)

Dedicated to those who were killed on June 4, 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

A massacre is happening
In this nation of Utopia
Where the Prime Minister catches a cold
The masses have to sneeze to follow
Martial law is declared and enforced
The aging toothless state machine is rolling over
Those who dare to resist and refuse to sneeze
Fallen by the thousands are the barehanded and unarmed
Armored assassins are swimming in blood
Setting fire to houses with windows and doors locked
Polish your military boots with the skirt of a slain girl
Boot owners don’t even tremble
Robots without hearts never tremble
Their brain is programmed with one process
A flawed command
Represent the nation to dismember the constitution
Represent the constitution to slaughter justice…

Liao Yiwu, 2010. Photo by Brian Awehali

[Earlier this year] we joined Liao and two writer friends he’d shared imprisonment with for tea. Liao was sturdy and bald, his skin ruddy with black rimmed glasses, wore flowing linen pants and navy flip flops which displayed several blackened toenails, and he walked with a limp. I’ll call the other two PB and RG: PB, who said he had eaten much more bitterness in his life than Liao and suffered much more greatly than him, had a typical black bowl cut, glasses, pasty white skin and a shirt tucked into a belt that said “Playboy” on it over the bunny icon. He said that he wrote about his stories of being in prison every day, and that altogether he had been in for seven years. The other one, RG, who said that it was hard to describe what he writes about, had longer hair down to his ears, was pudgy with rimless glasses and wore a plaid shirt. Of the three, RG smiled the most and spoke the least.

We talked about things like Twitter in China. You can say a lot more in 120 Chinese characters than you can in 120 English characters, and Twitter is used for more overtly political purposes in China, to get around the Great Firewall, and less for inane things about where someone’s eating or what someone’s wearing. We also talked about the difficulties of publishing in China. PB had written many stories about his prison experiences, but was resigned to just sharing them with friends and family because he didn’t think he would ever find a publisher; Liao is only published by overseas presses.

At one point Liao said that Chinese view the government as the police. When I asked about Chinese anarchists, Liao replied that all smart Chinese were anarchists (“no government people”) because the government just took their money and land and enforced rules and laws. They were just the police, and didn’t care if the people were hungry or not. I asked about this because I was just then reading Yale Agrarian Studies professor James C. Scott’s excellent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland East Asia, which details how between 80 and 100 million people in East Asia fled the Han Chinese state and took to the hills (“shatter zones”) to be self-determining over the past few centuries. This includes Tibetans, the Wa, the Kachin, the Lahu and a staggering range of other East Asian “hill peoples.” I’m not positive, but given our linguistic challenges, Liao was probably characterizing “smart Chinese” as more anti-authoritarian than anarchist, but was nonetheless making a deeper point about power than can be got at by conceiving of things in terms of so-called “capitalism” or “communism.”

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