For a while, this book was a big deal for people in certain tribes of the dissident right, but also with some in the mainstream. People like Thomas Friedman were championing it in the NY Times. so the beautiful people may have been reading it. The very short version is the robot revolution will have the same impact on humanity as the industrial revolution in the 19th century. There’s some truth to it, but like the paperless office, it is a thing that no one will live to see.

That’s the thing with futurists. They are almost always wrong. Most of them look around at current trends, then project those trends into the future. The trouble is no tree grows to the sky. Assuming some current trend will go on forever is like assuming your child will keep growing forever. The lack of 100-foot tall people tells as that trends always slow, come to a halt and often reverse themselves. The current technological trends will also slow and maybe go down dead ends and then end entirely.

On the other hand, many futurologist are just running a racket to get attention, sell book ans get on television to sell books. The way to do that is to either predict things that flatter people or predict things that scare people. Telling people their future will be the same as their present, but more boring, is not a big seller. Astrologers tell their female customers they will meet a mysterious stranger, for the same reason pulp writers crank out bodice rippers. Women by them.

This column in the New Statesman is a good summary.

Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word – “Hermie” – to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions – mobile phones and the like – that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.

Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book Future Shock, which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.

Science fiction writers are probably the best at getting some things about the future right, because they often have a good working knowledge of science. They also understand that human nature and human organization does not change all that much with technology.  Jules Verne got a bunch of stuff right and Aldous Huxley is looking to have nailed large chunks of cultural change. Still, most of what these people described never happened and will never happen.

Perhaps the most significant inaccuracy concerned artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956 the polymath Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do” and in 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky announced that “within a generation . . . the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”. Yet, in spite of all the hype and the dizzying increases in the power and speed of computers, we are nowhere near creating a thinking machine.

Such a machine is the basis of Kurzweil’s singularity, but futurologists seldom let the facts get in the way of a good prophecy. Or, if they must, they simply move on. The nightmarishly intractable problem of space travel has more or less killed that futurological category and the unexpected complexities of genetics have put that on the back burner for the moment, leaving neuroscientists to take on the prediction game. But futurology as a whole is in rude health despite all the setbacks.

This is where the predictions about our machine future fall apart. Yes, massive leaps have been made recently, but we are not close to building machines smarter than their creators. When one second of human thought requires a room full of servers, we are a long way from Terminator. Even assuming some breakthrough where the machines self learn in an increasingly fast recursion, we’re a long way from the machines becoming aware and taking over the planet.

Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, has an astrophysicist friend who made a pitch to a potential donor of research funds. The pitch was excellent but he failed to get the money because, as the donor put it, “You know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired . . . you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.” Gladwellism – the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence – is the primary Ted style. Is this, wondered Bratton, the basis on which the future should be planned? To its credit, Ted had the good grace to let him give a virulently anti-Ted talk to make his case. “I submit,” he told the assembled geeks, “that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilisational disaster.”

Bratton is not anti-futurology like me; rather, he is against simple-minded futurology. He thinks the Ted style evades awkward complexities and evokes a future in which, somehow, everything will be changed by technology and yet the same. The geeks will still be living their laid-back California lifestyle because that will not be affected by the radical social and political implications of the very technology they plan to impose on societies and states. This is a naive, very local vision of heaven in which everybody drinks beer and plays baseball and the sun always shines.

This really is the crux of it. There’s money in predicting the future. In every town there exists a tarot card reader or psychic. Women with advanced degrees go to these people to get their future. Religion is all about the future. Live your life a certain way and you gain ever lasting life or languish in hell. The animating philosophy of modern political elites is based on the belief that the right arrangements will result in heaven on earth, however that is currently imagined. The demand for these promises is unlimited.

The bits about Gladwell and Kurzweil in the article are interesting. It seems that the people who get rich from telling ruling class types about the future never know a lot about the science they promote. The two guys who authored The Second Machine Age have no science. One has a degree in math, but has never worked in science or technology. Instead he has remained in college teaching management. The other guy just writes books.

Thomas Friedman is a guy who appears to learn the jargon of science and technology, but knows nothing about science and technology. His skill is flattering rich people, especially his wife who is mega-rich. This allows Friedman to flit around the world telling rich people they are the best. The court jester has been a feature of human societies since the Bronze Age. Telling the boss he’s wonderful by predicting the current course will lead to times of plenty is never going to get you fed to the lions.

I had my annual physical yesterday. Even though I am no spring chicken, I remain in good health. Other than high blood pressure, for which I take a pill every day, I have no health concerns. I exercise frequently and watch my diet, but I am not like the guys in this story from the Weekly Standard. I take few supplements and I refuse to starve myself into a skeleton. I’m not interested in living forever. If it means looking like this guy, then I’m certainly not interested.

There was a poster on one wall of the examination room graphically describing the horrors of smoking. It featured pictures of brown lungs and mangled faces. The poster was sponsored by one of the nicotine patch makers. There was a calendar sponsored by a local disability lawyer. There was a poster for some drug that must be aimed at fat people. Next to that was a poster for botox.  I started thinking about John Kerry. What in the world would possess someone to have that done? I’m as vain as any other man, but immobilizing your face sounds crazy to me.

Looking around, it occurred to me that one reason America has such a dysfunctional health care system is we have convinced ourselves it is not a business. We think health care is this weird fusion of mystical religion, government service and natural resource. It is none of those things. It certainly should never be any of those things. Europeans made it a government service for the proletariat. It’s cheap and does the basics, but there’s a reason their elites don’t use the system.

Health care is just another service. It is a business. If we looked at it that way, like we do veterinary services, we would do ourselves a world of good. When I take the cat to the vet, I pay for the service. I once had a cat with a heart problem. I was able to get first world, cutting edge cardiac care for the animal at a price that was trivial. A one hour visit with a world class doctor and his cutting edge machines cost $300. For large animals, heart surgery is now available to fix things like heart valves, again, at reasonable prices.

At no time is there any doubt that the transaction is exactly that, a transaction. My vet charges a fee and hopes to make a profit from my business with him. I decide whether the services are worth the money. Normal market forces drive prices down and innovation up. In my little slice of heaven, there are more veterinarians than physicians. The wait time for the vet is the next day while I had to wait over a month to see the nurse practitioner for my physical. That last bit is important. I see a real doctor for the cat. I’ve never met my doctor, just his nurses.

The response whenever I bring this up is “But you can put your cat down. People need lots of care when they are old and you cannot choose to put them down.” That’s not entirely true. We withdraw life saving measures all the time. Living wills are for exactly that. Doctors have been telling families “there’s nothing we can do” for generations. The realities of death have been dealt with since the dawn of time. It is only of late that we struggle with the concept. In Europe, poor people are given pain killers and sent home to die. We used to do the same thing until the reformers came along.

Health care is a math problem. In any society the care and feeding of the helpless members is a top priority. Altruism is one of the oldest human traits and it is what allows us to live in large communities of strangers. We are not going to leave the poor and sick to die in the streets untended. The question is how best to supply that charity to these people. Everyone else should be paying their own way for health services just as we pay our own way for clothes and food. But, when you live in a society run by lunatics with magical thinking about observable reality, you get what we have now.

According to a new study, George Wallace was right when he said “Segregation now, segregation forever!” Of course, everyone has known he was right, regarding the benefits of peaceful separation, but he has so far been wrong about the forever part of his statement. No one is allowed to say it in public, but like so many of our current taboos, people act on what cannot be said.

Segregation is making a comeback in U.S. schools.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Normal people tend to notice things. For instance, if they push a button and nothing happens, they quickly figure out the button does not work. Crazy people stand there all day pushing the button, each time expecting a different result. That’s what we keep seeing with the Left and social policy. Even if we assume their motives are good, six decades of failure should cause some rethinking of their goals.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60” report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.”

This is the next great cause of the Left. White people keep moving away from blacks and Latinos. The result is the schools remain segregated. Busing was a disaster so the only solution is to force blacks and whites to live together. They tried this in Berkeley in the 70’s and 80’s. Berkeley Citizens Action gained control of the housing authority and zoning board. The first thing they did was go after the lace curtain liberals on the hill. It was a disaster, but the Cult never learns from the past.

They tried building housing projects out in the suburbs. That was a hilarious disaster as people just moved away and you ended up with these weird pocket ghettos in the middle of nowhere. This was a phenomenon in the South mostly. Instead of urban reservation, they build “affordable housing” in working class suburbs and the whites then fled to the next suburb.

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos,” Orfield said.

Housing discrimination – stopping or discouraging minorities from moving to majority-white areas – also plays a role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court.

School performance can be entwined with poverty, too.

The reason it is a “harder nut to crack” is people are not insane. In the Baltimore – Washington area parents play all sorts of games to keep their kids out of ghetto schools. Parents will claim to live in a better area, using the address of a friend or relative, so they can send their kid to the better school. Of course, the massive suburbs and exurbs around places like Detroit are the result of sane people fleeing the metastasizing ghetto.

“These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty, and it also denies the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you’re with people from different socio-economic backgrounds,” said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17, a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, the disparities are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education classes or art, and Advanced Placement classes are only available online.

John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA has revealed how many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped – or been reversed.

While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best reputations for decades, said Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and the surrounding area, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools.

Still, around the country, only 23 percent of black students attended white-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968.

Kansas City is billion dollar experiment that should have put an end to the madness of forced integration. Here’s a long report from Cato on the colossal failure of the reformers to fix the schools. Again, failure never seems to teach these people any lessons. It only encourages them. That’s because their dream of an integrated society is now just vengeance. They hate white people.