Open-minded curiosity can also teach much about another foreigner in our midst: the American suburb. Often vilified or ignored by urbanites, architects, and critics, the suburb is nevertheless the residential heart of America. Its citizens have much to learn about how it works and does not work, and why people choose to live there: because they can afford to buy houses there, because the homes are of higher quality than they get credit for, and because the builders who design and build them are responsive to home buyers’ desires.
Understanding and responding to those justifications doesn’t require endorsing the suburbs as they are today. In fact, it might help improve urban design in the sometimes overlooked places where Americans live.
We have a problem. In a 10-billion-year-old galaxy there should have been ample opportunity for at least one species to escape its own mess, and to spread across the stars, filling every niche. That this species doesn’t seem to have come calling leads to Fermi’s Paradox – if life isn’t impossibly rare, then where is everyone? Efforts to scan the skies for signs of intelligent life have come up blank too, adding to the puzzle. Perhaps the vast gulfs of interstellar space and the narrow windows of time for communicative species to exist within shouting distance of each other are to blame. Intelligences might be like small ships passing in the night in a vast ocean. Actual close encounters of any kind could be exceedingly unusual.
Another explanation for the great silence of the galaxy is that any surviving intelligence out there is so different from us, so radically evolved, that we can’t even conceive of its forms or behaviours. As a consequence, actually detecting and recognising it could be next to impossible. That’s a bit of a downer.
But there is also a possibility that lies between such extremes and it might be the most probable of all. When our first encounter or detection finally occurs, it could be a machine intelligence that appears in our sights.
I love listening to radio, but sometimes I don’t want to listen to a particular station, genre, or category. Sometimes I want to listen to a time of day. Which is, of course, entirely possible thanks to the rise of online streaming at the expense of older analogue broadcast methods. If I am feeling afternoony in the morning, I can leave the world that is “governed by time” and join whichever community of radio listeners—in Mumbai, Perth, or Hong Kong—is currently experiencing three P.M. The optimism of a morning show somewhere to my west offers a fresh beginning to a day that’s become lousy by midafternoon, whereas the broadcasts of early evening, burbling across the towns and cities to my east, can turn my morning shower into a kind of short-haul time machine past those hours in which I’m expected to be productive. But for the loosest and strangest of broadcast atmospheres, I am drawn most often to the dead of night, to the so-called graveyard shift.
Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge offer several intriguing ideas for limiting the excesses of data-rich capitalism. One idea is a “robo tax” as a partial replacement for the payroll tax — machines would be taxed more and human employment less. Another idea is mandated data sharing — an echo of the patent system, which also depends on disclosure, the authors note — to allow new entrants a fair chance to compete.
These ideas won’t get much of a hearing in today’s Washington. But the shift toward an information-based economy will outlast the current administration. Eventually, this country will have a government interested in encouraging the best parts of modern capitalism while restraining the worst.
“The past … never remains in the past.” That is the signature theme of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, which juggles time in much the same way that memory does, interlacing the war years of the 1940s with their immediate aftermath and then jumping forward a decade or so, only to dart back to the war again. At the outset, Ondaatje’s narrator, Nathaniel, is 14; by the last page he is in his late 20s. In between is the intricate, subtly rendered account of what happened to his mother, Rose. The warlight of the title is the London blackout of World War II, when familiar landscapes were darkened, mysterious, uncertain. It epitomizes nicely the climate of a narrative that is itself devious and opaque, that proceeds by way of hints and revelations.