Life Imitates Art | Ares Project

Managerialism: Where the MDA is Headed

In a nutshell, a managerial state, implemented (enforced) via MAs: The China Convergence.

I haven’t finished the article yet, but the first several pages neatly summarize my thinking on where the MDA is headed in the second and third books, based on my reading of Burnham, Reimann, Orwell, Wells, Scott, and others.

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of nonmanagerial elements.

Interesting that art is imitating life here for a change.

My own imagined version of this based on reading Burnham is a managerial system so integrated that the sectors defined by Lyons are indistinguishable, having been systematically dismantled and rebuilt as a seamless whole.

The catch in implementing any totalitarian state has always been achieving the total part: total control requires total legibility and total ‘actionability’. If you are obliged to carry an electronic communications device in your pocket at all times, and you use it in some capacity (even just its passive presence) in every interaction with another human, it’s trivial for the state in question to harvest all the data about your thoughts and actions they could ever need. And with a machine simulacrum of intelligence to analyze it, to find subtle actions and interventions it can take to achieve its goals and eliminate dissent before it can become a problem – indeed, before the dissenters even become aware of their dissent.

Of what use are crude tools of surveillance and control like the gulag, Gestapo, Stasi, Pitešti, Room 101, struggle sessions, brainwashing, social credit, etc. when you have technology through which you can precisely spot the patterns and trends in an individual’s thoughts early, even before he does, and nudge him in a safer (for you) and more productive (for your interests) direction without his awareness?

A system of this kind, implemented objectively and with the right overall goals, could indeed be a utopia – all discontent headed off by the right incentives and disincentives applied automatically at the right moment, all personal potential optimized with targeted opportunities and constructive interferences appearing at the right moments, etc. Each subject might see himself as the luckiest man in the world as he reflects on his unbroken string of good fortune and near-misses…as if there is someone watching out for him.

But, humans being humans, we all know a system of this kind could not and would not be implemented in such a way. As we see with things like the Google algorithm, biases, pettiness, misanthropy, ideology, etc. would prevent an objective implementation. It would be impossible for anyone capable of implementing such a system to allow it to apply positive nudges to people they see as undeserving, e.g. giving a frustrated young antisemite an art-school scholarship so as to focus his energies on something rewarding and constructive – and equally impossible to avoid programming it to sadistically apply negative nudges to those they feel deserve them.

Life Imitates Art: Death of Social Media Edition

In our unpublished backstory, if not in In the Shadow of Ares itself, we established that A) social media was a passing fad, regarded in the late 2040s like disco is today; and B) due to the proliferation of spam, lunacy, disinformation, and bot-created “information pollution” online, the internet would sprout a new super-layer of bespoke “datanets”: curated private subnetworks catering to every possible interest and bias.

Likewise, the generalized corruption of the internet would lead to the initial development of a non-self-aware form of machine intelligence, “simulacrum intelligence”, as a tool for more accurate and useful searching of networked electronic data.

We may not yet have ubiquitous embedded sim-int tech automating and simplifying everything we do, or mobile agents with their pretty-convincing-but-still-kinda-dumb personality modules, but some form of differentiation and disaggregation of social media (at least) might be starting. From the Z Blog (emphasis mine):

The bigger issue for Twitter and all social media is the barrier to entry has collapsed and disaggregation is upon us. Gab has proven this. They not only have a stable platform that is better than Twitter, but it was done on a shoestring by one committed guy, in the face of massive resistance by the usual suspects. The future is bespoke platforms of like-minded users. People are looking to be free from the blue-check harpies who have ruined the large social media platforms.

That’s not far off: the polluted online environment is posited here as driving the change, rather than the internet simply becoming unusable, but the outcome is similar.

Life Imitates Art: EuroSpace Edition

This has some striking relevance to certain events at the beginning of Ghosts of Tharsis: Astronauts in Europe ask for their own independent crew spacecraft

In fact, Ivanka has a thought along these lines, just before…very bad things happen:

“While Europe is still at the forefront of many space endeavors, such as Earth observation, navigation, and space science, it is lagging in the increasingly strategic domains of space transportation and exploration,” the manifesto states. “Europe’s Gross Domestic Product is comparable to that of the United States’, but its joint investment in space exploration does not reach even one tenth of NASA’s.”

Russia has the Soyuz crew vehicle, China has the Shenzhou spacecraft, and NASA has SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Moreover, within a few years, the US space agency should add the Orion spacecraft and Boeing’s Starliner capsule to its fleet of human spaceflight vehicles. India also seeks to develop and demonstrate a crewed transportation system to low Earth orbit within the next two years.

So where does that leave Europe?

She’s not any happier about being part of an also-ran team than these manifesto-writers are. In her case, though, it’s because all that money that could be lavished on a European space program is being frittered away on corruption.

Helluva Ride

I had the same reaction to this that I had when LM started putting cameras on the Shuttle External Tanks: “Why haven’t they been doing this cool thing all along?”

The departure of the heatshield was especially fun, as it’s exactly how I imagined the corresponding event in the prologue to “In the Shadow of Ares” (minus the unfortunate burn-through, obviously).

The rover’s first 360 pano is also out:

Note the similarity…

Looking Back from Mars

Netflix’s Mars series “Away”, starring Hilary Swank, debuts next month. Check out the official trailer. It appears to focus on the relationship of a mother leaving behind her daughter for a 3-year mission.

What caught my eye was the Earth-Moon-Mars bracelet Swank’s character gives her daughter prior to departure. Not nearly as cool as Amber’s pendant in In the Shadow of Ares, but still an interesting parallel between the two stories.

Life Imitates Art: The Mars Rovers of Iceland

On my next to last day in Iceland, I drove the Kaldidalur route from Reykholt to Thingvellir, passing en route the Langjokull ice cap. Much to my surprise, there was a modestly-marked turnoff that led not merely close to the ice but out onto it (just left of the prominent hill in the center of the image):

Between Iceland and Norway, I’ve been up close to a dozen or so glaciers but have only ever seen ice caps from a distance. I always pictured them as being bounded by ridges or mountains where they didn’t squeeze out through passes as outlet glaciers, and didn’t anticipate that the margin of the ice would simply taper off to nothing. Just look at this – is this what you would have expected? That such a huge mass of ice would just kinda…end?

I took some pictures and made some notes and filed it all away for when we eventually send characters to the North Cap. Expect to encounter this scene with a red tint at some point.

Another surprise, and the point of this post, was the tour vehicles used by Into the Glacier to ferry people to a man-made ice cave further out on the ice cap.

A little research turned up that they were custom made from MAN 8×8 military chassis by a British company, Army-UK. The things were huge – the pictures don’t convey just how large they seemed up close (but note the Ford Explorer for some sense of scale). I couldn’t see how many seats there were in the front cab, but it looked wide enough to seat four abreast. Army-UK gives a maximum cabin capacity of 38 passengers, which would work out to ten two-by-two rows (minus two seats for the entrance door and steps).

This one was even larger than the one above:

While these aren’t exactly how we pictured the rovers in the Ares Project universe (at least not the rovers sent to Mars as part of the titular Ares Project, which we describe as having cylindrical bodies with a single large front transparency akin to the submersibles from The Abyss), they are great analogues against which one can imagine what other sorts of rovers might look like. In particular, the rovers used by the ill-fated British Trans-Marineris Expedition of 2050…oh, wait, we haven’t talked about that story yet, have we…

Here, Hold My Beer

NAWA Technologies has announced that it will begin mass-producing carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Compared to lithium batteries, ultracapacitors are capable of near-instantaneous charging and discharging.

It was these characteristics that led us to select this technology, in our novel In The Shadow of Ares, to power various devices on a future Mars, ranging from mobile agents to the autonomous “diggers” (mining robots). More specifically, it was the near-instantaneous discharge of huge quantities of energy that made them particularly appealing.

Although the 2019 versions of ultracapacitors have shortcomings (low energy density and high leakage rates compared to lithium units), it is rewarding to see the technology we described a decade ago reach mass production.

So what say we buy one, bring it to full charge, and see what happens when we damage the charge regulator?

Life Imitates Art #3,045,772

Someone is now marketing something we proposed in In the Shadow of Ares: robotic solar panel cleaners. I received information on these via an email brochure from Sentro Technologies USA (unfortunately information on theses robots is not available on their website). These devices are certainly something my employer, a significant developer and owner of renewable technologies, would consider for our larger solar arrays. Here are two images from the brochure:

The first runs on a rail, much like we envisioned when we had Amber engaged in her chores, cleaning dust off solar panels because the robot wasn’t functioning. I find the second autonomous, mobile unit more interesting. The engineering challenge would be to get it to move from array to array, especially where those arrays have tracking systems and vary in tilt and orientation relative to one another.

Electronic Noses for Sniffing Disease

This is something I suggested to Lockheed Martin five years ago as an application of the cabin air monitoring technology we were developing for Orion: New Technologies Smell Sickness

We’ve long known that sickness has a smell. Service dogs can smell and be trained to alert humans to seizures and even cancer.

Now scientists are using technology to ‘smell’ diseases that the human nose can’t.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology team behind the Na-Nose, which is designed to detect up to 17 diseases, claims that its new technology can a wide range of diseases on a person’s breath.

Each person’s breath is made up of a number of chemical compounds, unique to us. They may be dependent upon gender, age, race and a host of other biological factors.

The Na-Nose’s developers claim that it can smell diseases including some forms of cancer, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s. So far, it has proven to be 86 percent accurate at detecting diseases.

We’ve actually had this idea on the back-burner for a while for use in an Ares Project story, but the need hasn’t yet come up. While the obvious applications are in health monitoring, the same technology could potentially be fitted to a robot and used for prospecting, by sniffing out trace volatiles and airborne “contaminants” indicating the presence of certain useful minerals.

Life Imitates Art: The Visor Display

It seems the capabilities of Leon’s helmet display aren’t all that far off:

Tyco’s Scott Safety is bringing a big upgrade to the field of firefighting with their newly released product, the Scott Sight. This hands-free device is the first in the industry that incorporates an in-mask thermal intelligence system, according to an April 18th press release from the fire protection and security company.

The Scott Sight works in a similar way to Google Glass. A screen within the mask itself displays readings and various interfaces via a thermal camera at nine frames per second for up to four hours.