Artificial intelligence: threat or menace?

The great thing about the British tabloids is they never let a strict adherence to the truth get in the way of a headline. Take this one from The Daily Mail: "Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk sign open letter warning of a robot uprising." Pretty ominous, huh?

Artificial intelligence has loomed as a threat to humanity ever since Victor Frankenstein reanimated his first corpse. A.I. dooms us all, whether on Earth ("Terminator" and its sequels) or out in space ("Battlestar Galactica"). If we're lucky, we'll just end up ruled by a despotic supercomputer, as in Joseph Sargent's 1970 thriller "Colossus: The Forbin Project." If we're not lucky — boom.

Two movies now in theaters take different approaches to the A.I. menace. In "Avengers: Age of Ultron," A.I. is the latest threat confronting Marvel's cinematic superheroes. "Ex Machina," meanwhile, confronts us with just how thin the line between intelligence and artificial intelligence really is.

The curious thing about Marvel's movies is they're action movies where the action is typically the least interesting part. The Shaw Brothers, Marvel is not. And "Avengers: Age of Ultron" has a lot of action. It starts with a raid on a Hydra base — Hydra being the bad guys from the Captain America movies and TV's "Agents of SHIELD" — and ends, like the first "Avengers" movie, with a huge battle involving our heroes vs. an army of disposable drones. And no, that's not a metaphor for the United States' preferred form of modern warfare. In his second outing for Marvel, Joss Whedon still directs action scenes as if they bore him, and they probably do. They're just this thing he has to do because they're expected, and his disinterest is contagious.

The one action set piece that isn't a snooze is the much-promoted heavyweight bout between the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo's CGI stand-in) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) wearing his just-for-the-occasion "Hulkbuster" Iron Man suit. One-on-one combat, punctuated by clever quips, beats Michael Bay-style melees every time.

The big bad is an insane robot named Ultron, voiced with malevolent glee by James Spader. Spader needs only his voice to rank with Tom Hiddleston's Loki among Marvel's best villains.

One of Stark's science projects gone awry, Ultron is supposed to protect humanity. Then Ultron decides the best way to do that is by making humanity evolve, and nothing speeds along evolution better than a global extinction event. Oops.

It makes one long for the more modest aims of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor, plotting to dump California's coastline into the Pacific to further a real estate scheme.

Whedon, who also wrote the script, is on more comfortable turf dealing with characters, and "Age of Ultron" gives him plenty. Joining the previous film's team are "Godzilla's" Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, while Paul Bettany, Stark's helpful A.I. Jarvis in four earlier movies, finally shows up in the flesh as the Vision.

The verbal sparring between Stark, Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), along with the budding romance between Ruffalo's Banner and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, keep lively what otherwise, like "Iron Man 2," feels more like a warm-up than the main act.

"Ex Machina" is definitely a main act, and it's a brilliant one. Screenwriter Alex Garland ("28 Days Later") steps behind the camera for an impressive directorial debut.

Billionaire tech mogul Nathan (Oscar Isaac) invites one of his programmers, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to his secluded home for an experiment. The experiment is to test whether Nathan's android Ava (Alicia Vikander) has achieved artificial intelligence. But when Ava tells Caleb that Nathan cannot be trusted, it kicks off a battle of wits that leaves us to ponder not only what it means to be human, but whether the real danger of artificial intelligence isn't a lack of humanity, but too much of it.

Garland has crafted a first-class sci-fi thriller, with so many twists and red herrings that the ones you see blind you to the ones you don't.

"Ex Machina" may be the smaller film about A.I., but it leaves the bigger impression.

Culture Shock 09.22.11: Can Netflix survive long enough for its master plan?

Netflix has had a bad couple of months.

Since the company announced its new price structure, which took effect this month and amounted to an increase for most subscribers, Netflix has been dealing with one PR disaster after another.

The rate hike was followed by Netflix's failure to renew its streaming deal with Starz, meaning lots of on-demand movies — including Disney films — will disappear from Netflix's offerings at the end of February.

As a consequence, the past two months have been ugly. Netflix has shed roughly 600,000 customers, while its stock has lost about half its value.

The backlash's severity caught Netflix's top brass off guard — and me, too, for that matter. I figured most Netflix users would complain and then suck it up, deciding Netflix was still worth the money. As it happens, most did. But, still, more than half a million customers actually following through on threats to dump Netflix. I don't think anybody expected that. It runs counter to the entire 20-year history of Internet griping, which had never amounted to anything.

Until now.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings tried to stop the hemorrhaging this week in an emailed apology that doubled as an announcement for Netflix's next move, spinning off its DVD-by-mail business into a separate company to be called Qwikster, while Netflix continues to offer streaming video.

Cue yet another round of angry customers and widespread ridicule.

Adding the cherry to this self-inflicted pie to the face, the newly valuable @Qwikster Twitter ID is already spoken for, and the guy who speaks for it does so only in a vague approximation of a language, presumably meant to be English.

From a PR standpoint, you couldn't ask for much worse, which is why it's ironic that from a pure nuts-and-bolts business perspective, everything Netflix has done makes sense — in the long run.

In the long run, DVDs are a dying format, destined to appeal only to collectors, aficionados and aging hipsters the way laserdiscs and vinyl albums do now. Nobody is going to make bank renting discs by mail. Even the Postal Service can't make money on mail.

Anyway, Netflix would rather spend money on content than on postage.

But, knowing that, all of the Hollywood studios have started upping their demands, which is what forced Netflix's rate hike and restructuring. Movies and TV shows don't come cheap.

The long-run plan is sound, but in the short run, Netflix has all of the dead-eye aim of an Imperial Stormtrooper.

Still, how bad are things for Netflix, really?

Despite losing half of its market value, Netflix's stock is still in the neighborhood of $130 a share, which is about $100 a share more than where media giants Disney and Time Warner currently trade.

Netflix also still has 24 million subscribers in the United States alone, which is more than either Showtime or Starz, and not far behind HBO's roughly 28 million. And Netflix has yet to roll out its own original programing.

The biggest threat to Netflix is still that someone might beat it at its own game. Blockbuster's new owner, Dish Network, might turn that floundering brand around, or a new owner might try to make Hulu competitive — something Hulu's current owners seem to discourage, with the exception of offering Criterion Collection films to Hulu Plus subscribers.

But first things first. Netflix really needs to buy that @Qwikster Twitter account.

Culture Shock 03.31.11: Technology dominance is fleeting

In the past week, Amazon.com has quietly released two new products that are likely to significantly escalate the ongoing cold war between the technology world's three major superpowers.

Last week, Amazon opened an app store, offering free and paid applications for devices that run on Google's Android operating system and becoming the first direct challenger to Google's own Android Market.

That also fed rumors that Amazon is working on its own Android version of its already popular Kindle e-reader, which might just finally be the device that mounts a serious challenge to Apple's iPad.

Then, Monday night, Amazon rolled out its Amazon Cloud Player, which allows users to upload music and videos, which they can then play from any desktop or notebook computer's Web browser or, using Amazon's Cloud Player app, from any Android-powered smartphone or tablet device. Imagine accessing your entire MP3 collection from your work computer or your phone. You'll probably have to buy extra storage space to do it, even though Amazon offers 5 gigs free and another 20 GB with the purchase of any CD download. But now you can do just that.

And as the sun rose Tuesday morning, some tech pundits were wondering if Amazon's Cloud was about to rain all over Apple's iTunes.

Both Apple and Google are reportedly working on systems similar to the Amazon Cloud, but now they're playing catch-up. And Apple in particular isn't used to playing from behind.

Notice something interesting yet?

We're talking about the major players in consumer technology in 2011: a book retailer that branched out into digital media, a computer manufacturer that revived its fortunes by selling music and a company that started out with just a website that helped you find other websites. But who's missing from this list?

Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft — the software giant that dominated personal computing for most of the past 20 years. The company that became so large and so powerful that its competitors accused it of being a monopoly. (How can you be a monopoly if you have competitors?) The Evil Empire targeted by lawsuits and justice departments in both the U.S. and Europe.

That Microsoft. You know, the one that barely seems relevant anymore.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it had discontinued its Zune music player. Launched in 2006, Zune was Microsoft's attempt to challenge Apple's iPod, but it came along far too late to make a dent in the market.

Microsoft just recently launched its own Windows 7 smartphone system, and from what I've seen it's not bad. But, once again, it's a bit late to Apple and Google's party.

Even if Microsoft still controls the lion's share of desktop operating systems, that's not a safe place to be when the future of computing looks a lot more like something you carry around in a backpack or purse.

In the end, the lawsuits and antitrust cases didn't really hurt Microsoft, but an inability to adapt did, which makes all that hand wringing about Microsoft's dominance back in the 1990s seem more than a little silly now. Dominance is fleeting.

Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and then proceeded to mismanage the website into oblivion, allowing Facebook, which is not without its own annoyances, to become the social networking site of record. Now Murdoch's Newscorp is in talks with the music-video site Vevo for some kind of deal that might salvage something from Murdoch's investment.

MySpace and Microsoft became complacent, which is why they're no longer of any real consequence.

Meanwhile, Amazon, Google and Apple should consider themselves lucky they have each other to keep them all thinking about the future.

Culture Shock 02.10.11: Reading is about to change forever

A few years ago, I spent most every weekend rummaging through the upstairs stacks at this used bookshop in downtown Athens, across the street from the Limestone County Courthouse.

After a few months, I'd assembled a complete set of old "Conan: The Barbarian" paperbacks containing the original stories by Robert E. Howard. I also found most, but not all, of the then out-of-print "John Carter: Warlord of Mars" novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The hunt was almost as important as the prize, as I imagine collectors who thumb through boxes at flea markets and yard sales for rare LPs and overlooked baseball cards would agree. But that bookshop is now gone, and the experience of hunting for used books may not be far behind.

Now I can find all of those John Carter stories for my Kindle, and they cost anywhere from a couple of dollars to free. Click, and it's done. It's convenient, but it lacks the romance of upsetting your allergies as you blow dust off a brittle, yellowed paperback someone else bought for 75 cents in 1972.

Amazon.com announced last month that it sold more Kindle books than either paperbacks or hardcover books in the fourth quarter of 2010.

That's not counting the public-domain e-books Amazon offers free of charge.

Brick-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble's quick adoption of its own e-book reader, the Nook, has helped it avoid the fate of longtime rival, Borders. (Birmingham-based Books-A-Million has thrown in with B&N and now offers the Nook.)

Borders, meanwhile, is likely bound for bankruptcy. While Amazon raked in $200 million more in 2010 than it did in 2009 — no recession here — Borders was hard at work losing $74.4 million in just the fourth quarter.

It's easy to get nostalgic about books. I get nostalgic about lots of things, like the orange-and-brown earth tones of 1970s kitchen appliances. But like it or not, the electronic book is making dog-eared pages and creased spines obsolete. And I can think of some reasons why that's for the better.

Beyond-Black-Friday.com, a blog that follows Kindle news, directed me to a Tampa Tribune story about a Florida school district that spent $400,000 to buy Kindles for its students. The district will get some of that back in savings; electronic textbooks run $15 less than traditional ones. Plus, there's the bonus of Clearwater High's students getting to carry slim, lightweight electronic readers instead of lugging around heavy backpacks.

But probably the greatest long-term advantage is an e-book gives students instant — and often free — access to thousands of works that are in the public domain. That includes most of what students read in their high-school literature classes, from Shakespeare to "Moby Dick."

It's a lot of free material that can replace students buying books with their own money, which is what I did when I was in high school. (I certainly wouldn't pay for "Moby Dick" if I didn't have to.)

E-books will also radically change libraries. The New York Public Library's website features e-books for iPads, PCs, Sony Readers and Android-powered devices. Companies like Cleveland-based OverDrive offer software allowing library patrons to check out e-books for a limited time. The Jefferson County Library Cooperative uses OverDrive's system.

The world is full of free and inexpensive e-books. And devices like the Nook and Kindle are about to put them into more hands than ever.

Culture Shock 09.30.10: Doomsday is approaching for the DVD

A little more than a decade after its introduction, the DVD is already on its way out. It's a quick end to what was the most quickly adopted media format in history.

The evidence of the DVD's demise is overwhelming.

Best Buy plans to greatly reduce the amount of floor space it devotes to DVDs this holiday season, using that space instead for netbooks and tablet PCs — products that are actually in demand. And if you've been in a Best Buy recently, you've probably noticed the big-box retailer has already scaled back its DVD selection. Just try finding anything other than recent films or classics like "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca." The midlist selection has all but disappeared.

Earlier this year, Movie Gallery, the nation's No. 2 video rental chain, went out of business. Last week, the No. 1 chain, Blockbuster, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in a last-ditch — and probably futile — effort to avoid the same fate.

Neither Movie Gallery nor Blockbuster could withstand the onslaught of Netflix, which delivers DVDs by mail, offers an unsurpassed selection and never charges late fees. But even Netflix is trying its best to phase out DVDs.

Netflix is aggressively pushing its on-demand service, which streams movies directly to viewers via the Internet. This month, Netflix began streaming films released by Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM under a new deal worth nearly $1 billion.

Netflix would much rather pay the movie studios for the right to stream movies than pay the Postal Service to deliver DVDs to customers within one day. Netflix's executives can see the future, and it doesn't include physical media like DVDs, which are rapidly going the same way as compact discs. (Best Buy is cutting back on CDs this year even more than on DVDs. You can blame — or praise — Apple's Steve Jobs for that.)

None of this means that DVDs are about to disappear completely. The Hollywood movie studios are still banking on high-profile new releases, and Blu-ray, the high-definition successor to DVD, still appeals to people with home- theater systems. But the studios are already cutting back. Most older movies still languishing in studio vaults will probably never be released on DVD.

To meet the lingering demand for those catalog titles, a couple of studios are adopting a middle ground. Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures have launched print-on-demand services via their company websites and Amazon.com. The studios burn films to DVD-R discs when you order them.

DVD-Rs don't offer the same quality as commercially released DVDs, but they'll have to do for fans of obscure films that have not, and likely will not, make their way to DVD. For instance, Sony had scheduled a DVD release of the 1965 Sherlock Holmes film "A Study in Terror" for last year, to coincide with the release of the latest Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. But the DVD of "A Study in Terror" never arrived.

This month, Sony finally made "A Study in Terror" available as a DVD-R at its website. Clearly, someone at Sony has reconsidered the studio's approach to older films with cult followings.

Warner Bros. has been especially aggressive in shifting to DVD-R. It's print-on-demand films include "Under the Rainbow" with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, the foodie murder mystery "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" starring George Segal and Jacqueline Bisset, and Peter Sellers in "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu." A few years ago, when Best Buy was still stocking midlist titles, all would have been candidates for traditional DVD.

A few other catalog titles may find their way to DVD through small, special-interest labels that have always catered to the cult-film audience. Synapse Films will be releasing three long-awaited horror films that had been gathering dust in the Universal Studios and Fox vaults: "Vampire Circus," "Twins of Evil" and "Hands of the Ripper."

Vinyl record albums have disappeared except for the few pressed to satisfy a small but devoted following of aficionados. DVDs seem destined to follow the same path.

Culture Shock 09.23.10: Reading a book goes from solitary to social

It was bound to happen. Even the act of reading a book — seemingly that most solitary of pastimes — is starting to plug into social media.

Amazon's Kindle is currently the top e-book reader in terms of market share. And while the company hasn't said exactly how many Kindles it has sold, at least one source puts the number at more than 3 million, as of April, which was before Amazon cut prices, causing a spike in sales, and well before the new third-generation Kindles began shipping to customers this month.

Amazon says its new 3G Kindle is the fastest-selling model yet, and earlier this year, the online retailer said it was selling more e-books than hardcover books.

All that would be impressive enough, but Amazon isn't the only player in the e-book game. Apple's iPad has quickly gained 22 percent of the e-book market, according to Apple, whose CEO Steve Jobs is never shy about telling you exactly how many units his company has moved. Jobs says iPad users downloaded more than 5 million e-books in the first 65 days the iPad was on the market.

Is your head spinning yet? Well, hang on. Brick-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader has about 20 percent of the e-book market, according to company figures. The Nook is the one truly bright spot on B&N's balance sheet.

And none of this includes Sony's e-reader or tablet devices powered by Google's Android operating system.

But what does any of this have to do with reading becoming a social activity?

Books are making the leap from paper to pixels faster than anyone — apart from Jobs and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — could have anticipated. E-books are reaching a critical mass of readers. And where there is a critical mass of anyone in an electronic environment, social networking inevitably follows.

After swearing I would never give up physical books and all of the sensations that come with them — the feel and smell of the pages — I finally made the jump to e-books. I bought one of the new 3G Kindles.

It was a matter of safety as much as anything. One of the stacks of books I have piled on the floor of my home office — my shelves are all full and sagging under the weight of my library — toppled and nearly hit me in the head. E-books may not be a perfect substitute for real books, but at least they won't try to kill me.

One Kindle feature I discovered is it allows you to highlight passages of any e-book and then retrieve your highlights with just a few clicks. It's a handy feature, especially for those of us who cringe at the thought of permanently defacing a physical book. But that's not all.

Kindle allows you to share your notes and highlighted passages with friends via Facebook and Twitter. And, as you're reading, it lets you know if a passage has been highlighted by other Kindle users.

For example, I'm currently reading "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like" by Paul Bloom. It has more highlighted passages than any other book on my Kindle. The most popular passage, highlighted by 44 readers so far, begins, "What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think the thing is."

So, as I read, I can see what other readers think is important, which, whether I like it or not, will probably color what I think is important. (Good thing it's possible to turn this feature off.)

E-books are in their infancy. So it's only likely that Kindle, iPad and other e-readers will greatly expand on this rather simple social-networking feature as time goes on.

And it isn't as if reading has always been completely solitary. Weekly book clubs have been around for as long as there has been widespread literacy. But now I find myself in a virtual book club with strangers I don't know and will never meet. We just happen to be reading the same book and, sometimes, highlighting the same passages.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Culture Shock 08.06.09: I, for one, welcome our android overlords

Technology that would just as soon kill you.

Is the day coming when your toaster might try to kill you?

That may depend on how smart the toaster is. One day, it makes your breakfast, and the next it decides it wants to sleep in, or else.

Do toasters dream of electric sheep?

At two conferences held recently in California, researchers in computing and artificial intelligence speculated about a future in which our computers are as smart as we are — or possibly much smarter.

"These are powerful technologies that could be used in good ways or scary ways," said Eric Horvitz, quoted in The Sunday Times of London. Horvitz should know all about scary technologies. He's a principal researcher at Microsoft, which gave us Windows Vista.

We can't say we weren't warned. From HAL 9000 to the replicants of "Blade Runner" to the Cylons to Skynet, science fiction is full of super-intelligent computers, robots and androids who rebel against their human creators.

Then there is the 1970 film "Colossus: The Forbin Project," in which a supercomputer decides to take over the world, for humanity's own good, naturally.

"In time," Colossus says, "you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love."

With computers becoming faster and more complex, maybe such doomsday fantasies could become real. According to Moore's law, named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, the processing power of computers doubles about every two years. Whether that trend will continue is a subject of debate, but some futurists think it will.

Ray Kurzweil believes we are about 30 years away from creating a human-level artificial intelligence, a computer just as smart as we are.

If both Kurzweil and Moore are correct, things could get interesting, and soon. In his 2008 book "Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World," David D. Friedman writes, "In forty years, that makes them (computers) something like 100 times as smart as we are. We are now chimpanzees — perhaps gerbils — and had better hope that our new masters like pets."

Science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge coined a name for it: the singularity. That's the point at which superhuman intelligences, rather than humans, are driving technological advancement. Each generation of machines creates another that's even smarter.

In a 1993 article, Vinge writes, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

That's all well and good if the future's super-intelligent robots look like Tricia Helfer, Grace Park and Lucy Lawless — the "Battlestar Galactica" scenario — but there's still the danger they'll decide to nuke us from orbit (because it's the only way to be sure).

Kurzweil is an optimist. He thinks we can beat the robots at their own game. Find a way for human brains to connect to machines, and humanity can take advantage of Moore's law, too.

Yes, mankind's fate may hinge on us becoming cyborgs. But why stop there? We could, as science-fiction author Ken MacLeod has speculated, upload our minds into cyberspace, leaving our flesh to go the way of all flesh, while achieving technological immortality, at least until the universe reaches heat death. Then the lights go out permanently.

Stopping technological advancement isn't an option, but if becoming a cyborg seems too extreme, we could try to build something like Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into our super-intelligent machines.

The only problem with that, as anyone who has read Asimov's stories knows, is the Three Laws often cause as many problems as they solve.

Maybe it's best just to hope we end up ruled by androids who look like Lucy Lawless. I, for one, welcome our new Cylon overlords.

Children’s brains may evolve for Information Age

If TV doesn’t rot your child’s brain, the Internet will, according to the latest scary speculation.

Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist, says exposure to social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, along with video games and fast-paced TV shows, may be rewiring children’s brains.

I can think of two reasonable responses to this claim: “So what?” and “So what?”

At one level, this is exactly the sort of thumb-sucking response that has always greeted new media. Since the 1930s, do-gooders have blamed jazz, comic books, rock ’n’ roll, television, and now video games and the Internet, for everything wrong with “the children” — even when there isn’t anything wrong with children.

Like Paul Lynde in the Broadway musical “Bye Bye Birdie,” they ask, “Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?”

Juvenile crime across the board is down compared to 10 years ago. Fewer teens are having sex, and the ones who do are more likely to use protection. Fewer teens are getting abortions.

OK. I give. What exactly is the matter with kids today? If online social networking is bad for them, it hasn’t shown up in the statistics yet.

But let’s assume MySpace and Facebook really are rewiring children’s brains. In fact, I would be surprised if that were not the case. The real question is “Why is this a problem?”

This isn’t the first time the environment has rewired our brains. Before our ancestors developed written languages, they had excellent memories. But writing has taken away our ability to remember epics like “The Iliad.” Still, that seems a good trade-off.

Adults often complain that change happens too quickly and that the world is becoming too fast-paced. If children’s brains are adapting to the pace of modern society, that seems like a net plus. A brain that is better at filtering information from many different sources in a short span of time is a brain that is better suited to the Information Age.

How fast-paced is the world today? One useful measure is the length of the average movie shot. An average shot in a major motion picture today is 2 or 3 seconds long. By comparison, film critic Roger Ebert notes, the average shot in “Citizen Kane” (1941) is 11.4 seconds. By today’s standards, “Pulp Fiction” is a slow movie, which isn’t surprising given that Quentin Tarantino is, in many respects, an old-fashioned filmmaker. The average shot in “Pulp Fiction” is 7.9 seconds.

There is a question of cause and effect here. Are movies contributing to children’s shorter attention spans by rewiring their brains? Maybe, but I doubt that’s the whole answer. I suspect, instead, that movies are mainly catering to the shorter attention spans that have resulted from the quickening pace of life in general, with movies being a small part of that.

Phil Edholm, chief technology officer at Nortel, created a minor stir last year when he suggested that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, at least in its mild form, may be an evolutionary adaptation for multitasking in the digital era. Parents of ADHD children where not amused. But maybe there is some truth to his speculation.

Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered that a genetic variation associated with ADHD seems to help people in nomadic cultures survive. The variation also seems to encourage novelty-seeking behavior. The researchers speculate that some ADHD-associated traits may have been beneficial in our prehistoric past.

If modern society is taking on attributes that make it more like our hunter-gatherer past — for example, greater mobility and a faster pace than agricultural societies — then genetic traits that were advantageous in the past could reassert themselves.

If so, that’s not cause for alarm. That might be just evolution.

Congress gives analog TV yet another reprieve

The never-ending saga for America’s transition to digital television just got a little more never-ending.

The U.S. Senate voted Monday for a four-month delay that would encourage but not require over-the-air TV stations to continue broadcasting both analog and digital signals until June 12. House Republicans blocked the measure Wednesday, but Democrats plan to bring it up again and have the votes to pass it. After June 12, all stations would finally turn off their analog signals.

President Barack Obama made the delay a top priority upon taking office, arguing that the original Feb. 17 deadline would leave millions of Americans unable to receive over-the-air TV broadcasts.

Despite a year of public service announcements and a government program to subsidize people buying analog-to-digital converter boxes for their old TV sets, it seems a lot of people still haven’t gotten the message. And some who did get it are out of luck.

The converter boxes range in price from $40 to $80, and the Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupon program intended to help people pay for them. The program’s funding limit is $1.34 billion, but the number of people on the waiting list for the $40 coupons has reached 2.6 million. Dangle “free” money around, and the world will beat a path to your door.

This, however, is just the latest screw-up in the long and convoluted transition to digital television. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been bungling the process for 20 years. Concessions to broadcasters delayed DTV implementation, which resulted in there being little incentive, until recently, for consumers to buy DTV-ready TV sets or converter boxes.

Those concessions are on top of the fact that the government gave additional broadcast spectrum to the stations free of charge.

One rule of economics is that people care more about something when they have to pay for it. But according to one estimate, TV broadcasters received up to $100 billion worth of prime broadcast real estate for nothing. That certainly didn’t give TV stations an incentive to quickly implement DTV and offer high-quality digital programming that would entice viewers to buy digital televisions. Instead, most stations just sat on that spectrum for years.

Now that broadcasters are finally ready to go all-digital, this latest delay has some of them asking for even more concessions. PBS chief executive Paula Kerger said Monday that continuing to broadcast in analog until June 12 would cost PBS affiliates $22 million, and she wants the federal government — meaning taxpayers — to pick up the tab.

Like most things the government does, there was a better way.

Congress and the FCC could have abandoned the fiction that the broadcast spectrum is and must remain a public resource, which broadcasters merely use so long as they promote “the public interest,” which is whatever politicians say it is. Broadcast spectrum is valuable property. Congress could have auctioned it off, forcing broadcasters to pay market prices. That would have ensured the spectrum would have gone to broadcasters who were prepared to exploit it as soon as possible and to its fullest.

Then, Congress could have allowed broadcasters to auction off their old analog spectrum to recoup some of their costs. As it is, as soon as broadcasters shut off their analog signals, that spectrum will go to wireless services and local public safety agencies. But there is no reason why TV stations couldn’t have sold those frequencies to wireless companies or back to the government. That would have been a fair concession to broadcasters.

Of course, this mess means nothing to the vast majority of TV viewers. More than 80 percent get their TV via cable or satellite. This expensive, drawn-out process is about the 20 percent of viewers who still rely on rabbit ears. And that number would be smaller if Congress and the FCC hadn’t spent most of the past 40 years restricting pay-TV’s growth and stifling competition — yet another gift to over-the-air broadcasters.

OK, Apple, you win; I finally have an iPod

“I bought an iPod. It can hold 20,000 songs or one message from my mother.”

— Steven Wright, comedian

I’ve finally given in and purchased Apple’s signature product, the iPod. Funny, I remember when Apple was a computer company. Now, it’s a music company that also makes computers.

If it weren’t for Apple’s “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC” commercials, I might not remember that Apple even makes computers. And what’s up with those commercials? The PC guy is likable, but the Mac guy is a jerk. This is supposed to make me want to buy a Mac? Now, Windows Vista — that’s a good reason to buy a Mac.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. My new iPod.

For years, I’d gotten by with my iRiver MP3 player. Yeah, you may think the iRiver is just a cheap iPod knock-off, what with the similar names and all. But, trust me, the iRiver is huge in Asia. Still, my first-generation iRiver didn’t hold enough songs, and it was a pain keeping extra AA batteries on the go. I’m sure iRiver makes better MP3 players now, but it’s hard to keep up with the iPod. Not even Microsoft can do it. How many people own Microsoft’s Zune players? A lot fewer than Bill Gates would like.

I swear, the Zunes on the display shelf at Best Buy are gathering dust. OK, not really. But I’m sure that’s only because the staff dusts them.

Part of me still says the iPod is a textbook case of style triumphing over substance. Other MP3 players can do pretty much everything the iPod does. Everything, that is, except play music downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store. But with other companies, including Amazon.com, offering music downloads without Apple’s proprietary copy protection, that’s less of an issue.

So, what is the iPod’s allure? It’s sleek. It’s shiny. It has an easy-to-use interface. And it comes right out of the box ready to plug into your computer. It automatically synchronizes with the iTunes software and copies all of the music on your computer’s hard drive. Within minutes, it’s ready to go. Like most Apple products, the iPod is idiot-proof.

I take pride in my computer skills, so being idiot-proof is not normally a selling point with me, and it’s not an unequivocal plus with the iPod. Idiot-proof electronics are often harder to deal with for those of us who know what we are doing.

To manually manage my iPod’s content, I must connect it to my computer and turn off the automatic synchronization. Then, iTunes asks me if I’m sure I want to do that. Well, my name isn’t Dave, and iTunes isn’t HAL. So, yes, I’m sure.

But the same idiot-proof features that make Macs annoying and Microsoft’s Vista insufferable are a plus with something simple like an iPod. You don’t want it to do anything fancy. You just want it to play music.

Then there are the peripherals. Since iPod is by far the market leader in the U.S., every other electronics company wants to make gadgets to go with it. So, I can buy a cable that plugs my iPod into my car’s cigarette lighter and then plays my iPod over the car’s speakers. Presto! No need to ever lug compact discs to and from my car again. Plus, everything from the largest stereo system to the smallest clock radio now features an iPod plug-in port.

Ironically for Microsoft-hating Apple partisans, this is exactly how Microsoft came to dominate desktop computing — by gaining such a large market share that everyone else had to make Microsoft-compatible applications. What Microsoft did for computers, Apple has done for digital music.

So, I give in. After years of avoiding Apple’s sleek, trendy products, I have an iPod. And, yes, it’s as good as advertised.

But I’m still not buying an iPhone.

Blu-ray wins the 21st century’s first format war

The latest great format war is over, and the winner is Blu-ray.

For the past 18 months, Sony-backed Blu-ray and Toshiba-backed HD DVD have battled it out to be the high-definition successor to DVD. During that time, Blu-ray seemed to have the upper hand, but the final blow came late last week.

Warner Bros., which had been releasing its movies in both formats, announced it will go exclusively with Blu-ray, joining other entertainment-industry heavy hitters Disney, Sony Pictures and Fox.

Warner currently sells more DVDs than any other Hollywood studio. But with DVD sales leveling off, it wanted to eliminate consumer and retailer confusion regarding Blu-ray and HD DVD, a company executive said at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That obviously meant using Warner’s huge film and TV library to tip the balance in Blu-ray’s favor.

Warner’s decision leaves only Paramount, Universal and mini-major studio DreamWorks in the HD DVD camp. Industry observers expect all three to make the leap to Blu-ray by the middle of the year. Blu-ray sales and rentals were outpacing HD DVD’s even before Warner’s decision to go exclusively Blu-ray. The remaining HD DVD-aligned studios simply can’t afford to stay on a sinking ship.

Toshiba executives say the fight isn’t over yet, but it is. They just haven’t admitted it. Toshiba’s position is either spin or a river in Egypt.

So, if you purchased the first season of Universal’s “Heroes” on HD DVD, you probably shouldn’t count on seeing subsequent seasons released on that format.

While this is bad news for HD DVD’s early adopters, at least we shouldn’t hear a lot of complaints this time around about how the “better” format didn’t win. Most videophiles either rate Blu-ray and HD DVD as about equal or give Blu-ray the edge. That wasn’t the case with the last big home video format war — the war between VHS and Betamax.

Sony’s Betamax videotape format died an ignominious death in the early 1980s, and Beta’s partisans cried foul. They said Beta’s audio and video quality were superior to VHS’s, which they were. Thus, Beta’s failure was proof that the “better” format doesn’t always win.

But “better” is a relative term. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years until an asteroid wiped them out, paving the way for mammals that had barely eked out an existence during the dinosaurs’ reign. Which was better adapted to survive? That depended entirely on the environment at the time.
During the Betamax/VHS war, the environment favored VHS. Consumers were willing to sacrifice Beta’s superior audio-video quality to get what VHS offered: double the recording time. That was a decided advantage when most consumers just wanted to tape TV shows for later viewing.

Besides, true videophiles didn’t need Beta. They clung to their laserdiscs, which served the niche home-theater market until smaller, more convenient and technologically superior DVDs came along.

So, Blu-ray has vanquished HD DVD and will, in time, replace standard DVDs just as DVDs replaced VHS. Then what? Will we be embroiled in yet another format war in 10 or 15 years?

I suspect not. What is probably next is digital downloading. You won’t have to buy a physical product at all. Instead, you’ll download movies and TV shows directly into some kind of storage/playback device.

That means there won’t be much incentive to replace Blu-ray as the format of choice for consumers who prefer a physical object to bits in a box. Blu-ray may reign for a while, only to become the video equivalent of an audio CD in an MP3 world.

Internet radio is thriving now, but for how long?

I have a new addiction: Soma.

No, not the fictional drug of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but SomaFM, an Internet-based “radio” station broadcasting commercial-free music from a garage in San Francisco.

SomaFM emerged in 1999 from one of those most noble of institutions: a pirate radio station. Not a “Pump Up the Volume”-style pirate radio station, but a station serving that year’s Burning Man festival.

Burning Man is an annual celebration of arts and anarchy held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For more about it, see Brian Doherty’s definitive and entertaining book, “This Is Burning Man.”

Burning Man, however, was only the beginning. In February 2000, Rusty Hodge, SomaFM’s founder, launched a Web site to stream his station via the Internet to the entire world. SomaFM is now one of the largest Internet-only radio stations, broadcasting more than 3 million “listener hours” a month and reaching about 8,000 listeners on average at any given time.

SomaFM’s playlists are far removed from typical top 40 radio. The 11 separate channels at SomaFM.com offer mostly a mix of electronic, ambient, trance and trip-hop music — the sort of stuff often referred to as “New Age,” not that much of it has anything to do with the eclectic group of religions often lumped under that name.

It’s music most people usually can’t hear over the air, apart from public radio shows like “Echoes” and “Hearts of Space.”

Hodge and SomaFM quickly became an Internet success story, not in terms of profits because there weren’t any, but in terms of Web hits, word of mouth (or e-mail) and satisfied listeners who had gone unserved by the likes of Clear Channel.

If SomaFM were the subject of a VH1 “Behind the Music” episode, this would be the point in our story where everything goes wrong. As it happens, everything does go wrong.

In 1998, Congress passed one of the most poorly conceived pieces of legislation of the past decade: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And in 2002, using the DMCA as a sledgehammer, the Recording Industry Association of America went after Internet radio stations for millions of dollars in royalties.

“I was looking at owing the RIAA an obscene amount of money, like $100,000,” Hodge told the San Francisco Chronicle in a 2004 interview, “so I chickened out at the time and took the station off the air.”

Internet broadcasters fought back, and Hodge testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Eventually, the RIAA relented and settled on a lower royalty fee, which for SomaFM is $2,000 a year, funded by listener donations.

As a result, SomaFM is back. But the legal problems, unfortunately, continue.

On May 1, the federal Copyright Royalty Board raised the fees for Internet broadcasting, making Web broadcasters responsible for royalties that over-the-air broadcasters don’t have to pay. A bill in the U.S. House to overturn the CRB’s decision, H.R. 2060, has more than 140 co-sponsors, but so far it has gone nowhere.

The duplicity here simply reeks. Congress is filled with demagogues who routinely rail against the broadcasting conglomerates like Clear Channel and Cumulus Media, the two largest owners of traditional radio stations. But when it comes to fostering competition where it really matters — the Internet — Congress stands with the big broadcasters and major music labels.

Of course, traditional broadcasters are dependent on government licenses in order to transmit over the “public” airwaves, so they, unlike Internet broadcasters, are reliable donors at election time.

But for now, Internet radio stations like SomaFM are still going. So, try them out before it’s too late. And maybe leave a few bucks in the tip jar while you’re at it.

What would Jesus do for an iPhone?

It’s symptomatic of the society in which we live that Steve Jobs had to apologize to his customers for lowering the price of Apple’s hip new gizmo, the iPhone.

Ours is a sick society, in which people feel entitled to, well, pretty much whatever they want, usually with someone else paying the tab.

Two months after Apple devotees made a spectacle of themselves, standing in line for days to pay $599 for Apple’s new high-end toy, they’re doing so again. When Jobs announced last week that Apple was lowering the price of the iPhone by $200, many of his staunchest acolytes in the Cult of Apple cried foul.

They had stood in line. They had shelled out nearly $600, plus tax and the cost of phone service. They had extolled the life-changing virtues of the iPhone to anyone who would listen, and some who wouldn’t. And now their hero, Jobs, was slapping them in the face by giving everyone else — the mundanes! — a 33 percent discount! How dare he!

The angry roar was deafening. And a day later, an apologetic Jobs announced that customers who had already purchased a full-price iPhone would receive $100 in credit good for other Apple products.

It was probably a necessary concession, if only to quiet the Cult. But you Apple fans shouldn’t feel too smug because Apple didn’t cheat you in the first place.

Remember when you finally had your brand new iPhone in your grubby little hands? Remember when you were skipping down the street with glee as you left the Apple store? Remember when you were showing off all of your phone’s cool features to your friends?

You were happy then, weren’t you? In fact, you were deliriously, nauseatingly giddy. The rest of us hated you and your stupid iPhone, and that made you even happier.

You would gladly have paid $800 or more to be the first on your block with an iPhone. At $600, it was a steal, even if it meant eating nothing but ramen noodles for a month to pay your rent.

As economists would say, even at $600, your iPhone gave you a big-time consumer surplus.

Then came the price cut, and that sense of entitlement kicked in. As loyal Apple customers, you felt entitled to the same deal everyone else was getting.

In fact, Apple was just practicing smart business. Apple charged one price at first, knowing its most devoted — one might say insanely devoted — customers would happily pay it. Then, later, it started charging a lower price to everyone else.

Because everyone else isn’t insane, but they still might like an iPhone for Christmas.

Economists call that “price discrimination.” That is when businesses try to divide up their customers, charging each group as much as it’s willing to pay. Businesses like to do this when they can because, obviously, some things are worth more to some people and worth less to others.

By being such a rabid Apple cultist, all of you rabid Apple cultists have practically begged Apple to charge you more. There is no use crying about it now.

I know, you Apple folks still think it’s just not fair that you paid more for your iPhone than all those unworthy latecomers did. So, maybe you should ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?”

In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus tells the story of workers in a vineyard. At the end of the day, the workers who had been there all along receive their previously agreed pay. Meanwhile, the workers hired later in the day receive the same amount.

The workers who had been there all day complain to their boss, saying they deserve more than the latecomers.

The boss, however, reminds them that they were paid the wage to which they had agreed beforehand, so they have no cause to complain.

Thus endeth the lesson.

So, if you’re still upset about “paying too much” for your iPhone, take it up with the man upstairs.

Culture Shock 03.29.07: Wii breaks the mold for video game consoles

After years of being an also-ran, Nintendo is riding high again with its new Wii video game console, which has become the must-have system by breaking all the rules.

Gamers can be fiercely partisan when it comes to their favorite game systems, so I'll start by saying I don't have a Mario Kart in this race. I haven't owned a console game system since the Atari 2600, and the last PC game I bought was Diablo II. My idea of a killer application is Pitfall.

I know. I'm showing my age.

Currently, sales of Nintendo's Wii have outpaced by about 2-to-1 those of Sony's new PlayStation 3. In January, Wii sales also surpassed sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

How did Wii become the No. 1 game system?

It wasn't by beating PS3 and Xbox at their own game. Rather, it was by starting a whole new game. Wii hit the "reset" button in the console wars.

Before Wii came along, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft were locked in an arms race. Each new game system was faster, more powerful and more versatile than the one that came before it. But after PS2 and the first version of Xbox trounced Nintendo's GameCube, Nintendo had to find a new strategy or risk going the way of Sega, which abandoned the console business after its Dreamcast failed to catch on.

That would have been a sad end for Nintendo's game console division, which had reinvigorated the home video game market in the mid- and late 1980s, after the early '80s Atari boom went bust.

But with Wii, Nintendo has changed the playing field. Wii forces players to get off their sofas and truly interact with the games. When you play Wii bowling or tennis, you're literally going through the motions of playing the game in real life. This has the added advantage of making game play simple enough for even the least tech-savvy player.

So, I wasn't really surprised to read a Reuters story last week about a retirement community where residents organized their own Wii bowling tournament.

When 80-year-olds are playing video games, something strange is going on. After all, these are people who didn't even play Pac-Man when they were young.

Wii making players more active participants in the game experience is a natural evolution. And we can see where it's heading — toward the sci-fi dream of virtual reality, in which players don't merely play a game, they're part of it.

Don't expect Sony and Microsoft to sit back while Nintendo gobbles up market share. They'll develop responses to Wii just like they came up with bigger and better consoles to compete with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES back in the 1990s.

Imagine a game with the intuitive, immersive game play of the Wii combined with the cutting edge graphics of the PS3. And if you can't imagine it, someone at Sony probably already has.

And when someone comes up with a role-playing or fighting game that plays like one of the sports games for Wii, Nintendo may find itself back on the defensive.

In the breakneck world of technological innovation, video game companies are the ones that can least afford to rest on their last big breakthrough.

Culture Shock 02.22.07: Big media is watching your iPod

If you think you really own the songs you purchase and download from digital retailers like iTunes, think again.

The same goes for movies and episodes of your favorite television shows.

When you buy a compact disc or DVD, you can take it with you wherever you go, let friends borrow it and play it on any CD or DVD player. But you can't necessarily do that with the digital music and movies you buy online. The reason for that is something called Digital Rights Management.

DRM encoding embedded into songs you buy from iTunes, for example, prevents you from playing the songs on anything other than Apple's iPod or iTunes computer software.

When you buy a CD or DVD, a store clerk doesn't follow you home to see that you use it properly. But, in effect, that's what happens when you purchase digital media online. DRM is like Big Brother, always looking over your shoulder to make sure you don't use the product — for which you paid good money — in some way that the big music publishers and movie studios don't like.

DRM restrictions on TV shows are even worse. With some playback devices, downloaded episodes are automatically deleted or rendered unplayable after a few days whether you've watched them or not.

Not that DRM actually works, mind you. Hackers are always finding ways around it, in spite of legislation that makes doing so illegal. And even the most unsophisticated computer user can burn iTunes songs onto a CD and then copy them right back onto his computer as plain old MP3 files free of DRM. But DRM is an inconvenience, and it is an insult to consumers, who are treated like criminals.

The U.S. Congress, prodded by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, criminalizing the production and distribution of technology designed to circumvent DRM. As science-fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow has written, the main effect of the law hasn't been to protect copyrighted material but to stifle new media technologies.

"DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition," Doctorow has written. He likens it the MPAA's initial opposition to VCRs — before, of course, the movie industry started making more money from home video than in theaters.

If the entertainment industry had gotten its way, VCRs would have been illegal. Now, it is getting its way, and digital technology is suffering for it.

But the battle lines against DRM are finally being drawn, spurred, in part, by an anti-DRM broadside from an unlikely source — Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Earlier this month, Jobs wrote an open letter encouraging the largest music publishers to abandon DRM.

"Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM ... ?" Jobs wrote. "The simplest answer is because DRMs have never worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

Jobs may have an ulterior motive. European regulators want to force Apple to license its DRM technology to other companies, which would lead to consumers being able to play iTunes music on players other than Apple's market-leading iPod. For Jobs, mutual disarmament is a far better prospect that the unilateral disarmament Europe could force upon him.

But whatever his motivation, Jobs has reopened a debate that the big media empires had hoped to end in 1998. Consumers have little more to lose and their consumer sovereignty to regain.