Philip Bethge

Category: Interviews

  • Nathan Myhrvold: ‘Culinary History Has To Be Analyzed Like Art History’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, inventor and chef Nathan Myhrvold, the author of the new book “Modernist Cuisine,” discusses the deployment of laboratory equipment in the kitchen, the preparation of the perfect cheeseburger and the practice of hyperdecanting — using a blender to serve wine.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, what is wrong with the ordinary French fry?

    Nathan Myhrvold: There is nothing wrong with it, but most French fries are just not perfect. They’re too greasy, they’re underdone, they’re not crispy. And most of them wind up being soggy.

    SPIEGEL: Definitely a culinary affront. Are you able to offer any help with your new scientific cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine”?

    Myhrvold: Yes, and this is a subject many people are obsessed with. The traditional technique is that you fry French fries twice — first at a lower temperature, then at higher temperature, letting them cool in-between. We decided to follow a totally different approach to create a French fry that was crisp on the outside, that had a very light fluffy texture on the inside and that would stay that way for some time. First, we steam the French fries so that they are basically cooked. Then we put them in an ultra-sonic bath …

    SPIEGEL: … an appliance that is normally used for cleaning jewelry or glasses?

    Myhrvold: Well, yes. It produces very high frequency soundwaves that cause tiny bubbles to form in water, which are so powerful that they can actually rip holes in aluminium foil in a process called cavitation. In the case of the French fries, it pokes little holes in their surface. That makes the exterior rough. If we now fry them, we get an extra crispy experience because of the extra surface area.

    SPIEGEL: Yum! And how long does it take to make them?

    Myhrvold: Two hours. But really, the extra time is the ultra-sonic bath. It sits in there for 45 minutes and you don’t have to care.

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Your new book, “Modernist Cuisine,” is a six volume, 2,400 page behemoth, which weighs 47 pounds (21 kilograms). It’s an encyclopaedic treatment of modern cooking techniques and recipes and costs $650 (€445). Who do you think is going to read something like that?

    Myhrvold: The book is for people who really love food, no matter if they are professionals, home cooks or even if they don’t cook themselves at all. I wanted to have a book that would explain cooking in a way I’d never seen a cookbook do before. And I wanted to take techniques that have been developed by great chefs around the world that are almost impossible to learn unless you go and work in those restaurants.

    SPIEGEL: The underlying theme of “Modernist Cuisine” is that we are witnessing a revolution in cooking. What does it entail?

    Myhrvold: The book is about pushing the boundaries of cooking using science and technology and laying the foundations for 21st-century cooking. Most of it has its roots in the mid-1980s, when people realized that science was important to cooking and that technology was relevant, too. My friend Ferran Adria of the restaurant El Bulli, in Spain, started very early on to experiment with these new techniques. My co-authors, Chris Young and Maxim Billet, and I document this revolution. And we did invent some new dishes and techniques.

    SPIEGEL: The book features, for example, recipes of faux eggs made with parmesan cheese, “caviar” made from melon and “cherries” made of foie gras. Is this sheer childish curiosity?

    Myhrvold: The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. In the book, for example, we have some very traditional American food, like maccaroni and cheese. They taste better but basically look the same. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before. That’s what I call cooking in a modernist aesthetic. Let’s do a risotto made with pinenuts instead of rice, for example. Pinenuts are a traditional Italian ingredient, but they have never been used this way. By doing so, however, you make something that is delicous, fresh and new and that has an interesting culinary reference.

    SPIEGEL: You are a mathematician and a physicist. Does your enthusiasm for cooking stem from the fact that it is reminiscent of experimenting in a laboratory?

    Myhrvold: Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice — or, in other words, make mayonnaise — you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. And I was fascinated by this very early on. When I was 9 years old, I announced to my mother I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner …

    SPIEGEL: … which involves the roasting of a whole turkey …

    Myhrvold: … exactly, and so I went to the library, got Auguste Escoffiers classic “Le Guide Culinaire” and tried.

    SPIEGEL: How did you fare?

    Myhrvold: Well, I could do a lot better today, but I was enthusiastic and I was nine. After that, I read literally hundreds of cookbooks and was sort of a self-taught chef. Then, in the mid-1990s, I took a leave of absence from my job at Microsoft to go to chef’s school La Varenne, in France.

    SPIEGEL: In 1991, you were even on a winning team at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, in Memphis.

    Myhrvold: Yes. There is a long tradition of barbecuing in the southern United States. For “Modernist Cuisine,” we looked into this micro-regional cuisine and invented nine different barbecue sauces. We also looked at grilling. By doing a computer simulation, we discovered that, if you line the inside of your grill with aluminium foil, the cooking is much more even.

    SPIEGEL: How do you cook a steak medium rare to perfection the modern way?

    Myhrvold: First, we cook our meat. Then, we use an extremely hot grill or a torch to heat the outside and make it crispy. For cooking, you can use a steam oven or a combi-oven. However, the steak gets even better if you use the sous-vide cooking technique.

    SPIEGEL: … the method of cooking vacuum-sealed food very slowly in a water basin at comparably low temperatures …

    Myhrvold: Exactly. NASA, for example, used the method for food for space flight. The key thing is the control over temperature and cooking time. It is very carefree and very accurate in temperature, which means you get the precise results you were aiming for every single time. You also conserve the flavors.

    SPIEGEL: You also present what you describe as the ultimate cheeseburger recipe in the book. Please explain.

    Myhrvold: We have a philosophy that any dish can be made fantastic if you really care about it. So, if you want to make the ultimate cheeseburger, you better make your own bun, your own sauces and your own pattie. First, there is this special mix of meat, and we did a lot of experiments to find the right meat mixture. Then, we have a specific way of grinding it that aligns the grain. It’s simple to do and we feel it makes a real difference in how the hamburger tastes and what the texture is. Next, we cook the hamburger sous vide. Then we put it into liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds to a minute. Finally, we deep fry it. That’s even better than grilling.

    SPIEGEL: Can you describe the result?

    Myhrvold: The outside is very brown and crisp, the inside medium-rare in perfection. The bun and the lettuce and the other things have to contrast the flavor. That’s what you want. Some people make fun of the fact that it takes 30 hours to do. But if you care about hamburgers, here is the ultimate hamburger.

    SPIEGEL: To write “Modernist Cuisine,” you created a complete “Cooking lab” in a portion of a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) warehouse outside Seattle that houses the research lab of your company, “Intellectual Ventures”. The Cooking lab is one of the most compelling kitchens in the world, with a load of industrial-type equipment. What, for example, is a Rotovap?

    Myhrvold: It’s a laboratory device for doing destillations. And there are a couple of cooking contexts where you want do that. There are many foods, for example, that have flavor compounds in them which you can distill. You can also use the device to make cognac, schnapps or whiskey. And we actually do quite the opposite: If you take a scotch whiskey and distill out the alcohol, what is left has an amazing taste to it and can be used as a flavoring for a dessert.

    SPIEGEL: The kitchen also features a 100-ton hydraulic press, for example, for beef jerky, and an autoclave, which — as far as I know — is designed to sterilize lab equipment. You call it “the pressure cooker from hell.”

    Myhrvold: Yes. And it does a great French onion soup! The onions for such a soup typically have to be brown. But that browning reaction is tricky. It’s very easy to burn the onion. Now, we take the onion, put it in a little bit of water and add a little bit of baking soda. After 30 minutes in the autoclave, we have perfect French onion soup.

    SPIEGEL: A spray dryer, freeze dryer, combi-oven and vacuum sealer — this isn’t exactly the stuff one would find in an everyday kitchen.

    Myhrvold: Well, many of these machines are made for laboratory use and are fairly expensive. But you don’t have to get all of them. If you are willing to buy a little bit of equipment, then you can cook 70 to 80 percent of the recipes in the book. The three most useful machines are the water bath for cooking sous vide, the centrifuge and the homogenizer.

    SPIEGEL: You really think people will do this at home?

    Myhrvold: Sure. And it makes a lot of things easier. Modern cooking techniques can achieve ideal results without the perfect timing or good luck that traditional methods demand. Take beurre blanc, for example …

    SPIEGEL: … which disintegrates quite easily if you don’t take utmost care.

    Myhrvold: Exactly. And we have a recipe for the invincible beurre blanc that you can make ahead of time, that you can even put in the refrigerator and heat up later. The recipe involves some emulsifiers that you don’t get in every grocery store, but you can usually find them on the Internet …

    SPIEGEL: For example?

    Myhrvold: Propylene glycol alginate, which is derived from a seaweed and originally comes from Japan. We use it for a lot of recipes. It’s great and easy to use.

    SPIEGEL: You also recommend putting wine in a blender for decanting. Are you serious?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. It is called hyperdecanting …

    SPIEGEL: … which is probably a great way to freak the hell out of any wine-lover.

    Myhrvold: Completely. And thats half of the value. I did this with a friend of mine once who is a Spanish duke and who comes from one of the oldest wine-making families in Spain. When I hit the switch of the blender with his wine in there, I thought he is gonna pull a sword.

    SPIEGEL: How does it work?

    Myhrvold: Part of the goal of decanting is to have the gases that have dissolved in the wine come out of it. Another goal is to have oxygen come in. The traditional way is to pour the wine over a large part of the surface area of the decanter so that the exchange of gas is promoted. And so I said, hey, we can promote the exchange of gas even better with a blender in about 30 seconds. In blind tests, most people find this to be an improvement, particular for a young red wine, such as an ’82 Margaux.

    SPIEGEL: To make “Modernist Cuisine” even more compelling, you went to great lengths in illustrating the book. Heavy machinery was used to bisect a whole kitchen?

    Myhrvold: We have two-halfs of one of the best kitchens in the world. We cut a microwave in half, a grill, a wok and even a $5,000 restaurant oven. Early in the book project, I hit upon this idea of doing cutaway photos, where we would show the magic view of what’s happening inside your food while it cooks. You see the glowing coals and the fat flaring up from the burgers, and the burgers themselves are cut in half so you can see what happens is as the heat progresses through.

    SPIEGEL: Was it worth the effort?

    Myhrvold: Well, you tell me. Our goal was to show people food as they have never seen it before. To achieve that, we actually made a hell of a mess. For example, we discovered why people don’t cut their woks in half. Our wok caught fire three times, because the oil from the wok would get right into the flame of the burner and then, whoosh. And we had to clean up and start again. But, in the end, we got the shot. And the shot, I think, shows you all the things that go on during stir frying, because stir frying is a combination of tossing things in the air, having super high heat from below and so forth.

    SPIEGEL: You seem to enjoy questioning traditions of cooking and reinventing methods and technologies. Is cooking an ever-changing subject, maybe even comparable to art or theater?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. Culinary history has to be analyzed in a similar way to art history. Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal, chef of the restaurant Fat Duck, near London, are the modernists of cooking. They create wonderful experiences, comparable to an opera or a Broadway play in New York. I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience. That’s what they are aiming to do.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Jonathan Schell: ‘Our Illusion Is that We Can Control Nuclear Energy’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, peace activist and author Jonathan Schell discusses the lessons of the Fukushima disaster, mankind’s false impression that it can somehow safely produce electricity from the atom, and why he thinks the partial meltdown in Japan could mark a turning point for the world.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, what unsettled you the most about the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe?

    Schell: Clearly this whole accident just went completely off the charts of what had been prepared for. If you look at the manuals for dealing with nuclear safety accidents, you’re not going to find a section that says muster your military helicopters, dip buckets into the sea and then try as best you can to splash water onto the reactor and see if you can hit a spent fuel pool. There’s going to be no instruction saying, go and get your riot control trucks to spray the reactor, only to find that you’re driven back by radiation. The potential for total disaster was clearly demonstrated.

    SPIEGEL: But supporters of nuclear energy are already preparing a different narrative. They say that an old, outdated nuclear power plant was hit by a monster tsunami and an earthquake at the same time — and, yet, so far only a handful of people have been exposed to radioactive energy. Not a single person has died.

    Schell: Clearly it’s better than if you had had a massive Chernobyl-type release of energy. But I think that any reasonable analysis will show that this was not a power plant that was under control. The operators were thrown back on wild improvisation. The worst sort of disaster was a desperate mistake or two away. Through a bunch of workarounds and frantic fixes, technicians at Fukushima headed that off, but that was no sure thing. No one will be able honestly to portray this event as a model of nuclear safety. It would be like saying that the Cuban missile crisis showed the safety of nuclear arsenals.

    SPIEGEL: It is not just in Germany, but also in the United States and China that people are stockpiling supplies of iodine tablets. And shipments from Japan are supposed to be tested for radioactivity. Where does this profound fear of nuclear energy come from?

    Schell: In the public mind, nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons. In both, a nuclear chain reaction is, in fact, the source of power. It’s true that you can’t have an atomic explosion in a nuclear power plant, but people are quite right to make that association. For example there is also the proliferation connection. In other words, the problem with the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons goes beyond the escape of radiation and Chernobyl-type accidents. The third big challenge is, of course, the waste problem. You have to keep that waste underground for maybe a half-million years. So we’re acting in a kind of cosmic way in the terrestrial setting, even though we just don’t have the wisdom and staying power to do so.

    SPIEGEL: You say that dealing with nuclear energy is like gambling with “Mother Nature’s power.” Why is it so totally different from other sources of energy?

    Schell: Because it’s so colossally more powerful. Comparable energy can be found, at best, in the center of stars. It’s basically not found on earth naturally, and it’s only through our own scientific brilliance that we’ve been able to introduce it into the terrestrial setting. But, unfortunately, we’re not as advanced morally, practically and politically as we are scientifically, so we are not prepared to control this force properly. The most dangerous illusion we have concerning nuclear energy is that we can control it.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Despite all these concerns, we have seen an emerging renaissance in nuclear energy in recent years.

    Schell: I don’t think there really was a nuclear renaissance. There was the phrase “nuclear renaissance,” but already in many parts of the world the financial aspects of nuclear power were not working out. The bankers were not stepping forward to finance new power plants. Insurance companies were reluctant to cover the risk.

    SPIEGEL: Many environmentalists are now even calling for an expansion of nuclear power — because they see it as the only way to limit climate change.

    Schell: I find their arguments weak. In the first place, there are about 450 nuclear power plants around the world. To make a serious dent in carbon emissions, you would have to double or triple that –and not only in countries as technically sophisticated as Japan. More importantly, I fear the attempted solution would be self-defeating in its own terms. Think how the high the cost will be if we pour our scarce resources into this faulty one and then there is a truly catastrophic accident down the road, and we were forced by this to liquidate the investment. This would be not only a disaster in its own right, but a disaster for the overall effort to head off global warming.

    SPIEGEL: German Chancellor Angela Merkel had always been a supporter of nuclear energy. Now she is talking about expediting Germany’s planned phase-out of nuclear power. Will Germany be able to succeed in eschewing nuclear power entirely?

    Schell: The anti-nuclear movement certainly has been stronger in Germany than in practically any other country, even before the Fukushima incident. I’d say it looks quite possible that Germany will go back to the phase-out policy, and that its nuclear power plants will be taken offline quickly. And I’d be surprised if Japan did not go in the same direction.

    SPIEGEL: Why don’t we see similar anti-nuclear protests in the United States?

    Schell: The whole nuclear industry has had a low profile in the United States, perhaps, in part, because we haven’t seen the construction of new power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

    SPIEGEL: But President Barack Obama has now announced the construction of new nuclear power plants.

    Schell: … and people in the US don’t seem to be bothered by it so far. That’s been true, until now. New polls show that support for nuclear power has dropped sharply. Honestly, I don’t think Americans have been thinking about this issue very much. Now the Fukushima accident will concentrate people’s minds.

    SPIEGEL: Will Obama abandon his pro-nuclear energy policies?

    Schell: There’s a real chance that, in practice, he will back off — also for budgetary reasons. If you try to add in all kinds of new safety features, then you raise the price. The cost of building a nuclear power plant today already costs tens of billions of dollars.

    SPIEGEL: The greatest enthusiasm to be found anywhere once permeated the US shortly after the discovery of nuclear energy. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration enthusiastically promoted its “Atoms for Peace” program.

    Schell: That story is interesting because with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we see the close connection at every stage of nuclear power with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower increased the US arsenal from around 1,400 to 20,000 nuclear weapons. But he also wanted an element of peace in his policy. This is where the “Atoms for Peace” program came in, whereby countries would be given technology to produce nuclear power, the “friendly atom,” in exchange for constraints on proliferation of nuclear weapons — the “destructive atom.” That rationale is still embodied today in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    SPIEGEL: Obama has outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. But the reaction to it has been lukewarm, even within his own team.

    Schell: Within the Obama administration, it seems to be the president himself — and possibly even the president alone — who really believes in this vision. But he has the public on his side. If you ask people if they would like to live in a world without nuclear weapons, a very high majority answer in the affirmative. On the other hand, there is a powerful bureaucratic infrastructure left in the Pentagon, in the State Department, in the Energy Department that is not ready to translate Obama’s vision into action and works to thwart it. He needs more supporters among his own officials.

    World Destruction Is Less Likely Today, But ‘Technically’ Possible

    SPIEGEL: Is a world without nuclear weapons even a realistic vision? With the technology already out there, wasn’t the genie permanently released from the bottle with Hiroshima in 1945?

    Schell: There will never be a world that is not nuclear capable. Once that knowledge was acquired, it could never be lost. So the art of living without nuclear weapons is an art of living without them, but with the knowledge of how to make them. The classic argument against a nuclear weapons-free world is that somebody will make use of that residual knowledge, build a nuclear weapon and start giving orders to a defenseless world. But what I point out is that other countries would also have that knowledge and they could, in very short order, be able to return to nuclear armament. Therefore, the imbalance is much more temporary than it first seems.

    SPIEGEL: Is the outlawing of nuclear weapons possible without also abolishing nuclear energy as well?

    Schell: A nuclear weapons-free world should be one in which nuclear technology is under the strictest possible control. But strict control of all nuclear technology is, of course, far more difficult as long as you continue to have nuclear energy production, as long as uranium continues to be enriched and as long plutonium is still being made somewhere.

    SPIEGEL: How serious do you think the current threat is of nuclear technology falling into the wrong hands?

    Schell: It is extremely real. The two most active hot spots for nuclear proliferation right now are Iran and North Korea. But you also have many other countries that are suddenly showing a renewed interest in nuclear power. The transfer of the technology in the Middle East, especially, is becoming a real danger. We may have fewer nuclear weapons, but we have more fingers on the button.

    SPIEGEL: Does that make the world today more dangerous than it was during the Cold War?

    Schell: No. I have too lively a memory of the Cuban missile crisis in the middle of the Cold War, which really looked like the potential end of the world. Regardless, it is true to say that the nature of the danger has changed.

    SPIEGEL: So the elimination of humanity through nuclear weapons is still a concrete possibility?

    Schell: Technically, the option is still there. What’s harder, though, is to frame scenarios in which all of the weapons would be fired simultaneously. Clearly, this is not as likely as it was during the Cold War. There are other colossal risks associated with lesser uses of nuclear weapons, though, ones that we are just becoming aware of. For instance, we have learned that the ecological perils of nuclear warfare can be triggered by much smaller numbers of weapons. There’s a new study showing that the use of just 100 or 150 nuclear weapons in a conflict between Pakistan and India would cause a nuclear winter through the burning of cities and the lofting of soot into the atmosphere. That would produce global famine.

    SPIEGEL: How great a threat do you think there is of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists?

    Schell: Over the long term, it’s clear that this danger is rising. It’s just in the nature of scientific knowledge and technology to become more and more available as time passes. The moment must come when it passes beyond the control of states alone and into the hands of lesser groupings.

    SPIEGEL: To what extent are nuclear power plants protected against terrorist attacks?

    Schell: So far, few adequate security precautions have been taken to mitigate the potential consequences. The nuclear energy industry has succeeded with its argument that such measures would simply be too costly.

    SPIEGEL: Does the example of the events in Japan show that human beings are incapable of learning from history? After all, the country is one that has experienced the horror of nuclear bombs first hand and nevertheless decided to rely on atomic energy.

    Schell: Kenzaburo Oe, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that going ahead with nuclear power in Japan is a betrayal of the victims of Hiroshima. But perhaps Fukushima will be a turning point — not just for Japan, but for the rest of the world as well.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Gregor Peter Schmitz

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

     

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘People are basically good’: Twitter-Founder Biz Stone on the networks revolutionary power

    Isaac “Biz” Stone, 36, reportedly set up Twitter with his buddy Jack Dorsey in only two weeks in 2006. Meanwhile, the Network has over 175 million users worldwide.

    Q: Mr. Stone, the movie „The Social Network“ depicts how Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg bullied his way to be the youngest billionaire of all times. Would it be possible to tell a similar story about Twitter?

    Stone: I don’t think we’re quite interesting enough to be a movie. We’re not like the dorm room startup and there is not enough intrigue.

    Q: However, you burned three CEO already, after only three years in business. What went wrong?

    Stone: This has a lot to do with what Twitter needed at different times. In 2009 we had about three million users. Now we have about 175 million. For a long time we were working on reliability and we achieved that. But always fighting fires kept us from developing a strong vision what Twitter could be in the future. That’s what we are trying to do right now with a new CEO. And the recent relaunch of Twitter shows it.

    Q: What is Twitter today and how would you explain it to new potential users?

    Stone: Twitter today is a real-time information network that spans everything from your friends’ updates to global news and events. There are 90 million tweets being created every day, and all of these tweets are being archived at subsecond speed by our search engine, which means for any person in the world there’s pretty much going to be something relevant to them in the Twitter network. So I always advise people to search Twitter about something that interests you, whether it’s sports, the name of your company, your city, what’s going on in your neighborhood, and get into it that way.

    Q: But people are overwhelmed anyway with information from the net.

    Stone: I agree, we are living now in an age of infinite information. And we can’t look at all of it. So relevance and timeliness have to be things that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We want people to be able to get the information when and where they need it and without having to sift through it all, so that they can move on with their lives.

    Q: There are millions of tweets like „I am drinking coffee right now“ – nothing anybody needs to know. Is there really a way, to find relevant information in 90 million short messages?

    Stone: Yeah, I think there is. Firstly, by following specific subjects or people on Twitter, you choose yourself which information is relevant to you. But that means that you’re missing out on a lot that potentially could interest you. Therefore, when you search for something in Twitter, we also show you the tweets that relate to your search and that were last created, just seconds ago. As an example, think of the situation a few years ago when that plane landed in the Hudson River. On Twitter, you were able to find that one first picture of that plane on the Hudson just half an hour after the crash.

    Q: You call Twitter even a „triumph of humanity“. Isn‘t that a little bit over the top?

    Stone: If Twitter is going to be a triumph at all, I believe that it will not be a triumph of technology but indeed of humanity. It really depends on what people are going to do with this simple tool; if they help each other during time of crisis, if they raise spontaneous amounts of money for people after a crisis or if they self-organize during a political upheaval. Twitter is designed to work on every phone across the planet because tweets fit in the international character limit for SMS. And there are more than five billion people using mobile phones in the world. This is so empowering. For example, if something happens in China, in Iran, in Haiti or anywhere else halfway around the world, you are able to find out about it instantly on this network because the relevant tweets are rising up and are becoming visible. That makes us realize that we are not just citizens of one country but of the world and that we are all in this together.

    Q: But does that really change anything? Looking at Iran for example: Despite Twitter the situation hasn’t really changed, has it?

    Stone: It depends on what you describe as change. Twitter isn’t in the business of changing a situation in another country. It’s in the business of allowing people to connect and share information about what’s going on. Think about China: Twitter is blocked in China. But people use Twitter in China because they’re figuring out ways around that block.

    Q: Critics believe that real political movements need a strong network and supervision. A flat hierarchy of just well-linked activists would even most likely disturb a real movement. Can Twitter push forward real change?

    Stone: Nobody here at Twitter with their head screwed on right would say that writing a tweet is equivalent to starting a revolution; neither is forwarding an email or updating your status or any of these things. But to say that Twitter would not play a complimentary role in any meaningful event in the world today is an absurd statement. A communication network that allows for information to spread very quickly, very virally, very effectively, can be used in any kind of situation.

    Q: Does that mean that Twitter is in effect a journalistic format?

    Stone: I don‘t think so. But the idea of the teaming up between Twitter and journalism is very powerful. I think Twitter has a knack for breaking news very quickly. So if there’s an earthquake, you’ll find out about it on Twitter before you’ll find out about it at the news desk. But what you won’t have then is what journalism provides, which is the fuller context of the story. What does it mean in relation to the previous three earthquakes and what geo-economic impact is it having on the region?

    Q: The editing and distribution of information was always a domain of professional journalists, and for good reasons. Today, if there is for example a political upheaval, people go to Twitter first. Isn‘t there a big risk of manipulation. How can people distinguish between trustworthy sources and others?

    Stone: Like any tool, Twitter can be used for good and for evil. However, what we’ve noticed over a decade of developing these kinds of systems is, that disinformation has a very short shelf life on these open networks. These networks tend to be self-policing. When you have some people trying to spread disinformation, you have more people debunking that and coming at it with the truth.

    Q: North Korea, for example, is sending out Tweets on a regular basis. Have you ever considered blocking Twitter accounts like that?

    Stone: Removing tweets from the system is something we don’t take lightly. We take free speech and openness very seriously, and there’s only a few scenarios in which we would remove content, like if it is breaking the law. But we can definitely highlight the more relevant information. For us, it is tremendeously important to be relevant and meaningful. We need a network that is important to peoples lives. Otherwise, we won‘t be able to make any revenue.

    Q: Twitter hasn‘t been able to generate a lot of profit so far. How exactly are you going to make money in the future?

    Stone: We are making money already. People don‘t realize this, because we are doing such a good job at our original plan. We optimized for value before profit in the first couple of years. And now we are seeing companies like the airline Jetblue or the coffee chain Starbuck’s using Twitter. And even more encouraging, people are willing to follow these accounts by the millions.

    Q: And the companies pay you money for that service?

    Stone: They pay money if we promote their tweets by putting them for example on top of our so called trend list, which can be found on the Twitter homepage. Anything that’s promoted is very clearly marked. So users can decide themselves if they want to read and follow promoted information. This is working exceptionally well for new products people are already talking about or for things like movies …

    Q: … some believe that because of Twitter they may predict if a movie becomes a blockuster or not…

    Stone: .. exactly. And the advertisers are loving it. Our ads are not banners that we are sticking in front of you that have nothing to do with anything. Our ads are tweets and are therefore part of the natural Twitter experience. In a lot of cases, you’re not even noticing that they are ads.

    Q: Is Germany a big market for you?

    Stone: It is. Germany is one of the first places that we translated the web interface into, and this year we have seen 80 percent growth in Germany. Japan was the first place that we saw such an explosion, and now Germany, France and Italy.

    Q: The Germans do really mind their privacy …

    Stone: … well, yes, and the good thing about Twitter is that we’re very, very clear about our policies in this respect. We tell people that Twitter is a very public and open service. Here in the US, tweets are going to go on CNN, they’re going to go in the Library of Congress of the United States, which is archiving public tweets. Once you send out a tweet, it is out there. We’ve tried to make this abundantly clear.

    Q: Do you still read a newspaper?

    Stone: Well, actually I read Google news, and so wherever Google news sends me is where I end up. So I guess I’m putting my faith in Googles algorithms to determine what I should and what I shouldn’t read. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it or not.

    Q: And you really think that people will do good just because they can share information?

    Stone: I believe that people are basically good, and if you give them a very simple tool that allows them to express that basic goodness, they will. We’ve seen it over and over again. The more people are connected on something like Twitter, the more empathy they begin to feel for people who are halfway around the world. They are suddenly walking in the other people’s shoes in a way that they might not have done in the past. I think this really brings people together.

  • The Tiger Mother’s Bite: ‘A Story in Favor of Coercion, Chinese-Style’

    Law professor, mother and author Amy Chua’s memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” has touched off an angry debate in the United States on parenting styles. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Chua talks about drilling her daughters and threatening to burn their stuffed animals in order to motivate them to learn.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Chua, according to your book, your daughters Sophia and Louisa were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a friend over to play or choose their own extracurricular activities. Do your daughters hate you?

    Chua: I hope not! I required Sophia and Lulu to be fluent in Chinese and in English and to be straight-A students. Sophia knew the alphabet at 18 months. In nursery school, while the other kids were learning to count from one to ten, I taught her addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals. By the time she was three, she was reading Sartre. Of course, I also wanted my kids to have hobbies and activities — not just any activities, like crafts, which can lead nowhere, but rather something meaningful and highly difficult with the potential for depth and virtuosity.

    SPIEGEL: You insisted, for example, that Sophia and Lulu do classical music and learn to play the piano and the violin, which is, in your own words “the opposite of decline, of laziness, vulgarity and spoiledness.” Do those words describe your view on Western education?

    Chua: It wasn’t the intent of my book to teach other people. It is a memoir and not a parenting book. But I do think that Western parents sometimes take things too easy. It’s too simple to say to your kid: “I just want you to be happy. Make your own choices.” You can’t tell a six-year-old: “Today, pursue your passions.” I think it’s sort of a romanticization. Of course, you’re hoping that they will suddenly pick up the flute or, you know, write poetry. But I think they’ll just sit in front of the TV or play computer games.

    SPIEGEL: Your methods to keep your kids on track are controversial to say the least. For example, you said to Sophia while supervising her piano practicing: “Oh my god, you are just getting worse and worse; if the next time is not perfect, I am going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them.” You are currently being demonized in the United States for using such methods to keep your kids in line.

    Chua: In restrospect, the coaching might seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, it was highly effective. When Sophia was nine she won a local piano award.

    SPIEGEL: Later on, she even played in Carnegie Hall …

    Chua: Exactly. And she loved it. “Nothing is fun until you’re good at it” is one of my lines. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude because the child will resist. Things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: So, what are the ingredients for successful Chinese motherhood?

    Chua: I think it’s love and listening, coupled with having high expectations. Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. They demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong.

    SPIEGEL: Why can’t the mother just be happy about it?

    Chua: Because Chinese parenting is about helping your children be the best they can be — which is usually better than they think. It’s about believing in your child more than anyone else. If done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence. Rote repetition is underrated in the Western world. Western parents give up too quickly.

    SPIEGEL: There is this episode in the book where Lulu worked on a piano piece and couldn’t do it. You hauled her dollhouse to the car and told her you would donate it to the Salvation Army. You threatened her with no Christmas presents and no birthday parties for years. Finally, you practiced with her into the night, and you wouldn’t let her get up, even to go to the bathroom. That sounds almost like torture.

    CHhua: I know. It’s so funny. People exaggerate that so much, they say: “Oh, my God, it’s like Guantanamo Bay!” This is actually a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. After all that struggle, out of the blue, Lulu suddenly did it. Her hands suddenly came together. A moment later, she was beaming. “Mommy, look — it’s easy!”

    SPIEGEL: You come from a traditional Chinese immigrant family and were clearly raised in a similar way. One time your father even called you “garbage.”

    Chua: My father called me “garbage” exactly once, and I know exactly when it was. My mother said something, and I said: “Shut up. I hate you.” And my father jumped in. But people get it wrong. Really, what he meant was “shame on you,” and he was right. It was exactly the same with my daughter Sophia. I said it only once to her in exactly the same circumstances.

    SPIEGEL: You say that the book is actually a love story. How can you talk of love when you are drilling your children all day?

    Chua: I am sure that my kids always knew that I love them. If the message you sent is “if yood, it’s like Guantanamo Bay!” This is actually a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. After all that struggle, out of the blue, Lulu suddenly did it. Her hands suddenly came together. A moment later, she was beaming. “Mommy, look — it’s easy!”

    SPIEGEL: You come from a traditional Chinese immigrant family and were clearly raised in a similar way. One time your father even called you “garbage.”

    Chua: My father called me “garbage” exactly once, and I know exactly when it was. My mother said something, and I said: “Shut up. I hate you.” And my father jumped in. But people get it wrong. Really, what he meant was “shame on you,” and he was right. It was exactly the same with my daughter Sophia. I said it only once to her in exactly the same circumstances.

    SPIEGEL: You say that the book is actually a love story. How can you talk of love when you are drilling your children all day?

    Chua: I am sure that my kids always knew that I love them. If the message you sent is “if you don’t get an A, I won’t love you” — that’s the worst parenting. That’s not what I am talking about. The message is really, “I think you can get the A because I believe in you. You’re a strong, smart, great kid.” Once a child starts to excel at something — whether it’s math, piano, pitching or ballet — he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence, and I do think that that can produce happiness.

    SPIEGEL: Do you really think happiness comes only through academic acheivement?

    Chua: I think the key is creating true self-esteem. I am very skeptical if you just keep telling your children: “You’re great. You’re perfect. You’re No. 1. Don’t worry.” Eventually, they have to go into the real world. And if they haven’t excelled at something, they probably won’t be able to get the job they want. I don’t think that’s a formula for happiness. I wanted my daughters to learn that through hard work and not giving up, you can actually be good at things.

    SPIEGEL: Do you think that high expectations can also be harmful? Asian-American girls aged 15 to 24 have above-average suicide rates.

    Chua: Well, first, that’s just tragic. But I’ve been bombarded with these statistics from all sides, and I would really want to get some solid evidence. It just seems very anecdotal to me. I truly don’t believe that Western kids are happier than Asian kids. I think it’s even, maybe even the opposite. However, pressuring your kids so much that they feel they can’t take it is terrible.

    SPIEGEL: Did you place to much pressure on your children? Your daughter Lulu rebelled in an extreme way at the age of 13 …

    Chua: … yes, she inherited my hot-tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving personality …

    SPIEGEL: You were sitting in Moscow in a restaurant close to Red Square and you got angry at her because she didn’t want to try the caviar.

    Chua: She screamed: “I hate you! You are a terrible mother! I hate my life! I hate the violin!” She got really upset. And it suddenly felt that everything was falling apart. I thought: “Have I done everything wrong? Am I going to just lose my daughter?” I got up and ran as fast as I could, not knowing where I was going. Finally I went back and said, “Lulu, you win. It’s over. We are giving up the violin.”

    SPIEGEL: She chose to play tennis instead.

    Chua: Yes. And it was painful for me. She loved music and she was very good at it. And I knew that you can’t be a great tennis player if you start at 13. But I know it was the right choice for her. And what’s fun about Lulu right now is that her coach says she doesn’t give up. She is hard on herself. She drills.

    SPIEGEL: Many Western educators believe that drilling kills creativity, and that it’s more important to develop children’s imaginations.

    Chua: I do focus a lot on creativity, but rather than playing with wood or sand, I expose them to more ideas and more differences. I travel with them to foreign countries and take them to museums.

    SPIEGEL: Your book has produced angry protests in the US, and you have been called “Monster Mom.”

    Chua: Yes. I knew, of course, that the book would be provocative. But what has happened is surreal. People don’t realize that the book is about the journey of one mother. In the end, I completely questioned what I had done. I guess there might be a geopolitical dimension to it. Shanghai just got this very good test result in the Pisa study of the OECD (an educational survey of countries conducted by the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development). The Rising Tiger worries a lot of people.

    SPIEGEL: You say that in the meantime you have become more Western. Are your daughters allowed to have sleepovers?

    Chua: I will tell you a secret: Today is actually Lulu’s 15th birthday. And last Saturday we just had a sleepover for seven girls.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Chua, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘Starfish, Daisies and Raying Purple Forms’: Oliver Sacks on the Wonder of Sight

    Oliver Sacks (© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons)
    Oliver Sacks (© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons)

    In a SPIEGEL interview, New York neurologist and author Oliver Sacks discusses his new book, “The Mind’s Eye,” which explores how creative people compensate for their sight disorders or blindness. He also discusses his own “face blindness,” which makes it difficult to recognize people.

    (–> photo-gallery OPTICAL ILLUSIONS)

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Sacks, five years ago, you were diagnosed with a melanoma in your right eye. You thought you would die soon. What has happened since?

    Sacks: Well, obviously, I didn’t die. I was told that a melanoma in the eye is more benign than I previously thought, but in those early weeks after the diagnosis, I was still very prone to fear and a sort of black humor. Fortunately, that fear has largely gone away. My feeling now is that time is doubly precious.

    SPIEGEL: How is your eye these days?

    Sacks: I am actually a little shy about it. I feel it does look bad …

    SPIEGEL: … not at all!

    Sacks: … well, I bled into the eye and I can’t see through it. So I regard the eye as being out of action. And whether I will recover any sight in it, I don’t know.

    SPIEGEL: Did the tumor change your perception?

    Sacks: When this presented itself, I noticed that a segment of my vision was missing. I always use the ceiling fan for checking my visual fields. And in the three weeks while I was waiting for surgery, I went from missing one blade to missing three blades. After surgery, my vision was becoming distorted, so that, for example, people looked as if they were elongated and tilted over to one side, almost insect-like. And faces had these strange, sort of puffy protoplasmic extrusions. There was a Francis Bacon exhibit here a while back that reminded me of that.

    SPIEGEL: Did you see things that weren’t there?

    Sacks: You mean hallucinations? Yes, I did, and I do have them. I tend to see things like little starfish, daisies and raying purple forms … let me bring you something … I kept one or two notes … so that’s my journal (he returns with a huge pile of notebooks).

    SPIEGEL: In your new book, you describe the blind spot in your right eye as a “gaping nowhere.”

    Sacks: Wait, I’ll show you what it looked like, I made a drawing of it. See, it has more or less the shape of Australia. It causes me a lot of trouble when I bump into people or lamp posts, but it sometimes fills me with wonder, too. One day, for example, I looked at my foot with my right eye and sort of amputated it with my blind spot, a little above the ankle. But when I moved my foot a little, wiggling the toes, the stump seemed to grow a translucent pink extension with a ghostly protoplasmic halo around it. As I continued wiggling my toes, this took on a more definite form until, after a minute or so, I had a complete phantom foot.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: You specialize in treating patients with neurological disorders. Now you’ve turned into a case study yourself. Do you see this as some sort of dark irony?

    Sacks: I do think that it’s a particular irony. Stereo vision for example, which you can only truly have with two eyes, has always been very important for me. From the age of 10 or even earlier, I have loved stereo photography and stereograms. For many people, this loss probably sounds trivial, maybe because they’re not so conscious of having it; and if they lose it, they hardly notice it. But for people like me, it’s really bad.

    SPIEGEL: There are other ways for the brain to calculate depth: perspective, movement, shadows. People with vision in only one eye can even drive motorcycles.

    Sacks: But they can’t experience depth! And they don’t know what they miss. I once asked a friend, Sue Barry, who was cross-eyed all her life, if she could imagine stereo vision and she said, “Sure I can.” But later, through vision therapy and with the help of special glasses, she gained stereo vision and found herself in a truly spectacular new world. She loved it and came to me and said: “I was wrong.” No one without it can imagine what stereo vision is like, just as a totally colorblind person can’t imagine what color is like.

    SPIEGEL: All your case studies seem to have a common theme: the remarkable ability of the brain to compensate and adapt. How do you cope?

    Sacks: I don’t think that I have adapted very well. I use a stick now because high curbs are a special danger for me. They look like horizontal lines on the ground. If a room is cluttered, rather than seeing objects in space, I see surfaces which are sometimes on top of each other. I wish I could paint because the world looks to me very much like a canvas with shapes and colors.

    SPIEGEL: To what degree can the mind compensate for the loss of input? In other words, how colorful can a blind person’s world possibly be?

    Sacks: Oh, very colorful! Zoltan Torey for example, an Australian, who was blinded in an industrial accident when he was 21, visualizes things to the point where he shocked his neighbors by replacing the gutters on the roof of his house at night. If you talk to Zoltan, you don’t feel he’s blind. He seems to be looking at you because he visualizes you in a very vivid, detailed manner. However, of course, if you very quietly turn your back at him, he wouldn’t know.

    SPIEGEL: Is it some kind of virtual reality he is creating?

    Sacks: No, he does not form a perceptual world. It doesn’t have, for example, all the details; imagery can never be as rich in detail as reality. Zoltan would go on what information he had. Since he was not blind from birth, he has visual memories that he can call on.

    SPIEGEL: In theory at least, is anyone who becomes blind later in life capable of compensating with more or less detailed imagery?

    Sacks: Not necessarily. John Hull, who corresponds with me by mail, lost his vision when he was in his forties. He describes his state as one of “deep blindness” — a total absence of any imagery. Two years after becoming blind, Hull couldn’t evoke the image of his wife or his children. He said he couldn’t even say which way around the number three went.

    SPIEGEL: Does he miss the images?

    Sacks: No. He even seems to like his condition. He feels he lives in an authentic, autonomous world, in his words one of “concentrated human condition.”

    SPIEGEL: Are you surprised that people’s minds react so differently in comparable circumstances?

    Sacks: Originally, I was very surprised. But, these two, I now realize — and I’ve seen dozens of blind people — are extremes. People adapt in different ways, they come up with all sorts of things. Ten to 15 percent of the people who lose their sight hallucinate — and not just little things, but faces and scenes and animals. Others don’t hallucinate at all.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Is there something like a psychological resilience that makes some people cope better than others?

    Sacks: Well, I mean, Zoltan feels that John Hull was too passive and too acquiescent, to put it bluntly. If you are asking how much of it is a decision to do things and how much is physiology, that’s really a difficult question to answer.

    SPIEGEL: Lillian Kallir, a celebrated musician and one of your patients, lost her ability to read music. Later on, she couldn’t read words anymore or identify objects. What’s different when the mind, and not the eye, loses the ability to see?

    Sacks: When Lillian wrote to me, she was very puzzled. She asked, “How come I can see tiny little letters, and I can’t make sense of them?” This is perception stripped of meaning. You may occasionally experience this yourself. Proust gives an example of this when he wakes up one morning and he doesn’t know where he is or who he is, and he says, “Memory comes down like a rope from heaven.” For Lillian, however, memory doesn’t come back.

    SPIEGEL: How did Lillian describe her experience to you?

    Sacks: The whole visual world was confusing for her. Once she took my medical bag instead of her own purse although they looked totally different. But Lillian stayed calm and found ways of living with this. At home, for example, she organized things by color or by position, so that she could identify them, even though they didn’t carry any visual meaning for her. Also, she still had rough categories for things. I remember showing her a picture of a wolf. She wasn’t able to identify it. But she thought that it maybe was a baby elephant. So she could see it was an animal.

    SPIEGEL: Some of your patients seem to even gain something from their impairments, for example the painter who lost his color vision but found an even stronger aesthetic identity by working in black and white. Can the tragedies you report on ultimately become opportunities for growth?

    Sacks: Well, one wouldn’t wish any of these conditions on anyone, yet there may be a positive side. When the left temporal lobe of the brain gets damaged, people may have a sudden heightened visual facility, and, for example, start painting. People with certain other conditions turn out to be better than normal at reading facial expressions and at hearing expressions of voice. This is not an instantaneous thing. It takes a while to develop. It’s a way to survive and to organize their new world in new ways.

    SPIEGEL: You once compared the brain to an “orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.” Are the off-key performances of this orchestra more widespread than we think?

    Sacks: I believe that most of us have small frailties and flaws in how we make sense of the world. In fact, there is an impairment which I myself share with a lot of people: I have trouble recognizing faces. It is quite distressing. If you have this condition, you always fear that people might think that you don’t care or that you are not sufficiently attentive. However, the recognition of faces doesn’t depend on attention. It’s pre-attentive. People who are face blind have to learn to pay unusual attention to the way people are dressed, the way they stand, their voice or the way they move.

    SPIEGEL: If you’d meet us five minutes after our conversation in the elevator, would you recognize us?

    Sacks: I probably wouldn’t. Although I noticed you were both tall people, but then — there are lots of tall people (laughs).

    SPIEGEL: Why is it so difficult for the brain to make sense of the visual world?

    Sacks: Because it requires the orchestration of 40 or 50 different areas in the brain. These areas have to do with meaning, with association, emotion and so forth. Fortunately, we are not a blank sheet when we are born. We already have all sorts of potentials, and these have to be developed by experience. I am fascinated, for example, by our ability to read. There is no part of the brain that has been shaped by evolution for reading. Reading has only been around for 5,000 years. The reason why we were able to learn how to read is our inherent potential for shape recognition.

    SPIEGEL: Let’s say we could understand the processes of perception, cognition, language and thinking. Would we then be able to enter the inner world of somebody and put ourselves in somebody else’s mind?

    Sacks: A very primitive thought reading is possible already, with the medical imaging that is available today. If you ask people to imagine a piece of music, to recite a poem internally or to imagine a color, you will find particular parts of the brain light up. However, the more sophisticated thought reading will never become a reality because there’s novelty and uniqueness in everyone. Everyone’s brain develops in a particular way. Even if you could, theoretically, transmit your brain cells to someone else, they wouldn’t know what to make of it.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Sacks: Because the language of uniqueness and subjectivity will never be replaced by the language of physiology. For example, if you think of a certain wonderful moment — when there was that marvelous time when your were 22 and in the love and the moon was rising in a starlit sky — how is this moment imprinted in the brain? We don’t know. Our methods are so crude. There are millions and millions of neurons with tens of thousands of connections to others. The degree of it all is unimaginable. Our medical imagery is getting better and better, but I don’t think that we can ever catch up.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Sacks, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Sci-Fi Author Daniel Suarez: ‘We Have To Regain Control Over Our Own Data’

    Programmer Daniel Suarez has written books about a future where human lives are controlled by software. Suarez’ sci-fi scenario involves a malicious, murdering ‘bot’ network. It’s fiction — but Suarez warns that the groundwork for such a future is being laid by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone firms.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Suarez, in the novels “Daemon” and the sequel “Freedom” you have invented a world in which small software applications that run automated tasks — generally called “bots” — control us and determine our destiny. Science fiction writers have often been prescient: Could this be a warning that applies to our current reality?

    Daniel Suarez: Well, the sequel is certainly fiction — but my fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that’s different but it’s familiar enough that it freaks people out a little. And it should. Because even today, we are surrounded by an army of bots that influence our lives profoundly.

    SPIEGEL: Some examples?

    Suarez: Sure, let’s take a look at what recently happened at Wall Street.

    SPIEGEL: On May 6, the Dow Jones suddenly dropped by nearly 1,000 points.

    Suarez: And then (bounced) back a couple of minutes later. And those were bots, trading with each other, beyond human control. They evaporated a trillion dollars of wealth in 20 minutes. Or look at medical decisions: Recently there was the case of several women who were kicked off their health insurance just because they were diagnosed with breast cancer. And it wasn’t a person that made this decision. It was a bot. They can do really atrocious things. And nobody questions it. Bots also work out your credit rating, which will determine whether you get a loan, an apartment or even a job interview. And that data never goes away.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    SPIEGEL: Where does all this data come from?

    Suarez: Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It’s about who you are with and what you will do next. There was a recent study at the Northeastern University in Boston, examining 50,000 cell phones and their owners. After some time, the researchers found they could predict the movements of any individual with 93 percent accuracy. And you can start to correlate that data with other data — for example, with credit card purchases or surveillance camera footage.

    SPIEGEL: Is the data being used already?

    Suarez: I’d be shocked if it wasn’t. Firstly, it would be part of the war on terror. But then it is also about selling things. Bots screen a vast ocean of data (for patterns). And they are very effective. Whether it’s about helping an intelligent agency find members of the opposition or selling people ice cream at the exact moment they’re most susceptible to buying an ice cream. If you can come up with a sophisticated bot algorithm, then you’re going to make a lot of money.

    SPIEGEL: In your books the story line involves a software tycoon and game designer Matthew Sobol, who accidentally creates a highly sophisticated network of bots that go into action when Sobol dies of cancer. The network, eventually named Daemon, then starts to dismantle civilization as we know it and even convinces followers to murder. How does all this happen?

    Suarez: The incentive is money. Basically all money exists as a series of ones and zeroes in databases. So, if you’ve got bots that are inside those systems, they can create money and then hand it to anybody. The bots also know who you’ve talked to, what your job is, what your hobbies are and so on. By the way, this is exactly what social media already does these days. There are 400 million people on Facebook. And Facebook is constantly being (researched) by bots. Those bots aren’t even intelligent. I don’t think it’s going to take a greater-than-human intelligence to trap us.

    SPIEGEL: In your books, you talk about a Darwinian struggle for survival between bots and humans. That sounds a little far fetched. Is the survival of humankind really at stake?

    Suarez: No, but our quality of life could be. A life where bots tell us what to do every second — get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person — is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. So, really, how much of a journey is it from that point to having bots determine what other opportunities you get in life? All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn’t even notice.

    SPIEGEL: But surely there are still people behind all of this, programming the bots and coming up with a purpose for them?

    Suarez: Sure, and I’m not saying it’s a vast conspiracy. You don’t find evil people sitting in the corner going “ha, ha, ha.” (The programmers) are all good citizens. But the whole thing can easily get out of hand. There are networks of bots out there with 10 million machines. Who’s controlling them? You tell me where the process that’s attacking your data is, physically. You can’t just shut it down.

    SPIEGEL: Couldn’t one just pull the power plug out?

    Suarez: How would you unplug the Internet? There is no way. Data centers have generators these days. They don’t rely on the electrical grid. And you wouldn’t know where to start anyway. Even if you shut down 20 percent of the (Internet), it would still exist. My point is that we are creating something very powerful. And we don’t understand the implications. Bots are like parasites, they evolve all the time. Eventually, we loose control.

    SPIEGEL: So what can we do about that?

    Suarez: We have to regain control over our own data. I think that transparency is the key. If you know where you are at, you can act accordingly. And if somebody else wants to use your data, you should be able to decide yourself if you want to hand it over.

    SPIEGEL: So as a software specialist, how do you take care of your data?

    Suarez: I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use Twitter. I don’t give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can’t be localized. A very small group of powerful people is deciding what’s going to happen with your data, and they’re using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It’s all about efficiency. And that’s the really scary thing about it. I’d prefer we don’t take that trip. Otherwise, this could really end up being a hellish world.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    This article was published first in German in the DER SPIEGEL-supplement Kultur SPIEGEL

  • Google Co-Founder on Pulling out of China: ‘It Was a Real Step Backward’

    Last week, Google announced it would withdraw its Chinese operations from Beijing and instead serve the market from freer Hong Kong. The Internet giant’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, 36, discusses his company’s troubles in China and its controversial decision to pull up stakes and leave.

    SPIEGEL: With your decision to close Google’s Chinese Web site, you are the first major company to have challenged the government in Beijing in this way. Are you powerful enough to take on an entire country?

    Brin: I don’t think it’s a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that’s the key issue from our side.

    SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?

    Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel’s back. … More