Factual Dispatch

I'm hoping this can act as a counterweight to the awful din of digital tabloids, for-profit message amplification, and information overload. This dispatch assumes you're vaguely aware of the news, so it will provide perspectives, articles, visualizations, and other content that you wouldn't come across anywhere else.

If you managed to make it through last week and this week without hearing about Amazon & their HQ2, I must congratulate you and I hope you'll show me some of the great pictures you took on your recent trip to the moon. Scott Galloway (Professor at NYU) correctly called it first back in February, realizing that this was never a contest, just of a series of bum fights between cities. There was no chance Jeff Bezos, the richest dude in the world, was going to move to a city that could deeply benefit from Amazon (Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis, etc.), especially given the news that Amazon was bidding on a cloud computing contract for the Pentagon worth $10 Billion. 

While it would be easy to spill thousands of words on the HQ2 debacle, many much better than I have already, so I believe unpacking the deal any further misses PrimeForest for the PrimeTrees. To be clear, HQ2 will add NOS to the engine accelerating gentrification in Shallow Queens that's been running since the early 2000s. And it's happening to a cluster of neighborhoods that is already dealing with another massive redevelopment ploy. But to focus on that or their largely expected and semi-comical anti-union tactics misses the bigger story of Amazon being, in my opinion, an entirely new breed of corporation, that can't be contextualized in the same way we understood previous monoliths like GE, Monsanto or even Microsoft or Apple.

Most accurately stated by Ben Thompson at Stratechery, Amazon's goal is to take a cut of all economic activity on the planet. And it is doing some pretty startling things to achieve that goal. Amazon grew its robot workforce 50% in a year. Amazon is influencing how products are designed. Amazon jumped out in front of criticism about its labor practices by setting a $15.00 minimum wage. Amazon has led the charge to convince 1 in 5 Americans to install a glorified wiretap in their homes. Amazon is attempting to reinvent healthcare, to reduce its ballooning healthcare costs (No, seriously, they are opening clinics for employees & hiring a data scientist for their benefits department). Amazon just announced free shipping on all orders this holiday season. Amazon has 40 freight aircraft, 40% of the cloud server market, an Oscar (before Netflix!), a rapidly growing music streaming service, and the potential to be a massively disruptive lender and asset management marketplace. This is not normal.As MG Siegler writes at 500ish Words, "How the hell is the company that used to sell books online and where I now buy toothpaste also powering the backend for most of the tech services I use every day — and making Oscar-winning films?" More importantly, how the hell do you compete with a company that is able to borrow money more cheaply than Russia, Mexico, or China, and has a CEO & investors who are willing go without profits for 14 years?

Is Amazon invincible? Of course not, as anyone who works at Best Buy, Sephora, boutique independent bookstores, and people who get Amazon Fresh could tell you. Last mile delivery is semi-useless in every major city, because everyone is still at work when the groceries need to arrive. Wal-Mart has been able to produce some growth using "click & collect" which is similar to models used in the UK. Wal-Mart's shoppers will eventually get hooked on a service that puts groceries in their car on the way home while I continue to steer clear of Whole Foods after 5pm on a weekday. China has also produced some interesting innovations in this space, sometimes even combining a food court with a Costco-style retailer and warehouse/forward distribution system. Best Buy, Sephora, and other specialty retailers are able to stay in the game by having knowledgeable, reasonably compensated & enthusiastic sales people, non-stupid marketing strategies, and websites/social media campaigns that don't make teens roll their eyes instantly. But it's going to take a lot more than some contouring tutorials, flat screen TV warrantees, and groceries being loaded into a station wagon on an idle Tuesday, to beat what will be the most valuable and potentially the most disruptive corporation that has ever existed.

Drones have seen over 15 years of military use now, and combining them with machine learning or programmed behavior has resulted in the new frontier in unmanned autonomous vehicles: Swarm Intelligence. While swarm theory (namely ant colony optimization or particle swarm optimization) has only recently started being applied to military technology, we've been deploying computers to handle overwhelming numbers of enemies since the Battle of Midway spawned the Naval Tactical Data System. This (first of its kind) information processing system collated reports and radar telemetry from multiple different ships and produced a coordinated, unified map of the battlefield. (If you ever want a "hard" problem, imagine building a computer out of vacuum tubes and art deco era transistors, that can't get wet, but has to be installed on a destroyer and it has to be capable of surviving a direct hit from a torpedo.)

By using the wisdom of crowds and short-range information transfer mechanics, ants can construct massive structures, schools of fish can avoid predators, and bees can fight off evolving hornet invasions (alternatively, here's a great read on Swarm Intelligence in Radiology). So of course, 30 countries are in the process of developing drone swarms for all sorts of combat & combat-adjacent roles. The biggest problem with these lethal automated weapon systems (see Sarah Topol's seminal work on LAWS, for short), is that when things go wrong, they can go wrong very, very quickly, and very, very badly. Paul Scharre illustrates this risk by reminding us of the idiocy committed by Knight Capital Group in 2012, where a series of glitches led to 4 million errant trades costing the company $460 million in 45 minutes. Whether they're micro-drones loaded with C4, stealth UAVs deep in enemy territory, or automatic defensive installations on the border of many countries, these systems can do horrific amounts of damage before being stopped, in case of error or accident. And, as the Russians found out earlier this year in Syria, when they fought off the first drone swarm attack of its kind, this is not speculation or science fiction. These attacks are going to get better, more complex, and harder to see coming. Especially from governments who give no fucks about civilian casualties.

The best solution to this Sophie's Choice of efficiency vs. brutality that I've come across is what's been referred to as Centaur Warfighting. The term refers to humans working at the center of automated weapon systems, in a similar way to the Human/computer duo that led Deep Blue to beat Gary Kasparov at chess. Humans can theoretically not only coordinate fire more efficiently, but act as a fail safe and a "moral agent." This has already been proposed by Lockheed Martin in their Loyal Wingman project. It's like a regular wing man, except instead of a guy who can chat you up to the cute girl at the bar and drive you home, it's a drone/slave F-16 flying airstrikes and running defensive screens for an F-35A in the air. Recently, they  demonstrated an F-16 drone breaking formation to conduct an air strike independently, and not only did it do so, it eliminated an aerial threat on the way. Centaur Warfighting has the potential to allow dozens, if not hundreds of drone or automated weapons to be commanded by a single human. Now the internet just has to decide how they'll wear pants.

Eye Watering Visualization of the Week: This is a chart documenting tobacco use in adults since 1965. 

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: The DEA & ICE are hiding cameras in street lights. I wish I was kidding.Annoying-but-Correct Take of the Week: Businesses pretend that they're this fusion of Conan, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger, charting a course alone through uncharted waters, braving total calamity to bring value to their customers. The truth is that they love hand-holding more than Donald Trump walking down stairs."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Humpty Dumpty was the name of a cannon used during the English Civil War to defend Colchester from the Parliamentarians in 1648, not an egg. Primary SourceDunk of the Week: The founder of Wikipedia is disappointed by forest fire truthers.

Keep your head up, you're almost there,T