Good boy!Yoshio Tsunoda/AFLO via ZUMA

Sony ended production of its robot dog, Aibo, more than a decade ago, but now it’s back and better than ever. The robotics are better, the intelligence is better, and—well, let’s allow Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler to explain:

Aside from walking around the house, barking and performing a few tricks, Aibo doesn’t do a whole lot. It can’t play music or answer trivia like a smart speaker, though those would be welcome additions.

Yet here’s why Aibo matters: Despite all those limitations, I fell for it. Over two weeks of robot foster parenting, almost every person I introduced to Aibo went a little gaga. The Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers got us to open our homes to new ways to interact with computers. Aibo offers a glimpse of how tech companies will get us to treat them more like members of the family. Affectionate robots have the potential to comfort, teach and connect us to new experiences — as well as manipulate us in ways we’ve not quite encountered before.

Aibo works, in part, because real robots are catching up with what we’ve been trained by Pixar movies to find adorable. Aibo’s 22 joints — including one bouncy tail and two perky ears — and OLED-screen eyes communicate joy, sorrow, boredom or the need for a nap.

When I talk to people about artificial intelligence, the most common pushback has to do with emotion and sociability. Sure, maybe robots will be better than us at driving cars or doing taxes, but they’ll never replace a conversation with friends or provide any kind of emotional support. A robot brain just can’t do this.

I couldn’t agree less. As far as I’m concerned, the human brain is a proof of concept that a human brain can exist. And if a human brain can exist on a substrate of CHON-based mush,¹ why can’t it exist on a substrate of silicon and trace metals? Do we really think that CHON-based mush is all that special?

Of course not. But that’s the easy part to knock down. The real criticism of our alleged robot future is that humans are just too smart, too evolved, too well developed. There’s no way that a computer algorithm can even simulate human emotions, let alone truly feel them. But I am a cynic: not only do I think algorithms can do this, I think they can do it pretty easily. The truth is that we humans aren’t really all that smart. We’re basically overclocked apes with a few extra cognitive tricks tossed in, and those tricks aren’t especially sophisticated. Not only are we easily fooled, we practically beg to be fooled. It’s why we get conned so easily, it’s why racism is so widespread, and it’s why we trust a pretty face more than an ugly one. We’re suckers for crude heuristics that probably served some useful purpose on the savannah but often do more harm than good in 21st century society.

Anyway. My point is that we’re more easily fooled on emotional matters than other things. Geoffrey Fowler is an adult, and knows perfectly well that Aibo is just a hunk of silicon that’s programmed with a few tricks to seem sort of doglike. But he found Aibo adorable anyway. I’ll bet elderly folks who don’t get much company would too. So would I if they made a cat version.² And that’s despite the fact that even the 2.0 version of Aibo is obviously very, very limited. But give it another ten years and we’ll barely be able to tell Aibo apart from the real thing.

And another ten years after that we’ll have human robots who can worm their way into our hearts and con us out of our life’s savings. Our robot future is looking better all the time, isn’t it?

¹That’s carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the basic building blocks of organic matter.

²What’s up with that, anyway? Are cats harder to simulate than dogs?

Pyongyang Press Corps/Xinhua via ZUMA

North and South Korea have signed a series of agreements designed to ratchet down tensions between the two countries:

But more eye-catching to Washington was his promise to dismantle a missile engine-test facility and a missile launchpad in northwest North Korea that have been essential to the country’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and invite outside experts to watch.

To go further, Mr. Kim has demanded “corresponding” measures from the United States, like declaring a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which was halted only with a truce. In return, he has proposed to “permanently dismantle” the Yongbyon nuclear complex, the heart of his country’s nuclear program, among other steps. Mr. Kim’s offer to permanently dismantle the Yongbyon facilities is significant. North Korea is believed to have produced all its plutonium there.

What exactly are the “corresponding” measures that Kim wants? The devil is all in the details here.

As I mentioned a few days ago, benefits have risen a little faster than cash wages lately:

U.S. employers are boosting benefits—including bonuses and vacation time—at a faster pace than salaries, a move that gives them more flexibility to dial back that compensation if the economy turns sour. The cost of benefits for private-sector employers rose 3% in June from a year earlier, while the cost of wages and salaries advanced 2.7%, the Labor Department said Tuesday.

This is not a huge difference, and it looks worse if you break it down by type of benefit:

Call me cynical, but without bothering to check this out I think it’s safe to say that bonuses and retirement pay are heavily skewed in favor of the affluent and the rich. For ordinary working-class and middle-class workers, total compensation has probably risen a hair faster than cash wages, but that’s all. What this means is that when you see the annual earnings reported by the Census Bureau—which is what all of us rely on for basic wage data—it’s pretty close to total compensation data. Total comp for the middle class may be growing faster than wages alone, but only by a tiny bit.

Sad news for rich people today:

Advocacy groups pouring money into independent campaigns to impact this fall’s midterm races must disclose many of their political donors beginning this week after the Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a long-running case. The high court did not grant an emergency request to stay a ruling by a federal judge in Washington.

….Nonprofit advocacy groups — which do not have to publicly disclose their donors, as political committees do — will now have to begin reporting the names of contributors who give more than $200 per election toward their independent political campaigns, campaign finance lawyers said….The change could affect heavyweight groups across the political spectrum, including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity on the right and the League of Conservation Voters on the left.

To be honest, I’ve never quite understood why rich people are so hellbent on hiding their political contributions, but I guess now we’ll find out just how serious they are. I assume this will wend its way up to the Supreme Court normally in a year or two, and then we’ll get a permanent ruling. In the meantime, if you want to give a million bucks to Americans for Trumpocracy, you’re going to have to let the whole world know you’re doing it.

This caught my eye in the LA Times this morning:

When students enter school in California, they learn at a pace on par with — if not better than — those in other states. The problem is that they arrive far behind their national peers, and they never catch up.

This conclusion, from a sweeping research project aimed at charting future education policy, focuses new attention on what is often overlooked: infant and toddler care, parenting skills, preschool and early childhood education. The researchers argue that if California wants to improve student achievement in schools, it has to start much earlier so that children are prepared when they show up for kindergarten.

I’m a fan of early childhood education, but I was surprised that a new report finds that California children arrive in kindergarten “far behind” their national peers. Here’s how California’s kindergarten students stack up compared to the rest of the country:

The white line is California while the yellow line is the US average. As you can see, kids in poor districts arrive at kindergarten with scores about a third of a standard deviation below kids in poor districts elsewhere in the country, both in reading and math. Speaking very roughly, this is a difference of around one grade level. However, once they start school, they progress pretty well:

Poor students actually progress a little better in California compared to the rest of the country. In fact, poor students progress about one-eighth of a grade level faster than average, which means that by the end of elementary school they’ve pretty much caught up to poor students in the rest of the country.

I’m still in favor of good early childhood programs, but I’m not sure this data provides much evidence for it. Even if weak ECE participation is responsible for the lagging performance of California’s kindergarten students, it’s a smallish lag that seems to be made up after a few years. It’s hard to draw very strong conclusions from any of this.

Sunrise over Glacier Point on a clear winter morning at Yosemite National Park.

Lots of moderate Republicans are fully convinced that the November election is an important one. The problem is that they increasingly think Trump is a crackpot and they care more about Democratic priorities than Republicans ones.Brian Cahn/ZUMA

An internal GOP poll shows that Republican voters are feeling pretty confident:

A private survey conducted for the Republican National Committee and obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek contains alarming news for Republicans hoping to hold on to control of Congress in November: Most Trump supporters don’t believe there’s a threat that Democrats will win back the House. President Trump’s boasts that a “red wave” could increase Republican majorities appear to have lulled GOP voters into complacency, raising the question of whether they’ll turn up at the polls.

….The internal RNC study finds that complacency among GOP voters is tied directly to their trust in the president—and their distrust of traditional polling. “While a significant part of that lack of intensity is undoubtedly due to these voters’ sentiments toward the President, it may also be partly because they don’t believe there is anything at stake in this election,” the authors write. “Put simply, they don’t believe that Democrats will win the House. (Why should they believe the same prognosticators who told them that Hillary was going to be elected President?)”

So there’s good news and bad news here for the Republican Party. The good news is that Donald Trump has been strikingly successful at persuading Republican voters that the mainstream media is just a bunch of anti-Trump fake news and should be ignored. The bad news is that…Republican voters don’t believe anything in the mainstream media anymore, even when it’s true. So they figure Republicans are way ahead in the polling and there’s not much point in bothering to vote this year.

But what about the moderates, the folks who aren’t Trump true believers? Well, it turns out that they pose an entirely different problem:

The study says GOP fortunes will hinge on the party’s ability to activate “soft” supporters: “Those voters who ‘somewhat approve’ of Trump and those who support the President’s policies but not his leadership style are the ones posing a challenge to the party.” Motivating these voters could be tricky. One hurdle is Trump’s chaotic style, which shows no sign of changing. Another is that the issues soft Republicans care about most are ones involving government spending and are typically associated with Democrats. The survey found that increasing funding for veterans’ mental health services, strengthening and preserving Medicare and Social Security, and reforming the student loan system all scored higher than Trump’s favored subjects of tax cuts, border security, and preserving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Long story short: Trump’s core constituency loves him, but can’t conceive that he could possibly lose. So why bother voting? Conversely, his more moderate supporters totally believe he could lose, but increasingly think that’s just fine. They like the Democratic platform better anyway.

It’s a dilemma.

heju/Pixabay

Trade war!

China is retaliating against a new round of U.S. tariffs with its own levies on $60 billion worth of U.S. products, escalating the countries’ trade fight while Chinese officials weigh whether to accept Washington’s offer for more negotiations. The announcement by the country’s cabinet came half a day after President Trump announced new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, an action that left Chinese officials scrambling on how to respond. The new levies, on imports from the U.S. ranging from farm products and machinery to chemicals, will take effect on Sept. 24, the same day the latest U.S. penalties are set to kick in. The Chinese rates will range from 5% to 10%.

The conventional wisdom is that China is running out of headroom to levy tariffs at the same rate as Trump, and that’s true. But China has plenty of other actions at its disposal that can make life harder for American businesses and/or easier for non-American businesses. Either one would provide an advantage for non-American companies over American companies.

In the end, of course, the market will get whatever the market wants. It probably doesn’t matter much what Trump or Xi want. They’ll flail around, but two years down the road nothing much will have changed. You’d think a bunch of Republicans would be able to figure this out.

Behold the fabulous new Apple Watch, which for some reason will not be subject to Donald Trump's new tariffs. Lucky Apple.Apple Inc.

Under normal circumstances, Thursday is evil dex day and Sunday is crash day. This is just the nature of the beast. Three days after taking the stuff, it wears off and I crash for five or six hours.

But this week I took the dex on Friday, so today was crash day. But this was no ordinary crash: I think the lights went out around 10 am and I didn’t fully pull out of it until 6 pm. I have no idea what made it so extreme this time, but I’m now seriously thinking of following my doctor’s advice (or permission, I suppose) to just go ahead and reduce the dex from 20 mg to 12 mg each week. This is ridiculous.

So what happened while I was basically in a coma?

• Donald Trump decided to raise taxes on American consumers yet again, this time by $20 billion. This tax is known as a “tariff” by some, but it’s still a tax. Where is Grover Norquist when you need him?
• Trump has also decided to unilaterally declassify a bunch of documents related to the Russia investigation. This is insane. It’s an ongoing investigation, and he’s obviously doing this solely in the desperate hope that somewhere in all the texts and warrants and interviews there will be some snippets he can use to fuel yet more Twitter rants about how unfairly he’s being treated. How long are Republicans going to let him do this?
• Larry Kudlow went on TV this morning and said our deficits are too high. But this is absolutely not because of the Republican tax bill. No way. The problem is that we’re spending too much on entitlements and they need to be cut—after the election, of course. “Entitlements” is code for either (a) Social Security and Medicare, or (b) spending on the poor. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Kudlow is probably thinking of (b).

If we’re grading on a curve, I suppose this counts as a pretty average day. Of course, we’re also dealing with the aftermath of a huge hurricane and we have a Supreme Court nominee who’s been credibly accused of attempted rape. In the Trump Era, though, I suppose even this isn’t enough to nudge the needle very far off normal.

BY THE WAY: This came up at the panel discussion I was on last Thursday, so I’m going to repeat it now. Despite the intense craziness of the Trump presidency, I still fundamentally believe the world is plodding along pretty normally. Liberal democracy is doing fine. Anti-immigrant sentiment is temporary. Brexit is a fluke. It’s unsurprising that a couple of eastern European countries are backsliding on authoritarianism. The economy is OK.

On a scale of zero to World War II, the current threats to liberal democracy are barely noticeable. Donald Trump is an insect compared to Mao or Stalin or Hitler or even peanuts like Nasser or Noriega. Brexit is stupid, but Britain will survive. Vladimir Putin may want to recreate the Soviet empire, but so far he’s managed to recover only a few square miles. And the Middle East is the same as it’s been for the past half century.

I sure hope everyone helps prove me right—or at least helps to get the ball rolling on proving me right—in November.

As you know, I was in New York City for a couple of days last week, which I used mostly as a photography excursion. I originally planned to do some street photography, but ended up not doing very much. It’s hard! A lot of people who do it end up with pictures they think are a lot better than they really are, and I decided pretty quickly that I just don’t have the eye for it. Maybe someday I’ll spend more time with it and learn how to do it well.

But I got a bunch of other nice pictures that will enter the daily queue, including lots of cute animals at the Prospect Park zoo. My stock of animal photos was running low, so this was a good way to spend a couple of hours.

But the first New York picture for you is this young couple in front of the famous fountain at Lincoln Center. Enjoy.