Luddites had the right of things all the way back in the 1800s. When textile factory owners in early 19th century England used the industrialization of their industry as an excuse to underpay and overwork employees in dangerous, dehumanizing conditions, the secret organization of workers set about smashing the machines of the capitalists who exploited them. Today, the Writers’ Guild of America faces a similar threat from those in control of a new transformative technology, generative AI, and it’s part of the reason they’re currently on strike for better working conditions.

On March 7, 2023, WGA members voted to approve the 2023 Pattern of Demands by a count of 5,553 voting yes to 90 no’s. On Tuesday morning, more than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America shut Hollywood down for the first time since 2007 when they last had to fight for their livelihoods.

“Though we negotiated intent on making a fair deal … the studios’ responses to our proposals have been wholly insufficient, given the existential crisis writers are facing,” read a statement from WGA leadership to CNN on Wednesday. “They have closed the door on their labor force and opened the door to writing as an entirely freelance profession. No such deal could ever be contemplated by this membership.”

As such, the guild is demanding significant increases to the industry’s minimum compensation “to address the devaluation of writing in all areas of television, new media and features” as well as standardize the amount writers are paid writing for streaming or theatrically released features, among a host of other long-deferred needs. The guild is also looking towards the future in its negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in efforts to prevent the studios’ from using AI and their own words) to put WGA writers out of work.

“It is not the tool itself, it's not an objection to the tool,” WGA member and writer behind Sinister,Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, C. Robert Cargill told Engadget regarding generative AI systems. “What we have asked of the studios is that they do not generate any material themselves that they have not been handed by writers.”

This is because writing contracts in Hollywood are very specific about the circumstances of how credit is attributed because residual payments are paid out based on them, Cargill explains. For example, writing the first draft of a feature pays at a higher rate than the subsequent rewrites and the amount of residuals the first screenwriter receives depends on what percentage of their original script made it into the final product.

“The fear here is very simple,” Cargill said, and one that is already being realized in the wake of the strike’s launch. “Which is, they get an idea and they put it into one of the generative programs… and then it kicks out something that looks like a script. Then what they do is they hand it over to a writer and say, ‘we're going to pay you your rewrite wage to go ahead and make it sound more like a human wrote it and to fix any of the problems.”

This would essentially preclude human — more importantly, unionized — writers from earring the highest pay rate while forcing them to still perform the highest pay grade work. “What Hollywood can be doing is cutting us out of that very lucrative first step of generating the initial script and story ideas,” he said.

The guild is also, rightfully, concerned with the potential for their existing writing content be used to train future iterations of generative AIs. “I had a fan reach out to me because he was playing around with [ChatGPT] a few weeks ago and wanted to get a couple ideas to a horror story,” Cargill recalled. “He says, ‘Give me some horror prompts based on, I want to write a horror movie that is a mystery thriller, I want it to be creepy and kind of like Sinister.’”

“What it spit back out was the plot to Sinister,” Cargill, who wrote Sinister. “A family moves into a house and finds a videotape of the murder of the family that previously lived there, and the only thing that was changed from my movie is ours happened on film and not video — and that's how it changed it.”

Cargill’s concern is that “by using our previous scripts, what the studios will be doing is essentially getting lines of our dialogue and our jokes sent back into the industry — but without our attribution, without our credit, without our pay.”

He elaborates that the guild is not seeking a full ban on generative AI’s use and that screen are welcome to use it if they want. In the same way that “you don't have to use a computer with spellcheck. You can write your script on yellow line paper by hand if you want — Quentin Tarantino still does that.”

“You don't you don't have to use the technology,” he continued. “But if you want to you can but what we want is to make sure studios aren't using that to replace that and then pay us lower rates just to rewrite what a computer sent back.”

The WGA did not respond to multiple written requests for comment. The AMPTP issued the following response:

We’re creative companies and we value the work of creatives. The best stories are original, insightful and often come from people's own experiences. AI raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everyone. For example, writers want to be able to use this technology as part of their creative process, without changing how credits are determined, which is complicated given AI material can't be copyrighted. So it's something that requires a lot more discussion, which we've committed to doing. Also, it’s important to note that the current WGA Agreement already defines a “writer” to exclude any “corporate or impersonal purveyor” of literary material, meaning that only a “person” can be considered a writer and enjoy the terms and conditions of the Basic Agreement. For example, AI-generated material would not be eligible for writing credit.

Ahead of a meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris and the heads of America's four leading AI tech companies — Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft — the Biden Administration announced Thursday a sweeping series of planned actions to help mitigate some of the risks that these emerging technologies pose to the American public. That includes $140 million to launch seven new AI R&D centers as part of the National Science Foundation, extracting commitments from leading AI companies to participate in a "public evaluation" of their AI systems at DEFCON 31, and ordering the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to draft policy guidance for federal employees.

"The Biden Harris administration has been leading on these issues since long before these newest generative AI products debuted last fall," a senior administration official said during a reporters call Wednesday. The Administration unveiled its AI Bill of Rights "blueprint" last October, which sought to "help guide the design, development, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated systems so that they protect the rights of the American public," per a White House press release.

"At a time of rapid innovation, it is essential that we make clear the values we must advance, and the common sense we must protect," the administration official continued. "With [Thursday's announcement] and the blueprint for an AI bill of rights, we've given company and policymakers and the individuals building these technologies, some clear ways that they can mitigate the risks [to consumers]."

While the federal government does already have authority to protect the citizenry and hold companies accountable, as the FTC demonstrated Monday, "there's a lot the federal government can do to make sure we get AI right," the official added — like found seven brand new National AI Research Institutes as part of the NSF. They'll act to collaborate research efforts across academia, the private sector and government to develop ethical and trustworthy in fields ranging from climate, agriculture and energy, to public health, education, and cybersecurity."

"We also need companies and innovators to be our partners in this work," the White House official said. "Tech companies have a fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe and secure and that they protect people's rights before they're deployed or made public tomorrow."

To that end, the Vice President is scheduled to meet with tech leaders at the White House on Thursday for what is expected to be a "frank discussion about the risks we see in current and near-term AI development," the official said. "We're also aiming to underscore the importance of their role on mitigating risks and advancing responsible innovation, and will discuss how we can work together to protect the American people from the potential harms of AI so that they can reach the benefits of these new technology."

The Administration also announced that it has obtained "independent commitment" from more than a half dozen leading AI companies — Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI — to put their AI systems up for public evaluation at DEFCON 31 (August 10-13th). There, thousands of attendees will be able to poke and prod around in these models to see if they square with the Biden admin's stated principles and practices of the Blueprint. Finally, the OMB will issue guidance to federal employees in coming months regarding official use of the technology and help establish specific policies for agencies to follow, and allow for public comment before those policies are finalized.

"These are important new steps to come out responsible innovation and to make sure AI improved people's lives, without putting rights and safety at risk," the official noted.

Since its establishment in 1914, the US Federal Trade Commission has stood as a bulwark against the fraud, deception, and shady dealings that American consumers face every day — fining brands that "review hijack" Amazon listings, making it easier to cancel magazine subscriptions and blocking exploitative ad targeting. On Monday, Michael Atleson, Attorney, FTC Division of Advertising Practices, laid out both the commission's reasoning for how emerging generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 could be used to violate the FTC Act's spirit of unfairness, and what it would do to companies found in violation. 

"Under the FTC Act, a practice is unfair if it causes more harm than good," Atleson said. "It’s unfair if it causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers that is not reasonably avoidable by consumers and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition."

He notes that the new generation of chatbots like Bing, Bard and ChatGPT can be used to influence the user's, "beliefs, emotions, and behavior." We've already seen them employed as negotiators within Walmart supply network and as talk therapists, both occupations specifically geared towards influencing those around you. When combined with the common effects of automation bias, wherein users more readily the accept the word of a presumably impartial AI system, and anthropomorphism. "People could easily be led to think that they’re conversing with something that understands them and is on their side," Atleson argued.

He concedes that the issues surrounding generative AI technology go far beyond the FTC's immediate purview, but reiterates that it will not tolerate unscrupulous companies from using it to take advantage of consumers. "Companies thinking about novel uses of generative AI, such as customizing ads to specific people or groups," the FTC lawyer warned, "should know that design elements that trick people into making harmful choices are a common element in FTC cases, such as recent actions relating to financial offers, in-game purchases, and attempts to cancel services."

The FTC's guardrails also apply to placing ads within a generative AI application, not unlike how Google inserts ads into its search results. "People should know if an AI product’s response is steering them to a particular website, service provider, or product because of a commercial relationship," Atleson wrote. "And, certainly, people should know if they’re communicating with a real person or a machine."

Finally, Atleson leveled an unsubtle warning to the tech industry. "Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it’s perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering," he wrote. "If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look." That's a lesson Twitter already learned the hard way. 

All of those fantastical possibilities promised by burgeoning brain-computer interface technology come with the unavoidable cost of needing its potentially hackable wetware to ride shotgun in your skull. Given how often our personal data is already mishandled online, do we really want to trust the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley with our most personal of biometrics, our brainwaves? In her new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, Nita A. Farahany, examines the legal, ethical, and moral threats that tomorrow's neurotechnologies could pose. 

St. Martin’s Publishing Group

From The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

“Passthoughts” as a Gateway to Brain Surveillance

Assume that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies soon have their way, and neural interface devices replace keyboards and mice. In that likely future, a large segment of the population will routinely wear neural devices like NextSense’s bio-sensing EEG earbuds, which are designed to be worn twenty-four hours a day. With wide-scale adoption of wearable neurotechnology, adding our brain activity to nationwide identification systems is a near-term reality.

One of the most extraordinary discoveries of modern neuroscience is the uniqueness of each person’s functional brain connection (its physical wiring), especially in the brain areas devoted to thinking or remembering something. Because of this, algorithms can be used to analyze our brain activity and extract features that are both unique to each person and stable over time. How your brain responds to a song or an image, for example, is highly dependent upon your prior experiences. The unique brain patterns you generate could be used to authenticate your identity.

Nationwide identification systems vary by country but generally involve the assignment of unique identification numbers, which can be used for border checks, employment screenings, health-care delivery, or to interact with security systems. These ID numbers are stored in centralized government databases along with other significant personal data, including birth date and place, height, weight, eye color, address, and other information. Most identification systems have long included at least one piece of biometric data, the static photo used in passports and driver’s licenses. But governments are quickly moving toward more expansive biometric features that include the brain.

Biometric characteristics are special because they are highly distinctive and have little to no overlap between individuals. As the artificial intelligence algorithms powering biometric systems have become more powerful, they can identify unique features in the eyes and the face, or even in a person’s behavior. Brain-based biometric authentication has security advantages over other biometric data because it is concealed, dynamic, non-stationary, and incredibly complex.

The promise of greater security has led countries to invest heavily in biometric authentication. China has an extensive nationwide biometric database that includes DNA samples, and it also makes widespread use of facial recognition technology. Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have conducted mass collections of biometric data from the Uyghur people and used it for targeted discrimination.

The United States has also massively expanded its collection of biometric data. A recent report by the US Government Accountability Office detailed at least eighteen different federal agencies that have some kind of facial recognition program in place. US Customs and Border Protection includes facial recognition as part of its pre-boarding screening process, and an executive order signed by President Trump in 2017 required the United States’ top twenty airports to implement biometric screening on incoming international passengers.

Increasingly, governments are investing in developing brain biometric measurements. The US Department of Defense recently funded SPARK Neuro, a New York–based company that has been working on a biometric system that combines EEG brain wave data, changes in sweat gland activity, facial recognition, eye-tracking, and even functional near-infrared spectrometry brain imaging (fNIRS), a particularly promising (if expensive) technology for brain authentication, since it is wearable, can be used to monitor individuals over time, can be used indoors or outdoors while a person is moving or at rest, and can be used on infants and children. China has been funneling substantial investments into EEG and fNIRS as well.

For biometric features to be successfully used for authentication, they must have universality, permanence, uniqueness, and be secure against fraud. Over time, static biometrics like facial IDs and fingerprints have become prone to spoofing. Functional biometrics, such as brain activity, are less prone to attack. That feature has motivated researchers like Jinani Sooriyaarachchi and her colleagues in Australia to develop scalable brain-based authentication systems. In one of their most recent studies, they recruited twenty volunteers and asked them to listen to both a popular English song and their own favorite song while their brain wave activity was recorded with a four-channel (an electrode capturing brain wave activity is called a channel) Muse headset. Afterward, the researchers analyzed their recorded brain wave activity using an artificial-intelligence classifier algorithm. Remarkably, they achieved 98.39 percent accuracy in identifying the correct participant when they listened to the familiar song, and a 99.46 percent accuracy when they listened to their favorite song. Using an eight-channel EEG headset on thirty research subjects, another group achieved a similar 98 percent accuracy in authenticating participants by their brain wave data after they’d looked at novel images. It might not even take eight or even four electrodes to achieve the same result. Even with just a single-channel EEG headset, researchers have achieved 99 percent accuracy in distinguishing between participants when they performed the same mental tasks. Most of these studies had a small number of participants; it is not yet clear if neural signatures will be as accurate at scale, when billions rather than dozens of people must be authenticated. EEG is inherently noisy—meaning the signals the electrodes pick up can come from eye-blinking or other movement, which can make it hard to tell the difference between brain activity or interference. But researchers have made substantial progress in developing pattern classifiers that filter noise, allowing them to discriminate between individuals based on their resting-state EEG brain wave activity and when performing tasks. As noted previously, EEG devices have been used to recover sensitive information from a person’s brain, such as their PIN codes, and their political and religious ideologies. Obviously, this poses clear risks to our digital and physical security.

Governments can already tap our phone conversations and snoop on us digitally. Will they similarly tap our brain activity data without our knowledge or consent? Will they deploy AI programs to search our brains for terrorist plots? Will they gather neural data to make inferences about individuals’ political beliefs to predict and prevent peaceful protests? China is reportedly already doing so.

Palantir already sells its domestic surveillance services to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so it should come as no surprise that the company founded by billionaire Peter Thiel is working to make inroads into the Pentagon as well. On Tuesday, the company released a video demo of its latest offering, the Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). While the system itself is simply designed to integrate large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's BERT into privately-operated networks, the very first thing they did was apply it to the modern battlefield.

In the video demo above, a military operator tasked with monitoring the Eastern European theater discovers enemy forces massing near the border and responds by asking a ChatGPT-style digital assistant for help with deploying reconnaissance drones, ginning up tactical responses to the perceived aggression and even organize the jamming of the enemy's communications. The AIP is shown helping estimate the enemy's composition and capabilities by launching a Reaper drone on a reconnaissance mission in response the to operator's request for better pictures, and suggesting appropriate responses given the discovery of an armored element. 

“LLMs and algorithms must be controlled in this highly regulated and sensitive context to ensure that they are used in a legal and ethical way,” the video begins. To do so, AIP's operation is based on three "key pillars," the first being that AIP will deploy across a classified system, able to parse in real-time both classified and non-classified data, ethically and legally. The company did not elaborate on how that would work. The second pillar is that users will be able to toggle the scope and actions of every LLM and asset on the network. The AIP itself will generate a secure digital record of the entire operation, "crucial for mitigating significant legal, regulatory, and ethical risks in sensitive and classified settings," according to the demo. The third pillar are AIP's "industry-leading guardrails" to prevent the system from taking unauthorized actions. 

A "human in the loop" to prevent such actions does exist in Palantir's scenario, though from the video, the "operator" appears to do little more than nod along with whatever AIP suggests. The demo also did not elaborate on what steps are being taken to prevent the LLMs that the system relies on from "hallucinating" pertinent facts and details.

We’ve all been there: sitting in the back of a cab as it crawls through downtown traffic, the clock on the dash mocking you with its inexorable march towards a missed final boarding call and non-refundable ticket fees. Racing to make your flight is an experience nearly as old as commercial aviation itself — and one which has seen repeated solutions attempted throughout the years. Today, companies like Uber and Hyundai or United Airlines and Archer are working to get fleets of eVTOL aircraft to serve as short-hop air taxis, ferrying travelers from city centers to airports while avoiding the mess and hassle of ground-based traffic. In the ‘60s, companies like Chicago Helicopter Airways (CHA) just used a bunch of repurposed US Navy helicopters whose rotors almost never catastrophically failed. Almost.

Following WW2, the US government found itself with a massive surplus of military aircraft — we’re talking North of 150,000 individual planes, helicopters and sundry whirlybirds that all needed somewhere to go that wasn’t storage or a scrap yard. At the same time, an emergent middle class got the chicken in every pot and car in every driveway it was promised, along with all of the traffic and congestion that that particular American dream creates. So, in the early 1950s, the Federal government launched a series of grant programs to promote commuting via helicopter as an intra-city alternative to driving, simultaneously addressing both issues.

The CHA began its existence in post-war America 1948, as a regional mail delivery service operating in greater Chicagoland with a fleet of Sikorsky S-58C and H-34A Choctaw helicopters, but switched to carrying human passengers from 1956 to 1963. Its five-stop route moved between its home base in Winnetka, Illinois and O’Hare and Midway airports, the now defunct Meigs Field, and Gary, Indiana.

For $5 in 1962 money (or just under $50 today) travelers could get from Winnetka at the North end of the city to Terminal 3 at O’Hare, and do it in under ten minutes. Or for $11, sightseers could reserve space aboard a city-wide “Complete Triangle Flight” helicopter tour of Chicago. According to digitized pamphlets archived at TimetableImages, anyone flying to or from “Europe, South or Central America, Alaska or across the Pacific,” on Air France, BOAC Lufthansa, Mexicana, Northwest, PAA or TWA were entitled to a free helo-transfer between Midway and O’Hare.

At its peak in 1960, CHA operated 126 flights and carried 6,000 passengers daily. However, that success did not last long past the tragedy of Flight 698. On July 20th, 1960, 11 passengers and two crew members took off from O’Hare airport, headed for Midway under clear skies. Minutes into the journey, disaster struck when the main rotor failed and came apart. The crew attempted an emergency landing but were thwarted when the tail rotor subsequently broke off and the aircraft nose-dived into Forest Home Cemetery. It burst into flames, killing all 13 aboard.

Just three years later in 1963, CHA’s business had dropped off by half with just 3,000 people opting for helicopter rides to the airport. By 1966, the federal government’s grant programs had run their course and funding quickly dried up, effectively putting an end to CHA’s operations. The company attempted a comeback with limited service in 1969 but shuttered again for good in 1974. 

The CHA wasn't alone in its air commute aspirations. It was joined by similar services in Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC and the San Francisco Bay Area. European cities launched their own services as well including Paris, Brussels, Dooseldorf and between the UK's Gatwick and Heathrow airports.

Clearly the issue was that the aircraft of the day only had a measly single rotor to provide lift and placed it at risk of major mechanical failure. That’s not an issue with modern VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft, such as the six-rotor Bell Nexus, which was to be used in Uber’s now defunct air taxi service, a similarly-specced offering from Volocopter, or the five-rotor version that Boeing tested in 2019.

However, finding reliable funding remains a challenge — even Larry Page’s pet VTOL project, Kitty Hawk, ceased operations in 2022 — which has resulted in much of the technology’s development concentrating amidst existing aerospace corporations. Airbus is working on a VTOL of its own, as is Honda, while United announced plans to buy 500 units outright from VTOL maker Eve Air Mobility to jumpstart its fleet. Joby Aviation, which purchased Uber’s air taxi business in 2020, just received significant investment from Delta as well.

The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around. 

Or at least that's how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity's own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity's intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.

Harper Collins Publishing

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

On a Scale of One to Three

The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in Star Trek, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.

Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.

The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.

What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.

It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).

On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more power and more space, just the churning and churning of engines. Astrophysicist Adam Frank identifies the Kardashev scale as a product of the midcentury “techno-utopian vision of the future.” At the point when Kardashev was writing, humanity hadn’t yet been forced to face the sensitive feedback systems our energy consumption triggers. “Planets, stars, and galaxies,” Frank writes, “would all simply be brought to heel.”

Even in the Western scientific tradition, alternatives to Kardashev’s scale have been offered. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin proposed one scale that measures planetary mastery and another that measured colonizing spread. Carl Sagan offered one that accounts for the information available to a civilization. Cosmologist John D. Barrow proposed microscopic manipulation, going from Type I–minus, where people can manipulate objects of their own scale, down through the parts of living things, molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, to the very fabric of space and time. Frank proposed looking not at energy consumption but transformation, noting that a sophisticated civilization does more than bring a planet to heel, it must learn to find balance between resource use and long-term survival.

Of these — again, all white American or European men — only Sagan offers a measure of advancement that isn’t necessarily acquisitive. Even the manipulation of atoms, which may seem so small and delicate, requires massive amounts of energy in the form of particle accelerators, not to mention that this kind of tinkering has also unleashed humanity’s greatest destructive force. But Sagan’s super-advanced civilization could be nothing more than a massive, massive library, filled with scholars and philosophers, expanding and exploring mentally but with no dominion over their planet or star. (Yet, one has to ask: What is powering those libraries? The internet is ephemeral, but it is not free.)

Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of one world, Hain, where civilization has existed for three million years. But just as the last few thousand years on Earth have seen empires rise and fall, and cultures collapse and displace one another, so it is on Hain at larger scale. Le Guin writes, “There had been…billions of lives lived in millions of countries…infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings…an endless repetition of unceasing novelty.” To hope for more than that is perhaps more optimistic than to imagine we might domesticate a star. Perhaps it’s also shortsighted, extrapolating out eons of future from just the last few centuries of life on two continents, rather than a wider view of many millennia on our whole world.

All of these scales of progress are built on human assumptions, specifically the colonizing, dominating, fossil-fuel-burning history of Europe and the United States. But scientists don’t see much use in thinking about the super-advanced alien philosophers and artists and dolphins, brilliant as they might be, because it would be basically impossible for us to find them.

The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about trying to imagine not just who might be out there but how we might find them. Which is how we end up at Dyson spheres.

Dyson spheres are named for Freeman Dyson, the physicist, mathematician, and general polymath. While most SETI scientists in the early 1960s were looking for extraterrestrial beacons, Dyson thought “one ought to be looking at the uncooperative society.” Not obstinate, just not actively trying to help us. “The idea of searching for radio signals was a fine idea,” he said in a 1981 interview, “but it only works if you have some cooperation at the other end. So I was always thinking about what to do if you were looking just for evidence of intelligent activities without anything in the nature of a message.” And you might as well start with the easiest technology to detect — the biggest or brightest. So the massive spheres Dyson popularized in his 1960 paper were the result of him asking What is the largest feasible technology?

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise finds itself caught in a massive gravitational field, even though there are no stars nearby. The source, on the view screen, is a matte, dark gray sphere. Riker says its diameter is almost as wide as the Earth’s orbit.

Picard asks, with hushed wonder, “Mr. Data, could this be a Dyson sphere?”

Data replies, “The object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.”

Commander Riker isn’t familiar with the concept, but Picard doesn’t give him any trouble for that. “It’s a very old theory, Number One. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it.” He tells him that a twentieth century physicist, Freeman Dyson, had proposed that a massive, hollow sphere built around a star could capture all the star’s radiating energy for use. “A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power.”

Riker asks, with some skepticism, if Picard thinks there are people living in the sphere.

“Possibly a great number of people, Commander,” Data says. “The interior surface area of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two hundred and fifty million Class M [Earthlike] planets.”

In Dyson’s thinking, the goal wasn’t living space but energy — how would a civilization reach Type II? And Dyson’s writing was clearly speculative. In the paper, he wrote, “I do not argue that this is what will happen in our system; I only say that this is what may have happened in other systems.” Decades later, astrophysicist Jason Wright took up the search.

One of the great benefits to this approach, Wright told me, is that “nature doesn’t make Dyson spheres.” Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. But while the best known version of SETI is listening for radio signals (more on that in the next chapter), Wright focuses on looking for technosignatures — evidence of technology out among the stars. Technosignatures allow you to find those uncooperative aliens Dyson thought would make the best targets. We don’t even need to find the aliens, in this case, just proof they once existed. That could be a stargate, or a distant planet covered in elemental silicon (geologically unlikely, but technologically great for solar panels), or it could be a Dyson sphere.

Wright’s first big search for Dyson spheres was called Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, or G-HAT. Or, even better, Gˆ (because that’s a G with a little hat on it). The premise was simple: Dyson spheres don’t just absorb energy, they transform it, inevitably radiating some waste as heat which we can see as infrared radiation. So, from 2012 to 2015, Wright and his team looked at about a million galaxies, searching for a Type II civilization on its way to Type III, having ensconced enough of a galaxy’s stars in Dyson spheres that the galaxy might glow unusually bright in infrared. (They surveyed galaxies rather than individual stars because, as Wright writes, “A technological species that could build a Dyson sphere could also presumably spread to nearby star systems,” so it’s fair to think a galaxy with one Dyson sphere may have several, and several would be easier to find than just one. Might as well start there.) None were found, but you know that because you would’ve surely heard about it if Wright’s search had succeeded.

Wright prides himself on the agnosticism of this approach. He doesn’t need aliens to be looking for us or to have any certain sociological impulses. They just need technology. “Technology uses energy,” he told me. “That’s kind of what makes it technology. Just like life uses energy.” That view makes demolishing a Jupiter-sized planet to build a star-encompassing megastructure seem almost comically simple, but Wright doesn’t even see the existence of a Dyson sphere as requiring massive coordination or forethought on the aliens’ part. It is truly, in his view, a low-intensity ask. He compared it to Manhattan, a fair example of a human “megastructure,” a massive, interconnected, artificial system. “It was planned to some degree, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here.’ It’s just every generation made it a little bigger.” He thinks a Dyson sphere or swarm could accumulate in a similar manner. “If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?”

Wright knows the objections: that this imagines a capitalist orientation, a drive to “dominate nature” that is by no means universal, not even among human societies. But for his research to work, this drive doesn’t need to be universal among the stars. It just has to have happened sometimes, enough for us to see the results. As he put it, “There’s nothing that drives all life on Earth to be large. In fact, most life is small. But some life is large.” And if an alien were to come to Earth, they wouldn’t need to see all the small life to know the planet was inhabited. A single elephant would do the trick.

Some hypothetical alien technosignatures might be less definitive. In 2017, astronomers detected a roughly quarter-mile-long rocky object slingshotting through the solar system. They realized that this object, called ‘Oumuamua, came from outside the system — because of its speed and the path it took. It was the first interstellar object ever detected in our system. While hopes or fears that it was an alien probe were not realized, it was a reminder that alien technology could be found closer to home, lurking around our own sun.

“We don’t know that there’s not technology here because we’ve never really checked,” Wright said. “I mean, I guess if they had cities on Mars, we would notice—if they were on the surface, anyway.” But, he pointed out, much of the Earth’s surface doesn’t have active, visible technology. The same could go for the solar system beyond Earth, too. There could be alien probes or debris, like ‘Oumuamua but constructed, moving so fast or so dark that we don’t see them. Maybe there’s an alien base on the dwarf planet Ceres, or buried under the surface of Mars. The lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wright reminded me, was buried just under the surface of the moon. All those ancient interstellar gates sci-fi is fond of have to be found before they can be used. Don’t forget, until 2015, our best image of Pluto was a blurry blob. So much of what we know about even our own solar system is inference and assumption.

Skeptics love to ask Okay, so where is everyone? But we don’t know for sure that they aren’t — or haven’t been — here.

While some of us will invariably make the local news with our stoney hijinks this Thursday, countless more will celebrate the High Holiest of Herbal Holidaze the right way: quietly, responsibly, baked out of our gourds watching Shaw Brothers movies while housing hoagies. Here’s the gear you need to avoid having your mugshot run alongside a graphic reading, “Marijanhuh?” but still thoroughly enjoy this year’s 4/20.

Herbalize It

While the popularity of flower has waned in recent years in favor of more easily-handled edibles and pre-rolled smokables, loose leaf bud remains a cornerstone of the modern cannabis market. If you want to go the traditionalist route, pick up a Santa Cruz Shredder 3-piece grinder and some rolling papers. The Santa Cruz is spacious enough to hold multiple J’s worth of shredded flower, have deeply textured grips to ease strain on your wrists and feature a curved collection bowl that can be cleared with just your fingertip, rather than a straightened paper clip and cursing. Even if you prefer dry herb vaping, that grinder will invariably come in handy as the weed you pack into the chamber will need to be shredded if you want it to heat up evenly and not scorch.

In terms of tabletop dry herb vapes, you really can’t go wrong with the Storz and Bickel Volcano. They’re definitely on the pricey side, with the newest Hybrid model running $700, but Storz and Bickel’s reputation is well earned and a Volcano is the sort of vape that you don’t get rid of so much as pass down to your kids. Heck, the one I bought in 2010 is still going strong even after multiple bag and whip replacements. The most recent versions offer a slew of enticing features including the ability to heat a bowl to its vaporization point in under two minutes — a significant upgrade from the days counting to 100 and back as the bag inflated — as well as iOS and Android apps.

For handheld or portable dry herb vapes, you’ve got a lot more options, both in terms of choices between makes and models and desired feature sets. Basically though, you’re looking for something easy to charge (preferably USB-C) with a robust battery life, something that’s easy to load, use and clean.

The $209 Storz and Bickel Crafty+ takes everything we love about the Volcano — the quality of construction and its ease of use, for example — and shrinks it down into a form factor that fits in your skinny jeans. With a generously proportioned heating chamber, rapid USB-C charging, an associated Android app and one button heating controls, the Crafty+ is a solid vaporizer choice for serious stoners.

The Tera from Boundless is a $250 alternative to the Crafty+ that uses convection air flow to help ensure even heating. It also uses standard 3.7V 18650 Li-ion batteries so picking up spare and replacement parts in the future won’t be a hassle. With a temperature range of 140 - 500 degrees F, the Tera can handle both dry herb and concentrates. You can even swap out the mouthpiece to use the device as a blower for your water pipe to further filter the vapor before inhaling it.

A more refined vaping experience can be had, at a price, with the TinyMight 2. Ranging from 349€ for the basic package to 449€ (~ $380 - $490) for all accessories included, the TM2 is highly customizable with options for everything from the length of the draw tube to the length of the power cable. It’s constructed from stainless steel and aluminum with a solid oak wrapping that not only makes it look nice but acts as a thermal insulator. The TinyMight2 charges via USB-C and, like the Tera, uses 18650 batteries. The TM2 takes 2-5 seconds to fully heat up and can be used either in on-demand or session mode — meaning the device will either heat up only when you draw or it’ll heat up and stay hot for a set amount of time (aka a “session”).

For those of you not looking to spend multiple hundreds of dollars on what essentially amounts to a very fancy hot plate, I suggest the XMAX V3 Pro. It’s always around $90, depending on what vape site you visit and what sales are happening that day (Planet of the Vapes and Vapospy are both generally trustworthy resources). Rather than a block, it’s wand-shaped! Like the Tera, the V3 Pro uses both convection airflows for heating, and can handle both dry herb and concentrate. It uses 18650 batteries and USB-C charging for power. However, the V3 is significantly slower in heating the chamber (around 15-25 seconds) than its alternative but, again, is less than half the price. It’s an expensive 10 seconds.

Speaking of hot plates, the Bowle from Taffee combines two of the five best things you can do with your mouth: drinking and vaping! This unique gadget combines a puck shaped vaporizer for heating loose leaf buds with a 250 or 400mL cup seated on top. With it, you can take rips and sips alternately or simultaneously to meld the flavors and experiences. A one-hour charge is enough to power eight sessions with the convection heater needing just one second at a time to fully heat. They even sell a specialty grinder (for $70, yikes) that will load the ground flower into individual ceramic heating cups.

Vaporize It

Flower is abundant, relatively ubiquitous even, but sometimes you want a little extra punch in your pipe, or maybe you just want to get high without smelling like it. For those instances, we invented concentrates. Whereas flower tops out at around 35 percent THC content, concentrates range anywhere from the mid seventies up to 98 percent THC, so a little goes a long way. As such, the devices vaporizing them are going to be smaller, lightweight, and longer lasting than their dry herb kiln kin but you’re still going to want to look for many of the same amenities — 510 threading, a common charging port style, generous battery capacity, and a straightforward user interface.

The Uni Pro 2.0 from Yocan ticks all those boxes. Full disclosure, this model is my everyday vape and I am rather partial to it. At $50, the Uni Pro 2.0 runs about double than the generic stick batteries you buy at the dispensary, but you get a lot of features for that added expense. Its 650 mAh battery is recharged via USB-C and sufficient to power through a full gram oil cartridge without needing to recharge. The power output runs 1.8 - 4.2V and can be controlled in .1V increments, which the OLED screen displays, along with the battery life, ohm rate and draw duration.

I’m not a huge fan of the magnetic screw-on cartridge adapters that Uni Pro 2 relies on, mostly because I have a habit of absentmindedly throwing them out with the exhausted cart and replacements are $7 a pop. It’s available in a variety of colors (when they’re not sold out) and can accommodate a wide range of cartridge sizes — whether tall and narrow or short and squat. Best of all, the Uni Pro 2 is small enough, heavy enough and blocky enough to not immediately get lost in my pants pocket amidst my keys and loose change.

If you’re looking for something similarly shaped but a bit less blocky and a bit more stylish, you can’t go wrong with the $59 Compass from Vessel. It’s about the same size as an AirPods case and comes in six accent colors. It’s got a 550mAh battery and charges via USB-C. The commands to lock/unlock the device, change the temperature settings or activate the heater unit are all controlled through a single pushbutton on the front of it. It’s discrete, even when there’s a cartridge mouthpiece sticking up like a Nokia antenna, and easily palmable — the kind of classy vape you bring along on a night out on the town.

Vessel also makes a pair of stick vapes, the Core and the ”ruggedized” Expedition Trail Edition. The $39 Core sports a USB-C compatible 260mAh lithium-ion battery and is available in a half dozen colors. You’re going to want to keep the charger nearby if you plan on sessioning with it and you’ll also need to be quick with the five unlock taps, but once the Core gets going, it’s a far and away a superior option to what the dispensaries sell.

Hybridize It

For those of you looking to really stick it to The Man and launch your own self-sustaining backyard grow op, your very first course of action needs to be sitting down and reading through the Marijuana Grower's Handbook by Ed Rosenthal. It contains — and I say this without hyperbole — literally everything you need to know about growing cannabis. In the latest edition of the long-running handbook, Rosenthal has recruited luminaries from across the industry to explain, in almost too much detail (like, down to "the Daily Light Integral equation" levels of detail), every aspect of how cannabis grows, the environmental factors that limit that growth; and the tools, materials, and resources needed to produce weed on either a hobby or commercial scale.

Less than a month after debuting its new suite of Firefly generative AI editing tools, Adobe announced Monday that it is already working on a host of upgrades to further empower its users through Creative Cloud video and audio applications. The additions should be coming to Firefly's beta program later this year.

Built from the company's long-running AI program, Sensei, Firefly is a suite of generative AI models that can both create and transform audio, video, illustrations and 3D models using text prompts in the same way that Dall-E and ChatGPT do. Firefly's features are already available across Adobe's ecosystem including Premiere Pro, Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop, though they're currently only accessible through the closed beta program. 

The new features announced Monday are designed to help professional editors cut down on their drudge work, boosting color levels, inserting placeholder images, adding effects, autonomously recommending b-roll for a given project — simply by typing their ideas into Firefly's AI text prompt and letting the algorithm do its thing. This will include "text to color enhancements," a broad-ranging capability that can adjust the brightness and saturation levels, shift the time of day — even the time of year — using natural language prompts. 

The generative AI features will extend to audio as well, with the capacity to insert background music and sound effects by describing the editor what they want through text. The animated font features that we first glimpsed at last month's debut event are expected to arrive shortly as well as an automated b-roll feature that analyzes the content of the script to generate storyboards and suggest video clips. Most impressive, Firefly will even throw together personalized how-to guides to walk new users through the process of using these features. 

One detail that's often omitted from modern founders myths is whether or not said scion of capitalist success actually invented the thing they're famous for inventing. Just like Elon Musk didn't invent electric vehicles so much as be the first to successfully market them to the American public, Thomas Edison's contributions to the advent of electrified lighting too might be overstated. In the excerpt below from his latest book, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans, Dr. Bill Hammack, YouTube's "The Engineer Guy," recounts the tale of Hiram Maxim, an irrepressible engineer and inventor whose novel filament production method would have made him a household name — had Edison not reportedly made "a clean steal" of his revolutionary technology.   

Sourcebooks Inc

Excerpted from The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans by Bill Hammack, PhD. © 2023 by Bill Hammack, PhD. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.

In November 1880, the reading room of the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, located in the basement of one of the first skyscrapers, glowed with the light of a four-bulb chandelier and six bulbs in fixtures spaced along the walls. An observer characterized this electric light as “very much like that of a first-class oil lamp, steadier than gas, and of a yellow, clear pleasant quality” — nothing like the “ghastly blue” of a “flickering” arc light, nor was there the odor of burning gas; instead, the room’s atmosphere “remain[ed] perfectly cool and sweet.” His only complaint was that the bulbs flickered slightly with every stroke of the engine that powered the generator. This first commercial installation, a spectacular achievement, featured no bulbs manufactured by Thomas Edison, although he had proudly announced his invention of the light bulb only a few months earlier to great press attention. The bulbs at the Mercantile Company were those of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a company driven forward by their irrepressible and energetic engineer, Hiram Maxim. Edison called Maxim’s bulb “a clean steal” of his lamp. Yet Maxim had seventeen patents on incandescent lamps, and his company controlled the patents of several other inventors, also contemporary to Edison. Maxim thought of himself as the inventor of the commercial light bulb. “Every time I put up a light,” he complained, “a crowd would gather, everyone asking, ‘Is it Edison’s?’” This so irritated Maxim, who noted that Edison at the time “had never made a lamp,” that he considering killing “on the spot” the next person to ask him “Is it Edison’s?”

That the first commercialized light bulbs were not Edison’s surprises because we love stories of sole inventors whose spark of inspiration revolutionized the world. They give us narratives that are neat, tidy, and digestible but incomplete. These stories hide the engineering method; they bury the creativity of engineers, smooth over struggles, and sanitize choices that reflect cultural norms. Perhaps no story persists more than Edison and his light bulb, yet Edison was the tail end of a long list of light bulb innovators in a process of invention similar to that of the steam turbine in the next century.

In the forty years before Edison’s first successful prototype, at least twenty people presented, patented, and demonstrated incandescent lamps—using electricity to heat a filament until it glowed. The first recorded attempt was in 1838 (almost a decade before Edison’s birth) by a Belgian inventor whose bulb used a strip of carbon as a filament. A fair assessment of history would call these men inventors of the light bulb comparable to Edison, especially in a world where Edison, the so-called inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was forty years late to the idea of incandescent lighting. But unlike with Edison, we don’t remember the names of these men, because most of their bulbs burned for only a few seconds. They had the necessary but thankless job of creating links in a chain of incremental advances that didn’t yet produce an applicable or reproducible solution to the problem of darkness, which so far could only be dispelled with fire, until Edison created one of the links that did, transforming from method into narrative. Although Edison and his bulb end that length of the chain of innovators, his link was no more an exercise or example of the engineering method than those that came before; it only overcame a circumstantial threshold of usefulness.

In 1878, Edison focused the energy of his staff at the bustling Menlo Park Research Laboratory on finding a long-lasting filament for the incandescent light bulb. The staff worked to the rhythms of Edison, “the central originating and guiding mind and personality,” as one worker noted, describing work there as “a strenuous but joyful life for all physically, mentally, and emotionally.” Edison set the tone with long work hours into the night. He often napped on the workbenches in Menlo Park and ate sparingly in increments of small snacks he thought were better for digestion, although for his workers, he had brought in, often at midnight, hamper baskets loaded with hot dinners of meat, vegetables, dessert, and coffee. But when Edison stood, stretched, hitched up his waistband, and sauntered away, all knew that dinner was over and work should resume.

In the late 1870s, Edison and his staff produced bulbs that looked much like a modern bulb: a glass envelope fastened to a wooden base covered with copper strips, and, at its center, a thin, long, delicate spiral of platinum. Yet these bulbs failed. Some yielded light as bright as a small bundle of today’s Christmas lights for a few hours, but most burned out quickly. As Edison learned, the temperature for the incandescence of platinum wire was near that of its melting point—any fluctuations in the current and the platinum would melt. Edison and his team tested an astonishing array of materials, by some count sixteen hundred types. They tested metals like platinum, iridium, ruthenium, chromium, aluminum, tungsten, molybdenum, palladium, manganese, and titanium; elements that sometimes behaved like metals, including silicon and boron; then a grab bag of materials—cork, wax, celluloid, and the hair from his employees’ beards. After these, his team moved to slivers of wood, broom corn, and paper. Tissue paper covered with lampblack and tar and rolled into a rod glowed astonishingly well and for a good amount of time. Edison refined this idea by “carbonizing” cotton thread, heating it without oxygen until the length of thread was blackened throughout. From this thread, he formed a long filament. On October 21, 1879, a bulb with a filament of this thread, with all the air removed from the glass enclosure, burned for more than half a day. They were approaching the beginning of the commercial light bulb.

Seven months after that bit of carbonized thread showed promise, they tried a piece of bamboo: a six-inch strip burned for three hours and twenty-four minutes at seventy-one candlepower (about the brightness of a standard sixty-watt bulb today). “The best lamp ever yet made,” an Edison associate noted, “here from vegetable Carbon.” From there, Edison’s team tested two hundred species of bamboo until they found a variety that was the best for manufacturing carbon filaments, grown near Yawata, Japan, where Edison is still celebrated with a street named “Edison-dori,” a bust of Edison in the town center, and, near a shrine, a large monument dedicated to Edison. With his specialized bamboo supply and method of manufacturing in place, Edison was ready to light the world, but Hiram Maxim beat him out of the gate.

Maxim’s bulbs, installed at the Equitable Life Building, out-classed Edison’s. “They have a rich golden tint, resembling that of a wax taper,” said one reporter. Another noted that Maxim “has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.” When comparing the lamps, reporters noted that Edison’s had lower brightness than Maxim's, or, when of the same intensity as Maxim’s, they burned out in only a few hours. By Maxim’s own estimate, the filaments in his bulbs could last forty days. The dimness and shorter life of Edison’s bulbs were the same thing: Edison’s bulbs could not tolerate as much current as Maxim’s, so if run at the same current, Edison’s bulbs would burn out quickly, and to make them last longer, Edison’s were run at a lower current and thus were dimmer.

That Maxim could achieve this was unbelievable to Edison’s staff—an outraged member of the Menlo Park staff ranted that it must be apparent to “any sane person that” Maxim’s bulb must be “but a copy” of Edison’s. Surely, thought Edison’s employees, only a well-oiled machine like that of Menlo Park could produce a light bulb. Inside Menlo Park, glassblowers, machinists, engineers, chemists, and physicists churned out inventions like appliances on an assembly line, while Maxim’s ham-handed U.S. Electric Lighting Company struggled to find enough resources to survive; employees thought it likely to shut at any minute, and even its own president described it as “helpless.” Their technical expertise was so low that they could not figure out, as one employee later noted, what “size wire would carry a certain number of lamps without overheating,” adding that “a number of mysterious fires about this time were probably the fruits of our ignorance.” Compared with Edison’s factory-line Menlo Park model, Maxim’s method of invention seemed scattershot.

Maxim was the classic American tinkerer, once describing himself as a “chronic inventor.” Although self-taught—one biographer describes him as “semiliterate”—over his lifetime, he invented an astonishing array of tools and toys. Maxim developed methods to separate metals from their ores, instruments to measure wind velocities, vacuum cleaners, novelty items that produced “illusionary effects”—a rotating sphere with concave paraboloidal floor, mirrors, and a bicycle track, presumably to create the illusion of riding a bike long distances—gear to prevent the rolling of ships, riveting machines, feed water check valves, steam generators, wheels for railroads and tramways, an inhaler to treat bronchitis, boot and shoe heel protectors, hair curling irons, a method for demagnetizing watches, a type of pneumatic tire, a coffee substitute, a method for extinguishing fires in theaters, and most surprising of all, new advertising methods—a rotating sign that works “even in very light airs.” And near the end of his life, he invented the world’s first successful machine gun.

Maxim’s contribution to the light bulb was to improve the manufacture of filaments. Filaments, whether of bamboo or cardboard, as in Maxim’s case, were converted to carbon by heating at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen until the cellulose in the material broke down, leaving a hard carbon skeleton, but uneven carbonization caused thinner sections to become much hotter when lit with an electrical current and burn out more quickly. Maxim’s insight was to place a carbonized filament into a hydrocarbon atmosphere, then pass through it an electrical current that heated the filament to a bright red. The thinner and hotter parts of the filament would break down the vaporous hydrocarbon surrounding them and deposit pure carbon on the filament, building up layers of carbon on the thinner parts and resulting in a filament of uniform thickness and greater life span. As Maxim gloated, “it is absolutely impossible by mechanical means to make a carbon filament that is of uniform resistance” without his patented method, adding that Edison “had to use my process or give up the job.”

Maxim’s attitude was prompted by the rivalry that burned between the many engineers competing in a world eager for the magic of electrical lighting, but it also shows us the problem with crediting any individual with the complete “invention” of any technology. We tend to tell the stories of inventors who, through their unique intellect and drive, produce an equally unique marvel at the climax of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. That is often how this book has told it, out of deference to individual humans’ need to relate to the stories of other individual humans. But the engineering method is uninterested in this “great men” historical framework. It cares only about the accumulated knowledge, heuristics, rules of thumb, intuition, and anything else that drives problems in the direction of solutions as fast as possible, the sum of which, even for a single solution, is beyond unthinkable for a lone person to create themselves. This web of information is so vast, incomprehensibly vast, so we make it comprehensible and moving by telling the stories of individual inventors, even if this distorts the unknowable true web of invention.

Maxim is likely unrecognized as an inventor today because he lacked Edison’s agile self-promotion and because, in a sense, Edison “won” and thus told the story of the light bulb’s invention. But did Edison “invent” a light bulb when his company produced a brilliantly glowing but short-lived electric light? Perhaps. When we think of an invented technology, we typically imply technology that not only exists but is reproducible in a way that can fulfill the needs of those whose problem it solves. That is, it can be manufactured or mass-produced. A handful of working light bulbs in the late 1800s is a marvel, but it doesn’t light the world. In this sense, the invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that can be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone. To tell only a “great man” story hides the contributions of others who were essential to a technology’s development. We can see that in the evolution of the manufacturing techniques of Maxim’s light bulbs: he had on staff an artistic draftsman turned engineer whose contributions to reliable manufacturing have long been overlooked.