Ancient Logic

Check out this article for a good summary of all of the pressures on employment coming from technology and automation. I particularly appreciated Jon Evans' efforts here to connect the dots between the loss of employment with the first wave of efforts to deal with the problem: Basic Income or Negative Income Tax. Some writers have taken a dystopian view of this trend, others a utopian, but Evans suggests that the future has already happened. Only instead of happening in America and other developed countries, he suggests post-work societies exist in Brazil, Russia, and India. Also great is the list of links which is a veritable who's who on this topic. Enjoy!

You might remember Watson as the black box digital Jeopardy champion from a few years back. You might have forgotten that after leaving showbiz, IBM's natural language-using super-computer turned to oncology, providing diagnosis based on user answers to questions. Now Watson is moving into the customer service industry , having been tapped to provide answers to chat, telephone, and email questions for Royal Bank of Canda, Nielson (television ratings), among other companies. Because I do not work in a field that Watson could easily move into (for now), I can look at this development with a certain degree of dispassion. But here is more evidence that one huge industry previously dependent on human labor is about to be seriously disrupted. The point isn't that millions of telecommunications workers will suddenly be unemployed but rather that millions more will never be hired, their positions taken up by 'good-enough' intelligence of Watson.

Let's talk about real problems. Not Benghazi. Not the IRS. Not even the deficit. Lets talk about the future. You see, the mainstream media is just beginning to awaken to the fact that something has changed over the past decade. There are no longer enough jobs for everyone and the number of employed people keeps decreasing a little bit each year. This has been happening since the turn of the century and it promises to accelerate. Partly this stems from the nature of the workforce. Demographically, we're getting older. As people live longer, a greater percentage of the population is retired or on disability. But a share of the blame goes to technology. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the introduction of automation and mass production still required labor. Someone had to operate the increasingly sophisticated machines or design future machines. But we are reaching the cusp of a great wave of change. Machines are beginning to design other machines and smart...

Yesterday I took part in a protest over Aaron Swartz 's unjust prosecution at the hands of US attorney Carmen Ortiz. I had followed this story this winter as the details emerged of an obvious case of prosecutorial over-reach. I hope that Swartz' death will ultimately provide the impetus to reexamine some of the unbalanced priorities in the Federal judicial system, particularly the amount discretion allowed prosecutors in deciding who in this society gets treated as criminals. Aaron Swartz used the unsecured MIT networks to download a massive amount of legal documents from the online database JSTOR and make them available on peer to peer networks. JSTOR declined to press charges, but federal prosecutors Carmen Ortiza and Stephen Haymann ultimately levied the full weight of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against him, charging him with crimes that could have resulted in a million dollar fine and up to 35 years in jail. Aaron Swartz' 'crime' was paying for...

The video below was released by the Air Vehicles Directorate, a branch of the US Airforce, to promote the concept of swarms of small drones released into an urban environment to conduct surveillance and assassination missions. Other than the ornithopter manner of the drones hovering and darting through restricted airspace, there isn't much here that hasn't been seen in other drone models. What really makes this striking is to see all of these elements, the remote monitoring, the use of man-made power sources such as power lines, the visual navigation systems and lethal payloads, placed into something small and ubiquitous. Present drone technology has essentially produced remotely piloted airplanes, small and relatively expendable, but not that many steps removed from a piloted airplane. But the notion of militarized swarms hiding in plain sight, living off of existing power systems to me seems a very radical notion, and one I haven't really seen fully explored i...

This is sort of a go-to topic for me, but this article on Awl, neatly sums up a lot of hunches I have about the effect popular conceptions of the future have on the actual way futures play out. Boiling the article down to its point, is our present generation of touch screen UI reflective of what actually works in manipulating a touchscreen or is it the product of design costumers expecting what looks good on film to match what works in the real world. http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/how-minority-report-trapped-us-in-a-world-of-bad-interfaces?1

No particular structure for today's posting, just a few things that have drawn my notice. Read this article from the Daily Mail. Now, are you with me? This is more like it. First of all, the idea of capturing asteroids and bringing them into Earth orbit is an important step for any would-be space colonizing civilization. The possibility of a stepping stone for exploring the other inner system planets is even better. But let's not lose sight of the basic idea. Step 1: waltz over to a sizable space rock. Step 2: While talking softly to it, take a big trash bag, lasso it and bring it back to cislunar space. Step 3: Wash, rinse, and repeat. As I understand it, the problem with space exploration currently is getting material and personnel out of the home world's gravity well. Basically every project has to be built to pass through several radically different physical environments just to complete a task. It's sort of like if early explorers had to explore the New Wo...

My friend Matt has recently become interested in the Google Augmented Reality game Ingress. I knew about as much as anyone else does by virtue of the promotional video: But apparently there's a lot more to it. At the moment the game is in alpha, which in typical Google SOP means you have to get an invite to play the game. Atypically, acquiring an invite is less about finding someone you know who has it (ala Google+) and more like passing an audition. Basically, you can wait at one of the metered portals for an invite or send a cool picture, tagged with "Ingress" or one of the other popular hashtags for the game. This is my friends work: https://plus.google.com/101002632394819121609/posts/XxQHHo6HEeQ So it appears he was successful, nice work! The actual play clips I've seen make it seem like a combination of geo-caching and Layers and also a bit of a road hazard, but still...very interesting. Seriously I'd check out all four of the links below, t...

One thing that I certainly appreciated about Red Mars was its principled refusal to over-explain. Enormously complex and esoteric features of terraforming, interplanetary economics and life support were tossed off casually in the novel with nary a word said about them. Two technologies that I found particularly interesting (mostly because I hadn't actually heard of them before) were air miners and moholes. I thought I spend a posting looking at both of them.    Air mining is very possible and is in fact one of the central things allowing the Mars Direct plan to function. Basically the idea is that a lander on the moon will be able to process the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to create consumables for a lift-off from the planet. Producing propellants is easy once hydrogen and enough heat have been applied (Sabatier's reaction.) However, in fairness, the air miners described in Red Mars are somewhat more flexible harvesting not just volatiles but also water, ar...

Had an hour to watch the season opener for "American Horror Story" last night. I was very nearly blown away with the awesomeness of this series. Unapologetically, I decided to care about this show after an interview with its creator on NPR talked up Jessica Lange as an actress. She is awesome, so I thought I needed to give the show the five minute test. Five minutes became the whole show very quickly. The character writing is top-notch, Jessica Lange plays a nun, Sister Jude, that showcases her talent for slipping around the edges of expectation. The second season of this show centers around a single story set in the 1960s in a Massachusetts Mental Asylum run by the Catholic Church. One concern I had about the show was whether or not Sister Jude would be another Nurse Ratchet type, a malevolent portrait of female abuse of power. I'm please to say the first episode obliterated those concerns. Sister Jude is a complicated monster, in one episode she ruthlessly commits a ...

Sweeeeeet! Christmas in September has finally arrived. I'm still waiting for my update to finish but I'm excited by the improvements. There's no way I'm getting the new iPhone so this is the next best thing. My pick for best feature I haven't tried yet? Turn-by-turn navigation. It's the one thing I really miss from my old Droid. The promise of Siri improved is also intriguing but I'll believe it when I see it.