As one person in the CNBC video below points out, there’s something almost magical about watching airships in flight… sort of the inverse of what you feel when someone says, “dirigible,” which I swear makes me think of required safety trainings, possibly involving protective gear. So I’ve paid attention to the articles here and there, now and then, that say airships might be making a comeback, including ones specifically to haul freight. And then, I…
Back in 1983, prolific writer Isaac Asimov was asked to imagine what the world would be like well into the 21st Century: 2019 to be precise. Now, considering that much of his prolific writing was science fiction, it’s well worth reading. Remember, this is the guy who wrote the Foundation series which had the field of “psychohistory” that was able to predict future trends. I found his predictions to be prescient in some aspects and…
Sean Illing has an interview in Vox with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey about his work on tackling aging. Aubrey de Grey, whose prodigious beard is dwarfed by his prodigious research ambitions, famously believes that combating aging is an engineering problem. In other words, medical therapies can be developed and can be worked on now given our current scientific understanding of aging damage. I remember first learning about the work of Dr. de Grey when he and others set up…
I’ve been reading and commenting a decent amount about automation this year, enough to make it seem inevitable. A popular topic with journalists and feature writers has been the impending automation of transportation which I noted back in May. Just recently, Vox ran another article about self-driving trucks and pending unemployment. As the topic appears to be developing into a “future trend trope,” I was very intrigued to learn about the work of Robert Gordon, which Vox also…
I’ve been following various articles about basic income (or Universal Basic Income – UBI) as I find it an intriguing potential solution as we trundle towards ever-greater automation in every aspect of the economy. Matthew Yglesias over at Vox writes about how UBI could tackle poverty — and indeed for some conservative and libertarian proponents of UBI, its potential to tackle poverty and related ills more efficiently than other social programs is one of its appeals. Ezra Klein…
A week or so ago, I linked to an article in Vox about the self-driving car and how its wide use will change transportation as we know it. This article, also from Vox, goes into how three different “disruptors” to transportation will really shake up Detroit. As the title suggests, it’s more focusing on Silicon Valley/tech companies shaking up Detroit/car companies, but it follows on some of the same themes, especially where self-driving cars are…
One of the reasons I’ve become more interested in learning about basic income and future potential economic models has been what appears to be the growing automation of everything. In other words, we’ve moved beyond automating factory and manufacturing processes (though we still automate that and refine that automation), and into automating service and analytical processes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the race to implement the self-driving car, because when the self-driving car…
Following up on my post last week about robots and the law, I read a piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Wired about a robot hotel. Of course it’s in Japan.
Anyone familiar with some of Isaac Asimov’s classic robot stories knows they are full of intriguing “what if?” scenarios. Well, now we’re at the cusp of these “what if?” scenarios being “so, when this happens next week…” scenarios. What will we do then? Ryan Calo explores this in an article from last month. Short story ideas are a-brewing.