Weekend Thoughts - 3.17.18

Image by Marisa04, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The great physicist Stephen Hawking passed away this week at the age of 76. If you're not familiar with his work, it's definitely worth looking into. I first learned about Hawking by reading his book, A Brief History of Time back when I was in college. Most people know who Albert Einstein was, and I'd wager that Hawking was as influential to the study of science as Einstein was in his day. Both men changed the world for the better, and with Hawking's recent death we have truly lost one of the great minds of our civilization.

2. People have been losing their jobs to new technologies for a long time, but the frequency of this phenomenon has been increasing since the dawn of the Internet. Now that we have the opportunity to continue our education online, tech companies have poised themselves to essentially retrain the workers that they are replacing via automation. Online courses can prepare beginners for entry-level jobs in the tech industry in just eight to 12 months. This is one step in the right direction, which will hopefully do at least a little bit to deal with the issue that an estimated 75 million to 375 million workers worldwide will be replaced by automation by 2030. At least for now we can see that it may be possible to retrain entry-level workers to work in the tech industry.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 2.18.17

Image by Lisa Norwood, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. As automation and artificial intelligence continue to replace human workers in various industries, we can expect robots to be doing more and more of the jobs that we have always had people do. Now that news-writing bots are already part of journalism, it's possible that Think Wilder may eventually replace me with a bot. You'll know the switch has happened when articles come out faster, contain more accurate information, and have a better personality. Stay tuned!

2. So what are we going to do as a society to transition into a world where the robots perform so many tasks that large swaths of the country are unemployed? Bill Gates thinks that we should force companies using robots to pay a robot tax, which would slow down the process while still allowing for innovation. It's an interesting concept, and not one that I had come across previously. My first reaction was "Why would we want to slow down innovation in the first place?", but as I thought about it, I realized that we don't have anything in place to deal with the near-sudden widespread unemployment that automation is going to cause. I'm not sure that this is the best way to tackle the problem, but it's a proposition worth considering, and one that may not have been made by anyone other than Gates at this time.

3. Leaving and re-entering the country just got a lot more complicated. Customs Border Patrol has begun asking U.S. citizens re-entering America to hand over their devices and in some cases, passwords to their social media accounts. If you're planning to leave the country (and come back) anytime soon, especially if you are visiting China or Russia during your trip, it would be well worth your while to read through the article linked above for advice on how to get past Customs without giving up your most sensitive information.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 5.30.15

Image by theclevelandkid24, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all. Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Fortune published a piece that explores the jobs that automation will kill next. Careers such as commercial airline pilots, journalists, lawyers, managers, and financial advisors are considered to be in the middle of the difficulty range compared to other jobs. The latest theories about automation predict that middle-skill jobs will be hit the hardest, because employees at the upper-end (engineers and scientists) and lower-end (plumbers and electricians) will be less threatened by automation practices. This article comes at an interesting time for me, as I recently reviewed Marshall Brain's Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future, which describes a future where automated robots eliminate half of the jobs on the market.

2. An excellent article from The Age that starts with the powerful lede, "It would be nice to say that the war on drugs had achieved nothing. The truth is far worse." Author Michael Coulter goes on to explain the current state of the drug war by highlighting the damage the war has done to the world's citizenry and pointing out that the damage from the war is far greater than any potential damage from the drugs themselves.

3. This week, I stumbled across this interesting idea: a chat room for psychedelics. The tagline is "Join psychedelic researchers, therapists, explorers and advocates to discuss...". It hasn't launched yet, and it only taking names and email addresses now, so I can't predict how it will turn out. But I wanted to share it with the Think Wilder audience nonetheless!

4. VICE UK has an in-depth article about synthetic cannabinoids (sometimes referred to as "Spice" or "K2"). Well worth a read for someone interested in the topic, concerned friends or family members, people in the medical profession, and psychonauts.

5. For those of us following the news of US Border Patrol's illegal detainment, search and assault of criminal justice student Jessica Cooke, this article from Reason dives a bit deeper and discusses how the organization is actually used (illegally) as an extension of the country's war on drugs.

6. Maj. Neill Franklin, a 34-year veteran with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Departments, wrote a short piece explaining how the drug war has created more violence and made neighborhoods more dangerous. Franklin is also the executive director of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), an organization consisting of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who speak out against the failures of our existing drug policies.

That's all for this edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Book Review - Manna by Marshall Brain

Marshall Brain (founder of HowStuffWorks) and his novel Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future were recently featured on KMO's C-Realm Podcast. In episode 457: Techno Extortion, KMO and Brain talk about the book as well as the United States' current trajectory with regard to jobs, automation, profitability, and societal well-being. I was intrigued by the conversation and decided to read Manna. Although the book is available for free at the above link, you can also purchase the Kindle version for $0.99, which is what I did.

Manna shows us two very different worlds. Each is possible for us to create (or find ourselves in) from the current world we live in. In the first world, robots begin eliminating human jobs in places like retail stores, fast food restaurants, construction sites, and transportation. The key technology that fuels this is inexpensive computer vision systems, and more than half of the jobs in the United States are eliminated. Tasks like restocking shelves, cleaning bathrooms, and taking out the trash are dictated by a management software called "Manna" that speaks through an earpiece each employee wears while on the job. All human managers are eventually replaced by this software. Without getting too much into detail about this world, it could be described as dystopian, and it certainly seems plausible to me, especially because I have experience working in similar jobs. I could definitely see how the management team could be stripped from the job and replaced by a cheaper, more efficient, less forgiving computer system.

The second world is more of a utopian society, where robots are not in control of the humans. Instead, the humans control the robots and use them to make life easier. People living in this world must agree with the following core principles of that society:

1. Everyone is equal.
2. Everything is reused.
3. Nothing is anonymous.
4. Nothing is owned.
5. Tell the truth.
6. Do no harm.
7. Obey the rules.
8. Live your life.
9. Better and better.

There are drastic differences in economics, transparency, energy usage, ownership, honesty, and life quality between the two worlds. It certainly seems to me like we are headed more in the direction of the dystopian world rather than the utopian world, but in the book's Postscript, Brain mentions that the utopian world is still a possibility for us to manifest.

I enjoyed the book. It's a very quick read, and it is thought-provoking. The writing left a little to be desired, because it seemed a bit over-simplified and repetitive to me. I've tried my best to not give away too much of the plot in this review, because there isn't much plot or character development to find in the book itself. I would definitely suggest this book though, because I imagine that it would be eye-opening for the average person. For me, it painted a stark contrast between the two different roads our global society could take, and highlighted a lot of the current issues that we face.

4/5 Stars. 79 pages.