JF Ptak delves into a very modern topic of discussion through the lens that the long shadow that innovation has cast over jobs-security and the notion that robots will create mass-redundancy with musicians, once the mainstay of entertainment with live, orchestral accompaniment, finding themselves shoved aside with the advent of talkies and canned- or robotic-soundtracks punctuating the experience.
Colluding with the advent of telephony that made written correspondence a less attractive means of communication, various leagues and lobbies back in the 1930s rallied on behalf live bands—though there’s no incipient doubt yet of the humanity of the composition, just perhaps the emotional quotient of the performance. A Mechanical Turk is a human employed, at a pittance, to perform repetitive tasks that could be automated—thus stealing jobs from robots—but given the circumstances, it’s more efficient to have a person perform it, like squirrels running in wheels to operate a complex juggernaut.
Saturday 8 October 2016
mechanical turk or singing for one’s supper
soda derby
A new front has opened in the Cola Wars, as Boing Boing reports, in the form of rewarding dieticians to endorse the benefits of drinking sugary concoctions—or at least disparage the notion of taxing soda as sort of a gateway sin-tax for controlling all sorts of behaviour and choice. While this practise is undoubtedly revolting and ought to be brought to light (for shame, disreputable nutritionists), I think being subversive on social media pales in comparison to the way that soft-drinks are marketed almost as sacramental wine in Central and South America. What do you think? Most peddlers of patent-medicines were run out of town long ago, yet the biggest ones remain.
red giant/white dwarf
If marauding black holes, undetected meteorites or hostile alien invasions weren’t enough to worry about, astronomers have detected a distant, dying binary star system whose gravitational waltz manages to periodically eject planet-sized blobs of super-hot plasma into their solar system at trajectories of over one-tenth the speed of light.
Although surely it would be catastrophic for any residents of V Hydrรฆ’s exoplanets to have cowered in the knowledge that once every eight years (or equivalent cycle) a deadly blast comes from the heavens in a civilisation ending event for at least the last four hundred years (if they managed to dodge it at all and aren’t the architects of this Death Star or this cosmic defence shield themselves), this stellar canon is too far away to threaten Earth.
the way ahead
As the brilliant Kottke informs, Barack Obama has written a thoughtful letter to his successor on crucial areas of “unfinished business in economic policy.”
Confronted by questions of America’s place in the world buffeted on all sides by anxieties and insecurities over globalisation and the quickening pace of change, which makes many yearn nostalgically for a time and a place that never existed (or at least we’d never want to return to, given all the trade-offs), the incumbent was prompted to recognise that many of these fears were waylaid—not rooted in prosperity and security alone, but by way of preamble was rather hijacked by division and disengagement, looking back (among others) to the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. Obama admonishes his successor that America’s stance can still be a force of good, globally, and America must continue to craft and enforce laws and regulations that will decrease the income disparity between the richest and the poorest, restore innovation and mobility of opportunity and build a stronger foundation that includes a sufficient infrastructure and legal framework that prevents loopholes and the incentivising of profits at the expense of the exploiting the work-force or environment. Read the entire letter on The Economist at the link up top.
Friday 7 October 2016
bombshell or weekend project
