The transformation to robot-led work is at once a threat and an opportunity to both devotees of the free market and socialism. New production technologies threaten to eliminate some jobs and make others more precarious, while delivering higher profits to owners of the means of production. But what if those same technologies could be used to usher in an era of unprecedented mass liberty?
Category: ideas
France And The Roots Of Nationalism
If French revolutionaries questioned the sovereign authority of their king within their borders, they also implicitly undermined the claim of any monarch to the territory within theirs. No longer should a country be passed down as property, within a family, much less won or lost in war. Just as the people were becoming the final arbiter of political decisions within France, so too, this new logic implied, the people ought to determine the title and status of the territory where they lived.
Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Really Be Able To Make Art?
Plato argued that “the true, the good, and the beautiful” are all things that have value in themselves. Beauty has a value in its own right, not because it serves some other purpose. We do good for its own sake, and so on. In order for a machine to make its own fine art, it needs to satisfy Plato’s dictum, and create without any utilitarian purpose. The open question is whether machines will ever be able to do so.
The World Of Afro-Futurism Goes Way Beyond ‘Black Panther’ – Here’s A Primer
The term comes from a 1994 essay, and it applies to everything from the fiction of Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor to the music of Janelle Monáe and the recent Jay-Z video “Family Feud” (directed by Ava DuVernay). Basically: Afro-futurism “refers to an aesthetic that infuses science fiction and fantasy with cultures of the African diaspora. It shakes up our preconceived notions of history and race by envisioning an often utopic future shaped by black technological innovation.”
Malls Not Only Aren’t Terrible, But They Saved The Suburbs From Themselves
Look, they were just better than sprawl. Truly. “The mall is for shopping. It sounds idiotic to say, or tautological at least. Of course the mall is for shopping. But more specifically, it gives shopping a specific place. The mall separated commerce into its own, private lair, and it did so just as commercialism was running rampant and out of control in the progress-fueled mid-century.”
Why Is U.S. Culture Still So Obsessed With Zombies?
Author Justina Ireland has a theory: “Every day is a new and terrible terror coming at you from the news, and it’s just nonstop. … I think people are feeling overwhelmed. And that’s a great metaphor for a zombie invasion. Like, that is the iconic scene for a zombie invasion, a horde coming to overwhelm a town or a mall or a handful of survivors.”
Silicon Valley Is Great At Tech, Not So Much On Social Theory
“Silicon Valley tech companies draw on innovative technical theory but have yet to really incorporate advances in social theory. The inattention to such knowledge becomes all too apparent when algorithms fail in their real-life applications – from automated soap-dispensers that fail to turn on when a user has dark brown skin, to the new iPhone X’s inability to distinguish among different Asian women.”
Confabulation: Why People Make Up Stories To Explain Things
“When we confabulate, we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story. As we are not aware that our story is fictional, this is very different from a lie: we have no intention to deceive. So in confabulation there is a mismatch between what we aim to do (tell a true story) and what we end up doing (tell a fictional story). We tend to confabulate when we are asked to explain our choices because we don’t always know the factors responsible for our choices. Yet, when asked why we made a choice, we offer an explanation.”
There’s Nothing Smart About “Smart” Cities So Stop Saying It
The cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital.
What Makes Humans Special? Our Ability To Automate Things
“As a species, we have built cities and crafted stories, developed cultures and formulated laws, probed the recesses of science, and are attempting to explore the stars. This is not because our brain itself is uniquely superior – its evolutionary and functional similarity to other intelligent species is striking – but because our unique trait is to supplement our bodies and brains with layer upon layer of external assistance. This provides us with a depth, breadth and permanence of mental and physical capability that no other animal approaches. Humans are unique because we are complex, and we are complex because we are the beast that automates.”