5 Intriguing Things
1. These future scenarios are not implausible enough.
"Ten years after the introduction of Google’s self-driving car, it still shows ads for businesses in other cities. Everyone complains, but we’d be terrified if the ads were too good. There’s a mutual interest to retard the platform. You want a dumb ad network so you can believe Google doesn’t know too much. Google wants it to seem dumb so they can keep some knowledge for themselves. After watching a 15-second YouTube ad for bail bonds, the car starts driving you to the Google grocery store without you telling it you needed milk. When you arrive, the car makes you sing the grocery store’s jingle to unlock the doors." (frankchimero.com)
2. Useful data doesn't just appear.
"So, how would you build an ironclad case that women are disregarded on-screen and behind the camera? You’d have to look at the most popular movies, rigorously code each one, and inventory scores of writers and directors, hundreds of producers and thousands of characters — all the way from James Bond down to Barista No. 4. It would be an extraordinary effort just to prove what many already intuit. And even after investing hundreds of hours, there’s no guarantee that people with the power to change anything in Hollywood would take notice. That’s the mission and modus operandi of Stacy Smith and her team of researchers at the Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative..." (fivethirtyeight.com)
3. In 2014, literary magazines provide "terrifying robot updates."
"This is a video of a swarm of robots coordinated by a drone. This is a video of a swarm of robots coordinated by a drone. This is a video of a swarm of robots coordinated by a drone." (thenewinquiry.com)
"The wet-plate collodion process involves a huge number of manual steps: cutting the glass or metal plate; wiping egg-white along its edges; coating it with collodion; making it light-sensitive by dunking it in silver nitrate; loading it into a “dark slide” which is inserted into the camera; taking the picture; then processing it, which is rather like printing a black-and-white image, before the plate dries out. You have about 15 minutes to do everything. This is why photographers in the 19th century had to take chemistry labs with them everywhere, in black tents. There are a lot of steps, and a lot of things to go wrong. It’s truly amazing that people managed to photograph anything!" (mortalmuses.com)
"One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. Aliens who still believe in hoarding money and material acquisitions, like the Ferengi, are viewed as barbaric anachronisms." (peterfrase.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
communism. In a general (philosophic) sense, any system of social organization in which all property belongs to the community, i.e. is held in common; thus Brook Farm was an experiment in communism. Russian Communism is a system of social organization based on revolutionary Marxism as developed by Lenin & the Bolshevik party in the USSR, in which all economic, social, & cultural activity is conducted by a single self-perpetuating party (i.e. a totalitarian state). It regards history as a class war eventually to result in a universal victory of the proletariat. See also SOCIALISM.
+ It's hard to believe Brook Farm was an off-hand reference at this time, but I guess it was?
Anyway, a great book that includes the Brook Farm experiment is A History of American Socialisms. It also contains one of my favorite passages about the tendency of people with a certain politics to think certain things about technology and land. Keep in mind, this was written in 1870:
Judging by our own experience we incline to think that this fondness for land, which has been the habit of Socialists, had much to do with their failures. Farming is about the hardest and longest of all roads to fortune: and it is the kind of labor in which there is the most uncertainty as to modes and theories, and of course the largest chance for disputes and discords in such complex bodies as Associations. Moreover the lust for land leads off into the wilderness, "out west," or into by-places, far away from railroads and markets; whereas Socialism, if it is really ahead of civilization, ought to keep near the centers of business, and at the front of the general march of improvement. We should have advised the Phalanxes to limit their land-investments to a minimum, and put their strength as soon as possible into some form of manufacture. Almost any kind of a factory would be better than a farm for a Community nursery. We find hardly a vestige of this policy in Macdonald's collections. The saw-mill is the only form of mechanism that figures much in his reports. It is really ludicrous to see how uniformly an old saw-mill turns up in connection with each Association, and how zealously the brethren made much of it; but that is about all they attempted in the line of manufacturing. Land, land, land, was evidently regarded by them as the mother of all gain and comfort. Considering how much they must have run in debt for land, and how little profit they got from it, we may say of them almost literally, that they were "wrecked by running aground."
How Uniformly an Old Saw-Mill Turns Up