One of my side gigs involves watching and reviewing TV programs. One program that I recently reviewed was one I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did: an interview with a man who created a ramen-themed amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. It's worth a watch, even if you're not a foodie.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

The prophet in your pocket — A sobering musing on what the digital tools that we use everyday are, at their core, actually designed to do. Baked into that design is nothing that truly benefits us.

From the article:

The surveillance machinery we have built exists at the service of a prediction machinery. We collect so much data to monetise it, and we monetise it by using it to predict, or by selling it to others who want to use it for the purposes of prediction. But efforts to predict people’s behaviour are intrinsically linked to efforts to control it, because the easiest way to predict the future is to influence it; preferably to determine it.

The Warehouse, in Plain Sight — A dive into the history and constantly-morphing uses of those sprawling buildings that you see off highways, and the ways in which their use has changed and how they've changed society. And not all of that has been benign or beneficial to most of us.

From the article:

[T]hey would transform warehousing into a consumer business. Wherever they found low land costs, proximity to urban markets, and large numbers of underemployed workers, they would build industrial parks, logistics centers, and retail boxes. And, thus, the warehouse was reborn — as a “fulfillment center.”

If an AI chatbot misleads you, who is to blame? — It's all too easy to blame the user (and AI boosters do that constantly) when it comes to the crap that AI spits out, but it's about time tech companies took more responsibility for what they and their products spit out.

From the article:

We are rapidly moving to a world where AI-powered chatbots will be at the other end of all sorts of corporate communications channels. It makes no sense for a company to be able to honor its statements when it wants to and disavow them when it doesn’t.

Einstein’s Miracle Year — Most of us, I'm sure, view Einstein as just a physicist whose reputation was cemented by his breakthroughs published in the titular miracle year. Yet there were more facets to him, which are too often glossed over or overlooked.

From the article:

Einstein has much to say not only about his philosophy of physics but also about his own style of thinking and what he several times refers to as his ‘religion’. At the root of this weren’t any supernatural beliefs, but rather reverence and wonder. ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience,’ he writes in ‘What I Believe’, from 1930, ‘is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’