{"id":6678,"date":"2020-01-30T18:46:45","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T18:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/?p=6678"},"modified":"2020-01-31T00:02:38","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T00:02:38","slug":"recent-readings-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/recent-readings-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Readings 14"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The emergence of YouTube sites that provide virtual friendship, companionship, and cater to loneliness. <a href=\"https:\/\/thewalrus.ca\/how-youtube-gives-us-love-without-the-messiness\/?ref=briefingday.com&amp;utm_source=briefingday.com&amp;utm_medium=email\">Link.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span data-offset-key=\"3pvdk-0-0\"><span data-text=\"true\">The Economist interviewed an AI to ask it about the future of AI. It gave coherent answers. But they weren&#8217;t what the AI thought. The answers it gave\u00a0were what the AI thought the <em>internet<\/em> thought. Still, impressive. <a href=\"https:\/\/worldin.economist.com\/article\/17521\/edition2020artificial-intelligence-predicts-future\">Link<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Science has not destroyed religion. <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/ideas\/why-religion-is-not-going-away-and-science-will-not-destroy-it\">Link<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Important uncertainty: the untested legality of streaming video games, particularly for profit (see Twitch). <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/2018\/01\/to-stream-or-not-to-stream-how-online-streaming-game-videos-exist-in-an-ip-world\/\">Link.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span data-offset-key=\"6m9h-0-0\"><span data-text=\"true\">Innovation and discoveries are becoming more expensive because the easy ones have already been found. Future innovations will cost more. <a href=\"https:\/\/voxeu.org\/article\/ideas-aren-t-running-out-they-are-getting-more-expensive-find\">Link<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-offset-key=\"5q81h-0-0\"><span data-text=\"true\">Pure Gibsonian future<\/span><\/span><span data-offset-key=\"5q81h-2-0\"><span data-text=\"true\">: Red state American farmers hacking their tractors with Ukrainian pirateware. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/xykkkd\/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware\">Link<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Universal translation by AI will increase global prosperity. When eBay improved its translation functions it increased their commerce by 11 percent. Imagine what prosperity will come from earbuds that give instant, free, real time language translation to all workers. <a href=\"http:\/\/news.mit.edu\/2019\/machine-learning-sales-ebay-translation-1220\">Link.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Bill Gibson had some interesting things to say <a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/tracking-realitys-fuckedness-quotient-an-interview-with-william-gibson\/\">in this interview<\/a> about his new book Agency.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I have a nagging suspicion that evolution (a wholly random process, though too few of us understand that) has left most of us unable to grasp the idea of an actual apocalypse being possibly of several centuries\u2019 duration. The jackpot began one or two hundred years ago, it seems to me. I myself can dimly recall a world before utterly ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. Toys were of metal, wood, rubber. Styrene was as exotic as Gore-tex, briefly. I\u2019m yet to discover any record of a culture whose imagined apocalypse was a matter of centuries. I doubt anyone has ever stood out on a street corner wearing a sandwich board reading, \u201cTHE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END IN A FEW HUNDRED YEARS.\u201d Even before we became as aware as some of us now are of climate change, and of the fact that our species has inadvertently caused it, we seemed to be losing our sense of a capital-F Future. Few phrases were as common throughout the 20th century as \u201cthe 21st century,\u201d yet how often do we see \u201cthe 22nd century\u201d? Effectively, never.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The emergence of YouTube sites that provide virtual friendship, companionship, and cater to loneliness. Link. The Economist interviewed an AI to ask it about the future of AI. It gave coherent answers. But they weren&#8217;t what the AI thought. The &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/recent-readings-14\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6678"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6693,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678\/revisions\/6693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}