Category Archives: Science & Technology

Scott Adams: Direct citizen voting

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“Imagine a system that involves direct citizen voting on every issue. But in addition to voting yes or no on a ballot question you can also assign your vote FOR A PARTICULAR TOPIC to any other voter who is open to that assignment. For example, I might cast my own direct vote on simple topics, such as gay marriage, weed, and doctor-assisted dying. I feel I know enough about those issues to be useful.

But if the proposed law is about economic policy, I might want to delegate my vote to Paul Krugman, or whoever I thought had the best thinking on that topic. You could also delegate your vote to your better-informed spouse, a friend, or anyone you would trust making decisions for you. But I would make it illegal to delegate a vote to anyone representing an organization. And I would make it illegal to delegate more than one voter topic to another person. That keeps individuals from becoming too powerful outside their field of expertise.

The beauty of my system is that you never have to wait for elections to improve things. The minute that you hear an expert saying something brilliant on a particular topic, you call up your voting app and assign rights to that expert for all of your votes in the category. If you hear a smarter expert tomorrow, you reassign your vote to that person.”

Humans out at advertising agency

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Marketing communications firm (plans) “to utilize technology-based resources such as software, virtual robots, and media algorithms to create and implement advertising and marketing programs for its clients.” Excerpts below from The Ad Contrarian:

”We will need to keep a few tech people on staff to insure that our systems are functioning well and are properly integrated. But that’s it. Last-century resources like account managers, copywriters, art directors, and media planners — in other words, people — will be replaced by digital resources.”

”We have developed what we call ‘virtual robotics’ that can actually understand a client brief when it is converted into code via a proprietary algorithm we have developed. The robot program then goes online and hunts down previously created advertising and marketing campaigns in similar categories which it ‘borrows’ from — much like a traditional creative team does,” he explained.

I wrote a lot of radio commercials (we called them “spots”) over the years and while I wrote a few good ones, many were of grind-it-out-get-it-on-the-air variety. Yeah, I can imagine software doing those as well as I did.

Radio dial just too small

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podcastsBeen thinking some more about broadcasters lobbying for mobile carriers to turn on the FM receiver chip in phones. Never gonna work. Radio dial just too small. A little back-story:

Since getting my first iPhone several years ago, I’ve always listened to music with earbuds when in the car. The 4Runner didn’t have a good way to interface and I just never bothered when I got the MINI. Apple Music has me listening more these days so I purchased an aux cable to play iPhone music through the MINI speakers.

Lo and behold! The MINI has really good speakers. Way better experience than the earbuds. (Yes, everybody told me that) Anyway, back to the radio dial…

With the unlimited data plan (ATT) on my phone, I can listen to (almost) all the music there is. And the playlists. And the customized “stations”… as well as the half-dozen podcasts I follow.

“Hey, Siri. Podcast. Tech News Today.” Voila!

No radio station can match this. ALL the radio stations can’t match this.

On Not Being There

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A few excerpts from a fascinating article by Rebecca Lemon in The Hedgehog Review:

Almost daily, we encounter people who are there but not there, flickering in and out of what we think of as presence. A growing body of research explores the question of how users interact with their gadgets and media outlets, and how in turn these interactions transform social relationships. The defining feature of this heavily mediated reality is our presence “elsewhere,” a removal of at least part of our conscious awareness from wherever our bodies happen to be.

I recently spent 90 minutes in a video Hangout with +Steve Brown. He was in Tucson and I was here in Jefferson City, MO in a coffee shop. That’s were our respective bodies were but I’m not sure where my awareness or consciousness was. In the cloud? Cyberspace? Somewhere other than that coffee shop. Back to Ms. Lemon’s article:

Mark Carranza—[who] makes his living with computers—has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it… Most thoughts are tagged with date, time, and location.

“clickworkers, gold farmers, porn zappers” – Many of them based in suburban Manila in former elementary schools and other unlikely sites, the content moderators perform the unsavory job of repeatedly adjudicating whether images posted to Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, or other social networking sites are sufficiently offensive to be eliminated from view. Moderators at PCs sit at long tables for hours, an “army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us.” By some estimates, the content-moderating army is 100,000 strong, twice the size of Google’s labor pool, and many of its members have college degrees.

Why the UPS driver runs

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“An American Management Association survey found that 66 percent of US-based employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee e-mail. UPS uses a system, Kronos, under which each of its delivery trucks is equipped with 200 sensors, which feed information back to headquarters about driving speed, seatbelt use, and delivery efficiency. Even trying to cheat the system can hurt the worker. Drivers commonly evade the seatbelt sensor by keeping the seatbelt locked but not strapping themselves in. UPS can claim higher safety compliance even though workers are actually more endangered.”

The Electric Car

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“Gas stations are not massively profitable businesses. When 10% of the vehicles on the road are electric many of them will go out of business.  This will immediately make driving a gasoline powered car more inconvenient.  When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch and so on.  Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck.  Then, there will be a rush to electric cars not seen since, well, the rush to buy smartphones.”

From a blog post by Geoff Ralston

The people formerly known as advertisers

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Media researcher Gordon Borrell says “we’ve reached the end of the Golden Age of Advertising.”

  • 82% of SMBs have established their own media channel in the form of a website or social media page.
  • Since 2007, spending has skyrocketed to the point at which businesses last year spent 72% more on marketing services and promotions than they had spent 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the annual expenditure on local advertising was 22% less than it was a decade ago.
  • “Over the next 12 months, the gap will almost certainly widen to the point that all traditional advertising channels — print, broadcast, outdoor and mail — begin to look like niche support mechanisms to a local businesses’ digital marketing plan.”

Let’s make them better than human

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ex-machina-movieGolly. I don’t know where to begin. I really enjoyed the film Ex Machina but that tells you next to nothing. Certainly the best treatment of AI I’ve seen on screen. There were a few moments reminiscent of Blade Runner. When Rachael realized her childhood memories were implanted; when Roy went to see his creator, Dr. Tyrell. But I found this a fresh and thought-provoking story.

If you’re that guy that kept pointing out why the flux capacitor was just a made up thing and couldn’t be used for time travel, yeah, you’ll probably find lots of _flaws_ in the tech of this movie. And now you know why it took you sooo long to get laid. Given half a chance, I’m quite willing to suspend my disbelief and did so for this movie.

What does it mean to be almost but not quite human? When we have the technology, will we be able to scrape enough ‘goodness’ to create beings better than ourselves?

When I’m really absorbed in a story I sometimes forget to breath for a few seconds. I was a little light headed by the end of Ex Machina.

The Simulation Game

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“Each individual believes that he or she is living in a world that really exists. The point of SG is to provide clues to the pieces that this is not so and see when they realize they are in a simulation. We considered inserting some obvious clues into their stream of experience, such as sky writing that says “This all a simulation—you are being fooled”, but that was deemed a bit too obvious, even taking into account the limited intelligence of the pieces. To make the game more interesting, and to net the greatest gambling revenues, we decided to make the clues subtler, though of course any of our species would recognize them immediately. We have therefore arranged it so that the world they experience is incoherent and unintelligible—quite literally impossible. This is not so clear on the surface, but in the game it is meant to be gradually revealed, as they apply their limited intelligence to the appearances.”

More about The Simulation Game »

Scott Adams: Robots

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“The age of robotics could replace religion, at least for the young. We will come to see our bodies as moist robots working according to the rules of physics, not magical beings with invisible souls that guide our actions. In other words, when robots start acting exactly like humans, humans will feel more like robots at the same time. It probably works both ways. At some point in human history – and I think today’s kids will live to see it – humans and robots will be working together, living together, and probably dating.”