Month: June 2016

“Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open. It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

Children of Arkadia

I read Children of Arkadia, by Darusha Wehm, over the weekend. This was a fascinating book. The setting is a classic of science fiction: a bunch of idealistic settlers embark on creating an idealized society in a space station colony. There are 2 unique twists: the artificial general intelligences that accompany them have, in theory, equal rights and free will as the humans. There are no antagonists: no one is out to sabotage society, there’s no evil villain. Just circumstances.

Darusha does an excellent job exploring some of the obvious and not-so-obvious conflicts that emerge. Can an all-knowing, super intelligence AI ever really be on equal footing with humans? How does work get done in a post-scarcity economy? Can even the best-intentioned people armed with powerful and helpful technology ever create a true utopia?

Children of Arkadia manages to explore all this and give us interesting and diverse characters in a compact, fun to read story. Recommended.

Do we need to jail animals?

zoos are still prisons, at the end of the day. can we do better?

Maybe we don’t need to jail animals. Maybe we just need to improve our ability to observe them in situ. There’s still plenty of open space that is, or could be, conserved. And we’re getting really good at surveillance! Let’s put our new skill to a different use. Fly cameras over areas of wildlife parks inaccessible to tourist vehicles. Enable online visitors to adopt and follow individual animals and their groups. Make it possible for anyone to have the sort of experience Jane Goodall did. The drone cameras sound creepy, but unlike the vehicles that carry tourists through those parks, the drones will keep getting smaller and more unobtrusive.