What are your favorite websites?
I fall down the YouTube rabbit hole more than I’d like to admit.
PROMPT: Favorite Websites
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Category Archives: technology
PROMPT: Moon
Nothing. My philosophy is that if I need technology to function flawlessly every second to keep me alive, I don’t need to be in that place.
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PROMPT: Alternative Career Path
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
At this point, it would need to be something AI / robots won’t possibly be able to do better, faster, cheaper in the near term. This leaves jobs for which one’s humanity is a central part of the job. Unfortunately, I suck at many aspects of being a human. Maybe I’ll become a robot and beat them at their own game.
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PROMPT: Without a Computer
Your life without a computer:
what does it look like?
I imagine like it does when I go on long hikes, and have no access to computer or internet. i.e. Mostly blissful with the occasional bleak thought that the world might be ending without one’s awareness.
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PROMPT: Topics
I’d like to know more about the capabilities and limitations of AI, a rabbit-hole that I have only recently stumbled upon, but which I am tumbling down hard. Particularly, how to best use it for language acquisition as I am currently learning Chinese and would like to increase my literacy so I can open myself up to a whole new world of books.
I’m also curious about pratfalls and physical comedy all of a sudden.
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BOOK: “The Future of Humanity” by Michio Kaku
The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth by Michio KakuMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Author Booksite
As the title suggests, this is one of the books for which theoretical physicist Michio Kaku dons his futurist cap to speculate about what is to come. Other of his books that might be included in this “series” are: Visions, Physics of the Future, The Future of the Mind, and Physics of the Impossible. This particular book focuses on how humanity will spread beyond the planet (and, perhaps, beyond the universe) to survive the (probably distant, but – also – inevitable) threats to the species. While there are other topics discussed, such as the search for immortality and transhumanism, those topics are often framed as necessities of interstellar expansion.
As one would expect of a physicist, the book is highly focused on the physics of the subject. There is little discussion of the psychological difficulties, nor of biological issues such as the fact that humanity is not so lone wolf as we think, and taking off to other planets and living in space without the Earthly life we are interdependent on would involve challenges we have difficult fathoming. All of the challenges that are usually treated with handwaves in science fiction are also handwaved off here.
The book is fun and interesting reading. It’s probably more insightful of science fiction than of our future, but that doesn’t make it less compelling. The seven years since this book was published have seen a lot of change, and there may be a book on this subject that has more of a finger on the pulse, but I still enjoyed reading it. [The downside of writing about the future, even with a focus on the distant future, is that one risks becoming obsolete rather quickly.]
If you’re interested in how humanity might survive into the future, I’d recommend this book. If you enjoy popular science and / or science fiction, you’ll probably find it intriguing.
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DAILY PHOTO: Scenes from the Air Force & Air Defense Museum, Hanoi
PROMPT: Profession
Nurse. I think it takes a tremendous level of humility and compassion. Also, I suspect it may be among the last handful of human jobs (as we know them now) to still exist once AI-robots start doing pretty much all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans. I think long after our doctors are machines, we will have human nurses.
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PROMPT: Alternate Universe
There are flying cars here. I fear my death will be by chucked beer bottle.
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PROMPT: Modern Society
In short, I think we need to foster emotional intelligence and not just academic intelligence, and we need to rebuild social interaction in a super-tribal world (i.e. a world too big for everyone to know everyone else.) [But do the latter without the xenophobia.]
To elaborate:
First, I think we need some true coming-of-age experience that facilitates a sense of self-empowerment. This would not just be collecting envelopes of cash and dancing a dance or reciting a prayer, but something more akin to being dropped in the woods for a week. Of course, this would require engaged parenting and skill acquisition and not just leaving kids with video games and social media. It seems like a lot of our present problems result from people with no sense of empowerment or the emotional intelligence that comes therefrom. Such people may have passed all the tests but still have “imposter syndrome” and the like.
Second, we need some sort of way to build tribal-scale groups in which people interact with a small group of others repeatedly — in person and face-to-face. The challenge is that this needs to be done without increasing xenophobia, which is already trending the wrong way. I think there is a problematic tendency to be virtually engaged but not personally engaged with others in humanity. Even in I, who am intensely introverted, the social impulse remains, but we live in a world where people can successfully dropout.
Some people get one or both of these experiences in any number of ways, but it seems like an ever-increasing segment of the population lacks confidence (even if they had a 4.0 gpa the whole way through their formal education,) and lacks human interaction (even if they have 2000 social media “friends.”)
Tiger Riding for Beginners 