- Are we losing the art of telephone conversation?
The number of calls made dropped for the first time in 2017. It’s not a huge drop – 1.7% – and the figure may be misleading since calls made on WhatsApp and Facebook weren’t counted. Three-quarters of people still believe that voice calls are important. But that’s not as many – 92% – as the number who value their phones mainly for internet access.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/03/phone-calls-becoming-lost-art
- What James Gunn’s firing says about the rising stakes of social media
Gunn’s tweets were up to a decade in the past, while Barr’s tweet reflected her current thinking and displayed actual racism, as opposed to tasteless humor. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be learned from similarities between the two, namely: If you want to keep your job, don’t tweet anything that could possibly be construed as controversial. In the case of both Barr and Gunn, their employers’ response was, essentially, “Shut This Down Immediately, Sort Out The Details Later,” with the emphasis on damage control over details. (The details were taken care of eventually; ABC later backtracked on canceling Roseanne, announcing the replacement series The Conners in late June, and similarly, there are now reports that Marvel might consider rehiring Gunn.)
- Elon Musk is fulfilling Thomas Edison’s energy dreams | Michio Kaku
- How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can
Inside OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk and several other big Silicon Valley names, you will find a robotic hand called Dactyl. It looks a lot like Luke Skywalker’s mechanical prosthetic in the latest Star Wars film: mechanical digits that bend and straighten like a human hand.
If you give Dactyl an alphabet block and ask it to show you particular letters — let’s say the red O, the orange P and the blue I — it will show them to you and spin, twist and flip the toy in nimble ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/30/technology/robot-hands.html
- Steven Pinker, Author of Bill Gates’s Favorite Book, Says Entrepreneurs Should Trust Stats, Not Their Intuition
The thesis of Pinker’s book ultimately boils down to, that while you might think that the world is doomed — considering the news we read and see — if you measure health, wealth, safety, knowledge and quality of life generally, humanity overall is better off than ever.
“For all the flaws in human nature,” Pinker writes, “it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits.”
Photo by Ye Fung Tchen on Unsplash