Death is Optional is a fascinating and terrifying (alternately and concurrently) conversation between historian Yuval Noah Harari and behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, in which Harari uses his knowledge of the past to make predictions about the future. In one very memorable exchange he talks about the presumption we currently hold, that new advances in medicine will […]
Monthly archives: March 2015
The Future Is Coming Faster Than We Think
Today I read a fascinating article in the London Review of Books. The Robots Are Coming, by John Lanchester, is about the rise of cheap automation and the effect it’s going to have on the workforce and society at large. In his introduction he talks about the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative’s computer, Red, launched in 1996 and […]
Shame and Social Engineering
Just finished reading So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson’s zeitgeisty book about social media pile-ons. There were many, many good points in the book, but I forgot to highlight them as I was enjoying reading it so much. One thing that has stuck in my mind, however, is an email exchange with the film-maker Adam Curtis, […]