0.0 A
timeline of cybernetic creatures starting with a toy beetle created in 1911. The whole site is interesting. Quite the rabbit hole once you start clicking around.
1.0 The fascinating story of
the birth of the shopping cart: “Goldman came to the realization that his problem as an entrepreneur was no different than the problem his customers faced while shopping: in order to
sell more food, he’d have to figure out a way for his customers to
carry less food”
2.0 Fighting back against the DMCA - the growing “
right to repair” movement.
3.0 A growing chorus of experts is raising
ethical questions about the future of robotics. Good primer on the topic with segments on use of robots in war, care, privacy and the ever fascinating topic of why we kick robots, and what doing so may reveal about how we treat people.
4.0 A surprisingly good TechCrunch overview of the public zeitgeist around the
Apple vs. FBI case.
5.0 For those days where you think the internet is nothing but corporate content and advertising, spend a few moments down the rabbit hole that is
Weird Facebook. This
Oulipian ‘
weird Twitter’ example is quite nice as well.
6.0 A transcript of Ethan Zuckerman’s presentation at a day-long
Data and Society workshop focused on algorithmic governance. The talk begins with the fascinating story of (if you’ve never heard it) the evolution of the US postal service, the power dynamics it created, and the resulting impact on the development of US media industries. The story is told as part of the wider topic of
exploring the conditions that make it possible to have an open society, and what research and policy may be needed in the future to ensure this.
7.0 The
3,415 words you can’t use (and will be automatically filtered out) when seeking to “express yourself” using Coca Cola’s
GIF the Feeling program. The number of words isn’t nearly as interesting their choice of categories.
“Facial recognition will work well enough to be dangerous, and poorly enough to be dangerous as well.”
Would be interesting to go point-by-point and examine which of the arguments are still valid in today’s always-connected. Smartphones, cloud storage and machine learning may have shifted some of the technical points, but not necessarily (yet) the legal or sociocultural ones.
10.0 A musical
written in collaboration with an AI “Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.”
