Belonging, Care and Repair → Big fan of Rachel Coldicutt’s Careful Industries research consultancy but, sadly, so far I’ve only skimmed this report. Lots of good stuff in there, no doubt. “The futures in this report offer glimpses of three alternative worlds in 2036: worlds where the most important things are belonging, care, and repair. They are neither utopian nor dystopian but somewhere in between; a little like real life, but fifteen years ahead.”
The miserable lives of cyborg truck drivers → Clive Thompson on the implementation of AI, once again, proving to be just another stage in making things more efficient and productive, to the detriment of workers and the enrichment of owners. “Technology, AI, and automation are thus both symptoms of, and causes of, increasingly lousy work conditions for truckers. So here again is the trend: Automation and AI don’t reduce the number of jobs in an industry. In fact, there are more jobs than ever. But they’re crappier jobs, with humans run ragged to keep pace with ruthlessly optimized high-tech systems.”
Peek onto the future → Intriguing post by Om Malik, where he looks at the specs of Apple’s new Studio Display, which includes an A13 Bionic, the chip that powered the iPhone 11 Pro just three years ago, and speculates on where it might lead. “It has GPU power to video on the screen appear more fluid. It has a neural engine to make Siri less dumb, music sound more spatial, and microphones can discern between voice and noise. It has enough machine learning capabilities to morph the screen into a more personal screen.”