StarWorld

I've seen "Star Wars: The Last Jedi".  And I enjoyed it.  Which must mean that I'm not a 'real' Star Wars fan.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  What I find is that I'm a fan of things that  I enjoy and I'm willing to let certain things slide from a canonical stand point if it makes the story interesting.  Did Rian Johnson, the director and writer, make the right choices for Luke's character?  I enjoyed the journey that the character of Luke took through this one movie, so from that perspective, he did.  Is it consistent with the character of Luke Skywalker from episodes 4-6?  I suppose that I would argue that it is not, but then that was 35 years earlier in that character's life.  Who among us has stayed the same over even five years of our lives, much less seven times that long?  Certainly not me.

But that is not really what I want to write about this week.  Merely the setup.  I want to talk about another of the fan backlash issues: starship automation.  And this one involves spoilers.  So read on only if you've seen the movie or don't care.   But see the movie: it's worth seeing on a big screen.

Mouse-opoly

Last week, the biggest news about the internet and inter-connectivity was the FCC's vote to repeal the Obama-era Net Neutrality regulations.  But that's been covered and covered and covered.  Don't get me wrong, I think that this party-line vote is a big blow against free speech in general and open access to information more particularly.  Furthermore, Ajit Pai is the puppet leader of a captured agency and should be relieved of his post.  Beyond that, I don't have anything original to say about it.

Instead, I'll jump to what I feel is the second biggest piece of Internet news: Disney Corp buying the creative assets of 20th Century Fox for $52M.  I know that at first glance, this does not look like a connectivity issue, but it is.  On a large scale.  An international scale.  Read on.

Innovating Maintenance

I recently read this article about the need to place a higher value on maintenance an a lower one on innovation.  And it got me thinking.

The basic premise, for those of you who do not like to click on in-line links, is that the drive to innovate is all well and good, but it has less direct impact on our day-to-day lives than proper maintenance of our infrastructure.  That often innovation does not take into account the effort needed to maintain the new technology or idea.

They take it a step farther and blame the drive to innovate and entrepreneurship on the increasing gap between the haves and have-nots.  Because we all want the latest and greatest, the fastest and fanciest, we reward those that create them disproportionately to those that then have to fix those new products when they break through their performance envelope.

While I do not disagree with the authors (they have fancy, unassailable letters after their names), I do think that they are missing a few things.  Read on.

Artificial Envy

I promised that last week's entry would be the last on this weird, never-to-see-the-light-of-day, novel I've been working on for NaNoWriMo.  Well, I lied.  There is one more (at least) topic about which I wish to share my rambling thoughts.

At least this one will not be about Universal Basic Income.  Instead, this week's topic is about gender identity and how it may change with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.  This is connected to my bogart-in-a-box because I decided that one of the characters, the teenage son of the protagonist, chooses not to identify as any gender.

Of course, all character traits have to have a motive and this one is no exception.  So, how does Artificial Intelligence connect to sloughing off gender as a personal identifier?  Read on.