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.

Universal Basic Dystopia

This is the fourth and (probably) final installment on my current writing experiment: what might the world look like if Universal Basic Income were implemented?  The first three looked at the basic concept, the suite of tools that I think might be used and how people might take advantage of it.  This one will look at how the government might take advantage of it.

Please keep in mind that this is all conjecture.  I do not know that any of this would actually fall this way.  I remain a proponent of Universal Basic Income, crypto-currencies and their associated Smart Contracts.  I believe that technology will and should be installed inside the human body.  But the thing that I'm writing has taken on a life of its own and is not going in the direction that I originally intended.  And that's a good thing as it makes thing more interesting.

Universal Basic Crime

This continues my series on whatever it is that I'm writing for NaNoWriMo.  The first two can be found here and here.

As of the afternoon of Sunday, November 19, 2017, I'm sitting at 32,184 words written of the 50K required to 'win' National Writing Month.  I'm averaging around 1,700 words a day, which gets me across the finish line on 11/29.  Only not really.  I'll have 50K words written, but this story will be far from finished.  The challenge for me will be two fold: finishing the rest of the rough draft and then doing re-writes.

I already know that I need to fix things.  My villain is turning out to be someone quite different than the one I set out to use.  This is a real issue as I wrote the climactic fight scene first.  In the past, I've tried to be a bit more linear, starting at the beginning and slogging through to the end.  Unfortunately, I realized at about 30K words that I had no idea where the story was going.  I had all kinds of characters and a large problem for them to work on, but I did not know how the problem had originated or how it could be fixed.  So this time, I thought that I'd solve the problem first, then figure out how the characters got there.  I'm not sure that it's better, but I can say that the Scrivener writing software absolutely ROCKS for non-linear story telling.  I highly recommend it.

So what is the central conflict?  Read on.

Universal Basic Mechanics

As stated last week, I'm charging head long down the National Novel Writing Month annual challenge.  I'm up to 21,400 words as of the break I'm taking to write this blog.  The premise of my unlikely-to-see-the-light-of-day novel is to look at crime in a world where Universal Basic Income has been implemented.  What does that world look like and how will people try to take advantage of it.

Last week's post looked at how employment might actually change.  The TL;DR is that while people should be able to survive without work, it will be basic survival.  There will still be an incentive for people to work and companies to employ them.

This week I want to mentally explore how UBI might actually work from a back office stand point.  How does the government ensure that the right people get the right amount?  What existing and/or emerging technologies might be use to make it happen?  Read on...

Universal Basic Plot Device

This last week marks the start of November.  For most of us in the United States, this heralds nothing more than Trick-or-Treating, the end of Daylight Savings Time and the impending doom that is Thanksgiving with its aggressive day-after shopping blitzkrieg.

However, for a few thousand of us, in the US and beyond, it also starts the annual confrontation with self-motivation, internal demons and writer's block known as National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo for short.  The goal is to write 50,000 words in one month.  1,667 words a day.

I have entered a few times and completed it once (Purity, an attempted mash up of "The Last Unicorn" with "Game of Thrones").  Then I realized that 50,000 words, as many as that is, does not automatically equal a completed work of art.  I did not have an ending, merely a collection of scenes, some of which might be worth keeping, all of which would need to be extensively rewritten if they were ever going to be worth anything.  It now sits on my Google Drive and mocks me when I open that folder.  So I don't open that folder.

This year, I've done more pre-planning and am starting by writing the climax and then working backwards.  I'm not sure if this is any better than working in a more linear fashion, but it can't be worse.  You can track my progress, if you care, here.

Aside from the I'm-writing-this-and-this-other-thing-so-you-should-be-interested-in-both, there is more connecting this blog to my nascent novel.  Because of all my rambling thoughts on Universal Basic Income, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Smart IDs, I've decided to set the novel in a world where all of those things are ubiquitous parts of the landscape.  I plan on using this post, and all of the rest through the month of November, to build this world in a fast-finger stream of consciousness.

What Price Your Package?

Last week, Amazon announced a new service called Amazon Key.  There has been a fair amount of press around it, so I'm not going to (completely) rehash what other's have already done.  Instead, I'm going to do what I always do: tear it apart and then offer some solutions.

First, a quick overview in case you don't like clicking links.  Amazon Key is an attempt to figure out how to secure deliveries.  Package theft is a real thing and the Amazon logo on a box sitting on a porch is a big 'come steal me' sign.  The Big A's solution is to sell a $249 kit to Prime members in select cities.  The kit includes a Smart Lock and Cloud-connected Camera.  Their courier gets a one time code to unlock your door, drop the package off and re-lock the door.  You get a notification and a video of this happening.

Package theft solved, right?  Maybe.  Read on.

Un-National Security ID

Last week, I discussed some thoughts on personal identification, specifically as it related to credit ratings and the Equifax breach.  However, one of the things that I did not discuss is why something like this is not already in place.

After all, many other countries have National ID programs that allow them to segregate citizens from non-citizens.  To understand who is entitled to the rights set forth in each country's governing documents and laws.  Also, who should be paying taxes.  From a bureaucratic stand point, having a strong, trustworthy National ID system only makes sense.

Then why doesn't the United States, the most rootin'-ist, tootin'-ist country in the whole dang world, have something like this?   Read on, intrepid ponderer!

Rate My Credit

The Equifax hack(s?) are highlighting more than the security of the institutions that are asking us to trust them with our personal information.  It is bringing into question the entirety of how these institutions identify us and thereby assign us credit.

Even the cursory, headline-scanning research that most of us do will show that the requirements for obtaining a new line of credit are ludicrous.  All you need is a Photo ID, Social Security Number (doesn't need to be yours), a matching birth date and address.  That's it.  And with the SSN and a little work, you can get the Photo ID.

Walk into most retailers (car dealerships, furniture stores, WalMart, Target, etc.), spend fifteen minutes filling out an application and then go to town.

This needs to change.  Even the White House agrees.  For what that's worth.

What The Actual Gun?

WARNING: This post will most likely have little to do with the internet or the Internet of Things or technology or any of the usual nonsense that I spout.

Instead, I feel the need to get something off my chest:

Why The F@#K haven't we done something about the access to guns in the US?

In the wake of this latest (and only unique in the details) gun related tragedy, why do these events keep happening and why aren't people doing something about them?  Why is the US less than 5% of the world population, but has more than 30% of the mass shootings?  I'm sure that it has something to do with having nearly 50% of the civilian owned guns.

I know that I'm not really qualified to discuss the deep legal issues involved here, much less the psychological side, but I do like to think that, as a compassionate human living in a supposedly enlightened society, I can feel for the victims.  From that perspective, the only conclusion is:

This S@#T has got to stop.

So why hasn't it? I'll answer my own question: the Second Amendment and the NRA.

Mining, Not Ads

Last week, the internet changed dramatically and you probably did not notice.  This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality, though that is a big thing that may change the internet in ways that are hard to imagine.  Instead, it has to do with how websites make money.

The news story that you probably heard was that the CBS and Showtime websites were set up so that when you browsed their sites, your browser ran a script that 'mined' a crypto-currency.  It turns out that, in this particular case, the code to do this was not authorized by CBS and that some programmer did this in the dark for their own Superman III/Office Space style scam.

What you did not hear was that the mechanism that this back office Richmond used to do all of this is actually legitimate.  Just not approved by CBS.  And it can help monetize web content AND minimize advertising.  How does all of this work?  Read on.

That's What She Said

There were a few news items that caught my eye this last week.  A couple that are entry-worthy are:

• "Uncle" Joe Biden came down against Universal Basic Income as "selling the American Worker short."
• Amazon was rumored to be considering Bitcoin as a payment option.  And then wasn't.

But both of those were overshadowed by this:

Sex robots are here!  (The full article from The Mirror UK here.)  Of these three news articles, this one has the greatest potential social impact, so that's what I want to dissect.

Sonic Siri

A Chinese research firm has discovered that all our our various voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, OK Google and Cortana) listen to frequencies well beyond the range of human hearing.  Therefore, if a malicious command is pitch-shifted above that range, our devices will hear it and execute it without any of us knowing about it.

Here's the video of it in action:



On the surface, this looks a bit scary: the parts are cheap, there are apps that will shift the frequency of any input (though it may need to be washed through the app a few times, but that's not hard, just time consuming).  And maybe it is scary, but there are some things that you can do about it.  Read on.

Equi-Fu**ed

I've written about on-line privacy before and the utter helplessness surrounding it for the individual citizen.  The Equifax hack highlights this again and takes it to new and more horrifying heights.

Equifax, one of the three credit reporting agencies used by every US entity that needs to decide if any one person is trustworthy, had 143 million records stolen out of their supposedly secure database.  That is roughly two-thirds of the population with a credit report (approximately 246 million people aged fifteen and up).  Bottom line: your information has been exposed.

There have been many data hacks in the past, from Target to Sony to G-Mail and on.  This one is worse.  While those others have had some information, often including social security numbers and credit card information, Equifax makes its business collecting all of that information: credit card payment histories, utility payment histories, mortgages, employment, bank accounts and more.  On everyone who has ever opened any of those.  They collect all of this so that they can help banks and employers and others decide if you will pay your bills on time.  If you are someone who is responsible.

But how can any of that be trusted if the company collecting it proves not to be responsible?

Voice Cliques

The big news from this last week in the Internet of Things is that Amazon and Microsoft are talking to each other.  At least, they are through their digital assistants.  You can now 'summon' Cortana through Alexa and vice-versa.

The big idea that helped these two Seattle area volcanoes of tech to work together is that their two assistants are good at different things.  Cortana integrates well with Microsoft Office and the Bing search engine.  Alexa is good at almost everything else.  This means that you will soon be able to say natural sounding phrases like, "Alexa, open Cortana. [pause] Hey Cortana, what's on my Outlook calendar for today?"  All from the same speaker thingy sitting on some shelf in whatever room you are in.

Not clunky at all.

Weapons of Doubt

Last week, Elon Musk again warned against Killer Robots.  This time, instead of just him on stage, he got 115 of his closest friends (really, leading experts in the field of AI and autonomous weapons) to publish a letter to the UN.  In it, he (and all the rest) warn against the use of these kinds of weapons that are not only unmanned, but also not directly controlled by a human being.

Is he wrong?  No.  There are terrific potentials for misuse around these things.  Think of mean ol' Mrs. Jenkins who always yells at you to pick up after your pooch.  If she sets up a Kalinshni-Bot(tm)  on her front yard, the neighborhood population of pups is going to take a sharp down turn.

What I find a bit disingenuous is that Mr. Musk is the person voicing these concerns.  After all, he is one of the leaders in autonomous vehicles with Tesla.  And the area awareness software and sensor suite that he is plunking into his cars could be easily modified to drive something more sinister.

But let's put that aside and think a bit about what those rules might be.

Virgin Money

Over the past week or so, there has been an increase in interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI).  A couple more of the tech elite have added their voices to those of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in support of this Utopian economic concept: Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, and Richard Branson, founder of all things Virgin.

The two of them are coming at the concept from slightly different bents.  Mr. Butterfield sees it as a way to help those hurt by localized market inflation, similar to the housing market in Silicon Valley where high tech salaries have driven home prices out of reach of all of the ancillary jobs that those technocrats take for granted.  It doesn't matter how well sourced your latte's beans are if you don't have a barista available to prepare it.

Mr. Branson is looking at it from a bit more humanitarian perspective, having met with groups working in Finland to understand how that countries limited UBI program is working.  In a blog post, he states:

"In the modern world, everybody should have the opportunity to work and to thrive. Most countries can afford to make sure that everybody has their basic needs covered. One idea that could help make this a reality is a universal basic income. This concept should be further explored to see how it can work practically."

This is slightly different than both Musk and Zuckerberg who are more concerned with the fallout from workplace automation and how we all can afford basic necessities if we don't have jobs.

Avast Your Content

This last week, a couple of news items knocked me out of the stratosphere of the post-work society and back to reality.  That is because both items hit me where it hurts: in the content I love.

First up, there is the news that HBO has been hacked and someone is trying to blackmail them by threatening to release Game of Thrones episodes ahead of official release.  Plus allegedly damning emails.  After the Sony "The Interview" hack of 2014 which is rumored to have cost Sony around $100 Million, companies have taken threats like this seriously.  Unless the hackers don't actually have what they say they have or think that what they have is more critical than it is (see "Burn After Reading"), as appears to be the case here.  HBO is not reported to be negotiating in any serious manner with the cyber thieves.

Secondly, Disney has announced that they are severing ties with Netflix and will be pulling their content from that service in 2019.  They intend to set up their own streaming service for their content which may include content from ABC and ESPN, both owned by Disney.  Netflix responded by buying a comic book publisher, Millarworld, which is most known for the "Kick-Ass" series.

What do these two news items have in common?  Well, they are both about money.  They are both about control.  And they are both about content piracy.  And content piracy is about breaking free of money and control.

Virtually Polite

I like my virtual assistants, be they "Hey, Google" or Alexa.  (I've not owned an Apple product since long before Siri.  As for Cortana, well she may be fine, but who knows?)  But they are not perfect.  Each has their own set of problems, be it interoperability with the apps I want to use or the trigger words that are used to 'wake' them up.  However, the thing that irks me the most about them is that they are only kind of polite.

By 'kind of', I mean that they follow the intent of polite conversation, but not the forms.  They respond quickly with relevant information (most of the time) if they are address correctly, but they do not handle words like 'please' and 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' with any grace.  Ffor instance, if you say, "Alexa, please tell me about the weather," then Alexa will tell you about the weather, ignoring the word 'please' as irrelevant to the request.  Then, after you have the information, if you say, "Thank you," you get nothing in return.  Instead, you have to say "Alexa, thank you".  Only then will you get a "You're welcome."  It does not fit into a natural conversation.  At least in the style of American English in the beginning of the 21st Century.

Travel App Crap

Recently, I had (and took) the opportunity to go on a big ship cruise.  This is not something that I had ever thought that I would do.  But for an older family member's significant birthday? What the hey, I'll try anything once.  So off we all went for a seven day tour of Alaska's Inland Passage.

The cruise itself was nice.  The Middle School Daughter and I had a few adventures hiking, kayaking and zip-lining.  We saw whales and glaciers from the deck of the cruise liner which was cool (though a bit surreal, what with looking at receding glaciers from the deck of this diesel and hollandaise fueled behemoth).  And we were force-ably unplugged.  Or mostly.

Passing On

A few weeks ago, the Emmy Award nominations were announced.  Normally, this is an event that I ignore with great abandon.  However, it appears that this will be a banner year for Man-Machine interaction.  Two futuristic properties got nods: Westworld and Black Mirror's episode 'San Junipero' both got multiple nominations.

I've watched all of Westworld Season 1 and thought it was some of the best discussion on the nature of consciousness and what it means to have self determination. (Did Maeve get back off the train to find her daughter because she wanted to or because she was programmed to?  Is there a difference?)  However, I had not watched San Junipero, though I have seen a few other Black Mirror episodes.  So, I thought to give it a watch.

[Spoilers after the break]

Artificial Risk

Over the past months, I've written quite a bit about how automation, driven by an Artificial Intelligence (or three), will take our jobs and that it is a good thing.  Then along comes Mr. High-and-Mighty Technocrat Elon Musk saying that AI is an existential threat to humanity and needs to be proactively regulated.

Well, crap.

What is a blogger with an audience of (maybe) dozens supposed to do against the loudest voice for Futurism on the planet?  I don't know what the others are doing, but I'm going to unpack his comments and do some on-page thinking.

Work is What You Make of AI

Last month I got all on a kick about how automation is going to take our jobs and that that is a good thing.  There has been some more press on this topic so I want to continue kicking it around.

The first article for my shouting-into-an-empty-house discussion is from the BBC: How long will it take for your job to be automated.  This is about an Oxford study that asked 352 scientists how long various jobs would take to be automated.  This is a better information than the one that the Will Robots Take My Job site used.  And it offers up a time frame that is more heartening for those that are hip deep in the status quo: 120 year before 50% of all jobs are automated.  Hold on to that thought.

The second article is about Eric Schmidt, Google Founder and Techno Spouter (of course I'm jealous, people ask his opinions instead of me trying to force them down any ear that will listen).  In it, Mr. Schmidt puts forth the idea that A.I. will create more jobs that can't be filled instead of destroying them.  His reasoning is that automation will make workers more efficient, more productive, but that humans will still need to be part of the process.  He cites a McKinsey study that says that 5% of current jobs can be automated with today's technology for his reasoning.  It's a very together-we-are-stronger statement, but it has a few holes.

A Matter of Travel

I saw this article about how autonomous vehicles will change everything a few weeks ago.  I meant to write about it then, but then Amazon distracted me.  But I did not forget.  Not this guy.

The basic gist of the article is that, as both self-driving cars and electrical power systems grow, coupled with the instant-ordering supplied by smart phones, it will change how people choose to get their transportation.  Instead of owning, we will rent on an as-needed basis.  The author goes on to predict that, at the inflection point of long battery life and reliable autonomy, this behavior change will happen very quickly.  "A matter of months" quickly.

Amazon Patent Menagerie

When I wrote about the potential Amazon-Whole Foods merger last week, I may not have adequately (or at all) connected it to the nominal subject of this blog: The Internet of Things.  I'd like to take some time this week to correct that oversight.

First, let's all remember that 'Things' are physical and require a physical space in which to operate.  Amazon has had that through its distributions centers (DCs), but not in an publicly accessible space.  At best, they've had a few experiments with Amazon Go and physical bookstores in select metros.  With the Whole Foods thing, this changes.

In last week's post, I mentioned that these 450-ish stores give Amazon an opportunity to observe us shopping.  Not to sell IoT products to consumers, but to use them on us.  To see how we shop in physical spaces and then use that information to improve product placement, to optimize store layout, to optimize product choice.  To improve the shopping experience, not for the shoppers, but for Amazon.

And, on the heels of the merger announcement, we saw a patent that may be the kind of thing that will result from that learning.

Prime Foods

Amazon had a good week last week.  There were a lot of sales on their various signature products (Echo, Kindle, Fire, etc) in lieu of Father's Day, they launched the Dash Wand with Echo so that you can 'say it or scan it', and they agreed to purchase the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.4 Billion.  A good week indeed.

It is the Whole Food deal that I want to focus on.  As someone who has spent a couple of decades in a variety of retail positions, from floor sales to manager to vendor rep, as well as some opinions on where automation may take us, this deal raised my eyebrows and got me going, "Hmmm."  With that in mind, I read a few articles, starting with two from the Grey Lady:

• Amazon to Buy Whole Foods for $13.4 Billion
• The Amazon-WalMart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy

Both articles are worth your time (if you haven't already read them), but the focus of both is too narrow.  They both only scratch the surface of why Amazon might have agreed to buy a brick-and-mortar grocery chain.  Yes, they have been dabbling with physical locations for the last year or two: Amazon Go being one and they now have a physical book store or two.  Yes, they want to take more market share from WalMart.  But to swallow a nationwide chain when they have been spending two decades destroying nationwide chains is a different animal all together.

What's In A Name

I'm going to step off the techno-socialist soapbox I've been using for the past few months.  Instead, I'm going to put on my old marketing gloves, open up the sales toolkit and do a product tear down.  Though, not really.  What I want to tear down is the launch of a product, not the product itself.

The item in question is the new Apple HomePod, announced last week at Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC).  The HomePod is a package of tech that is roughly the size of that urn your grandmother keeps on the mantle.  The one full of your grandfather's ashes.  Only this one may be full of something else.  Something smellier.

No Jobs Are Safe

Hello, World!  I'm back after a brief hiatus that I spent remembering our troops by taking the Middle School Daughter Unit white water rafting (among other things).

But that's all over now and it's back to banging the what-do-we-do-when-the-jobs-are-all-automated drum.  The jumping off point is a website I discovered through Reddit, called:

WILL ROBOTS TAKE MY JOB

The Techno Contract

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into the term "Techno-Feudalism," bare and all but devoid of context.  It was in this Reddit post on /r/Futurology.  Like all red blooded Reddit browsers, I did not actually read the post, just the headline.  But the term stuck with me.  What is it? What do I think it is and what is it actually?

To Echo or Not To Echo

As I've spent the last few weeks expounding on the 'trap' of automation as an economic policy, I've not commented on a few of the things that have been happening in the more immediate world.  I'm not done with the concept, far from it (read up on Techno-Feudalism, O constant reader), but I'll give it a rest this week.

No Working at Home

After my extended diatribe on automation and the 'Post-Work' society over the last few weeks, it has occurred to me to question the role of home automation in this transition.  After all, this blog started because of my interest in smart home technology and the promise of consumer level IoT.  So how does a connected home fit into this transition?   How does having a automated light switches and thermostats and shelf-top voice assistants help get us (me) towards a 'Life Well Lived'?

Working Towards No Work - Part 2

I know that there were plenty of opinion worthy news events over the last week related to connectivity, privacy and the internet.

• The FCC wants to 'free' the internet up for corporations by removing neutrality rules.
• Open ports in many Android apps create smartphone hacking opportunities
• Turkey is blocking Wikipedia because ignorance is bliss for those you rule.
• Federal Spy Agencies are not automating fast enough to overcome recruiting obstacles.
• Google Home can now recognize different users.
• And Amazon wants to spy on you in the bathroom.

But the hell with all of that.  I want to continue my tirade/rant/dream of a Post-Work economy.  For those of you who have not read last week's post (Working Towards No Work - Part 1) or the one from three weeks ago, here's a brief summary (though not in the order in which they appeared in the two cited posts):

• Automation is coming and will disrupt the work place according to this report from the International Bar Association.
• No work is really safe from this (including c-level management)
• Setting quotas for living workers will merely push corporations to jurisdictions that don't require them.
• It is going to happen because it reduces labor costs which in turn gets the things we want to market at lower costs, which will increase demand, which will drive more automation.
• But if all jobs are automated, then how will we earn money to buy the things that the robots make?
• We must rebuild our economy on a different platform from capitalism/consumerism.  Maybe around the notion of 'A Life Well Lived', not 'A Life of Work.'
• This is not Post-Scarcity.  That requires unlimited resources.  Resources are still limited by location and our inability to restructure mater on the fly.  Automation only helps us make the most of the resources that are available and get them where they are needed.

We MUST Automate

Forget, for a moment, about automation on the personal or micro-economic scale.  Heck, don't even think about it on the enterprise or single national entity scale.  Instead, to understand the imperative in the above sub-heading, I ask you to think on the fully macro-economic scale.  The getting-to-stage-1-civilization scale.

With that in mind, the issue is all about resource management.  There are more and more of us humans on the planet every second of every minuted of every hour of every day.  The current estimate has us at 7.5 Billion people with an additional 145 joining every minute (250 emerging and 105 shuffling off per minute, for a net of 145).  We'll be at 10 billion sometime around 2060.  How the F-Sharp are all of those people going to eat? drink? WORK?

Ten Billion is a significant number because it is one strong estimate about how many people the earth can support.  Much of this is based on the eating of meat, a particularly inefficient food source, but we'll set that aside because you and I both know that the human race won't stop at 10B pop.  We'll keep going and going, expecting things to just work out.  For the Powers That Be to 'do something'.  And those Powers only have so many options:

• Population Control.  Yeah, because that worked so well for China.  Stopping people from pro-creating is not going to get anyone elected or keep them in power.  If we try to stop it, that will just move all of the sex behind even more doors.  The kids will still be born, and once they are born, no one in any first world country is going to kill them because they are excess population.  Personally, I believe that some level of this must eventually take place, but god help the poor soul who tries to make it happen.
• Invasion/Genocide.  This may work on a national scale, but not on a global scale.  With no more lands to conquer, your people are still going to breed.  It is also the most likely to galvanize the rest of the world to stomp on you.  Again, not a workable solution.
• Find Another Earth.  Lots of people are working on this, but the tech to make it workable in the next couple of centuries, much less in the next couple of decades which is when we'll need it, is not going to be there.
• Be More Efficient.  Ultimately, this is the only answer.  We have to use what we have better.  Fewer Bugattis and more bananas.

Ah!  I can hear you thinking over the internet, "We'll put all of those people to work making food and moving water and building shelter!  That'll fix it all!"  Well, not really.  The more people work, the more they consume.  Also, humans are great multi-function machines, but they can not match the productivity of purpose built automation.  We need all of the production and distribution we can get if we are going to have a chance of feeding and housing everyone at even the most basic levels.

Maps?  Where We're Going We Don't Need Maps

The tricky part of all of this is getting from where we are now to where we need to be.  Here in the US of A, much of our identity is tied up in what we do to earn money.  Where we fit on the social ladder is connected to how much money we have.  Who gets what goods and services and at what quality is all based on the amount of money we have.  If no one is working (if no one CAN work because they can't compete with robots), then no one is earning money and no one is buying anything.  How do we measure our self worth?  How do we know who gets the good stuff?

The short answer to that last bit is that no one gets the good stuff because there won't be any more good stuff.  To deal with a 10B+ population, the good stuff has to go away and everyone gets the basic stuff.  There simply will not be room in the production schedule of something like a Bugatti.  Not when making one will deny food, water and shelter to lots of people (though many argue that something like that already takes place.  Communists).

The long answer to all of those questions is that we need to rethink our self worth without money or economic power.  Those cultural touchstones need to be replaced with something else.  The suggestion from that International Bar Association article that launched all of this three weeks ago is to define a Life Well Lived.  That our schools and other institutions need to focus on out-reach and helping.  Giving and sharing and healing.  Doing good works for their own sake, not for any potential reward in either this life or the next.  Charity in the noblest, most caring, least pitying sense of the word.

To make that shift is not something that will happen in a decade or two.  It will require multiple generations and the dedicated good works of people who already do this: nurses, teachers, (most) public safety employees, etc.  Most of them are underpaid and doing it because it is a 'calling'.  Something that they must do to live not in the world, but with themselves.  We need more of these people.  We need to instill this into our children and grandchildren.  And that is the real trick.

I am not one of these people.  I have struggled to find a purpose in life.  Something to which I can truly, unabashedly dedicate my time and energy.  The closest I have come is to raising my daughter.

And that is where I will start.  Have started.

Working Towards No Work - Part 1

Two weeks ago, I wrote about why I think laws requiring a percentage of the work force to be human is a bad idea, using it to transition into a vision of a "Post-Work" world.  This week I want to continue on that theme and expand it a bit, focusing on the momentum towards it, the reasons why we need it and some thoughts on how to get there.

[
/Open (aside)

Last week, I did not write, but took the Middle School Daughter Unit camping.  Or, rather, her school did and I was allowed to tag along as long as I drove and fed the teachers leading the expedition.  We visited a Wolf Sanctuary and then went caving in lava tubes in and around El Malpais National Monument.  Visit both if you can, but definitely have a guide for the caves: it is easy to get lost.

/Close (aside)
]

Post-Work, not Post-Scarcity

Most people who talk about life in a fully automated society label it "Post-Scarcity".  This is not what I'm talking about.  Or at least, not yet.  To get to a full on Post-Scarcity world, we need to go beyond automation into the realm of matter reconstruction.

With work place automation, we are off loading the work to machines, but we are still dealing with the same resources.  The same amount of arable land to grow food, the same amount of water in the same occasionally convenient places.  All the automation does is help us maximize our use of those resources.  This is Post-Work.  The available resources are still limited.

For Post-Scarcity, we need to be able to build food, water and consumer packaged goods from things that are not food, water or goods.  Like breaking a rock down into its constituent atoms and then re-assembling them into other goods that are more useful to the people in the immediate location.  I'm not talking about vat-growing a steak.  Instead, this is building the steak atom-by-atom in the back of the restaurant, already cooked, on demand.  The current state-of-the-art for working on that scale has a long way to go, but is not outside the realm of 'eventually.'

Post-Work is a landing on the staircase that leads to Post-Scarcity, but does not get us all of the way there.

It is Inevitable, Mr. Anderson

With annoying definition pedantry things out of the way, let's talk about why work automation is going to happen (oh, let's!).  The reason is simple: the short, medium and long term gains for employers are just too high.

Robots don't sleep.  They don't need vacations.  They don't complain about work hours or have families or needs outside of the work place.  They have the potential to get sick (break), but their medical plan does not cringe at fire-and-replace if the repair cost is too high.  And that's for the high cost, physical world automation.  Many of us, myself included, will lose our jobs (if I had one) to software.  Then all of the ills of the mechanical world are tossed out (to be replaced by bugs and viruses, to be sure, but still more reliable).

Beyond the world of HR, automation adds one other significant factor: consistency of output.  We humans with our five imperfect senses cannot repeat tasks down to the millimeter consistently.  Those that can are considered savants or somewhere on the autism spectrum.  They are not sitting in the middle of the bell curve with the rest of us baseline humans.

As I said in my piece two weeks ago, those companies that automate quickly and completely will have a significant edge over those that do not.  If those companies find themselves in jurisdictions that attempt to force human labor on them, they will lobby against them, eventually moving to someplace that will allow them to operate as they want.

Next Week - I Promise

So, this rant is already subjecting all five of you who read this to a longer article than I think your patience can handle.  I'm going to push the rest of this to next week's installment.  The two topics left are:

• Why work place automation MUST happen (Hint: there are 7.5 Billion reasons and growing).
• How we make the transition to Post-Work with the least amount of pain (I don't have a clue, and this is the real reason it's getting pushed to next week).

Affirmative Automation

This week, I'm going to continue ignoring the repeal of Net Neutrality.  Instead I want to return to the concept of workplace automation.

Human Quotas

In particular, this article from The Guardian, US Edition, "Rise of robotics will upend laws and lead to human job quotas, study says."  The article in about a report from the International Bar Association on the rise of the robot workforce.  Despite the headline, the article spends little time talking about human quotas, instead documenting the rise of workplace automation.  Which is something anyone paying any kind of attention already knew about.

Despite the disparity between the headline and the content, the article does mention that the report does suggest that governments may attempt to regulate the job market, requiring that employers hire some number of humans.  In general, I think that this would be a colossal mistake.

Mismatched

(We're going to set aside the issues of building and maintaining automation for this article.  They are short term jobs that will also ultimately die to automation.  Eventually the robots will be building and maintaining themselves.)

The problem is that humans, as non-specialized tool users, will never be able to compete with task specific robots.  Those will always be able to do the task for which they are designed faster, more reliably and more cheaply than something like the jack-of-all-trades design that is the human body.

As that is the case, requiring humans to do similar work to the robots right next to them will reduce the competitive advantage of the company/country that enacts these quotas.  Other jurisdictions that allow their employers to go 'full auto' will have companies that can produce the same product cheaper and with higher quality, undercutting the quota companies and driving them out of business.  And then where will the humans work?

Why 'Work'

For me, the problem is the word 'Work'.  For the purposes of this rant, I'm going to define 'work' as the 'trade of free time for currency'.  Our current economy, at least in most developed economies, is based on the need for the population to work so that they can:

1. earn money so that they can 
2. spend money so that
3. other people can work so that they can
4. buy the things that the first people make/do.

We are all trading our free time so that we can buy things that other people make by trading their free time so that they can buy the things that we make.  This is the 'Business Cycle'.

(courtesy of the BBC)

But what if our "Needs & wants' were met without work because automation?  What would we do then?  That is the question that a fully automated work force starts to ask.

The Real Question

Work is supposed to reward effort with access to more and better resources through the middle many of currency.  We are supposed to be a meritocracy (a subject for debate).  But if there is no work to reward, then how do we know who is pulling their weight and who is just sitting around playing video games all day long?

This is the question that needs to be debated in the halls of power: how do we reward actions that our society deems meritorious?  It does not need to be money.  It could be Facebook 'Likes' (not to give the great and glorious Zuch any ideas to expand his already growing FB Economy).  It could be YouTube subscriptions or something like gaming achievements.  Maybe these could be used for access to higher tier goods and services... but that just swaps dollars and pounds for likes and achievements.

What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?

Maybe the real issue is not how we reward effort or creativity, but that we all feel that things like 'effort' and 'reward' need to exist.  I realize that competitiveness is baked into the human psyche after millions of years of evolution, but it may be time to start working those out of our minds.  Instead of doing things because there is an external reward, we should be doing things because the doing of those things is reward enough.  It is a nice thought.

In reality, maybe the first step is to actively start automating government.  When the lawmakers start to see their lives disrupted, something will happen.  Maybe quotas, maybe Universal Basic Income, maybe something else, but it will be a step towards a post-work human society.

The Bixby Button

It is time once again for me to fret and strut my hour upon the Blog-o-sphere.  The obvious targets for my sound and fury are all of the April Fool's jokes that bounced around the interwebs on Saturday, but no; those are asking for the abuse and so I will pass them by.

Of course, my favorite was Google Gnome.

Instead, I'll focus my ire on something else: the Galaxy S8 announcement, specifically Bixby.  As a brief disclaimer, I worked for Samsung for over nine years, but I'll try not to let any sentiment, good or bad, color my judgement.

Wait.  Not that Bixby.

A Kinder, Gentler Bixby

For those of you who do not follow smartphone press releases (what do you do with your lives?), Bixby is Samsung's voice assistant offering, but there is more.  It is also a info-card system on screen (Bixby Home) and an image recognition system through the phone's camera (Bixby Vision).  Each is designed to add context and suggestions to the actions people take with their Galaxy S8 phone.

What separates it from the other voice assistants already in market (and also on the Android driven S8) are a few things:

1. It can work with supported third party apps and potentially do anything that the user can do with their hands.  While there aren't many such apps yet, that may change over time depending on how aggressive Samsung goes after developers.
2. It can do image recognition.  If you see an object that you like, a pair of shoes or a car or whatever, then point the S8 camera at it and it will bring up information about that object.
3. It can interface with Samsung's going line of smart things, including SmartThings.  This is maybe the biggest differentiater as Samsung makes many of the things that we all want to be smart.  They can directly influence products as they go to market instead of trying to buy their way into someone else's refrigerator or TV line.

That Being Said...

There are a few things that are less good about Bixby versus some of the other voice assistants on the market.

First, there is a button.  For me, one of the biggest advantages of Alexa or Google Home is that they are completely hands free.  I can be washing the dishes and get the lights turned on or off, skip a music track or get the weather.  In all fairness, the same can be said of Siri, Cortana and the in-phone version of the Google Assistant.  But for a smart home, it make is less useful.

Next, it is only on the Galaxy S8 and S8+.  While the Galaxy line of phones are popular, this is still a flagship product that will take time to trickle down to the masses.  Admittedly, smart home owners and users are closer to the 1% (called mass premium consumers in marketing parlance), but the Venn diagram of smart home owners and Galaxy early adopters strikes me as small right now.

Finally (at least for the purposes of this article), this is not Samsung's first foray into the world of voice assistants.  They launched S-Voice in 2012 in response to Siri.  It did not go well.  Much of this was due to a lack of developer support and buggy performance.  Things that do not bode well for Bixby.

There is Room

I hope that Bixby does well.  Not only for all of my former colleagues at Samsung and their job security, but also because it increases the competition in this area.  I would hate for the consumer innovation world to give up on this thinking that Amazon, Apple and Google have won.  Remember, In the early 2000's, we were a Yahoo! world and no one thought we needed Google.  There is still room for someone to reinvent the voice assistant market.

That's my sound and fury for this week.

Blog-O-Matic Automation

There were not many news items this last week that affected the Internet of Things.  A few, to be sure:

• New laws on how ISPs can sell browsing data
• A sale at Lowes on GE Z-Wave switches (most likely gone thanks to people like yours truly).

Of course, there was also the usual horde of investor articles that seem to rehash the same points: security, cost savings (or not) and how it will affect jobs.  I generally ignore most of those because they rarely say anything new and that bores me (and I write articles that are at least three times longer than the usual Buzzfeed crap, so I rank my attention span as better than the average internet goldfish).

But, as usual, something did catch my eye: another question on Reddit, in the /r/singularity section.  "Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Content Writers in the Future?"  Most of the comments are pro human: "Content for mindless dribble, 100% yes."  And that's a sentiment with which I mostly agree.  For ad copy and other boiler plate kinds of content (financial reports, etc), it may already have taken over.  Which is great, because most of us humans don't like writing that stuff (though we'll cash the check for the work).

What about 'real' content: long form, creative writing?  For the purposes of this article, we'll take 'creative' to mean fiction, opinion and in-depth reporting all of which require a creative use of language to keep the reader's attention.  What some of the articles on AI writing start calling 'soul' or 'heart'.  As someone who holds a BA in English, I want to dive into what that 'soul' is.

The current state of AI writing bots appear to be good at highly formulaic prose, hence the financial reports and legal briefs and other content that for whatever reason needs to stay within strict bounds.  Anywhere that a dropped comma can cost a company millions needs something with a superhuman attention to detail and legal exposure.  The current AI systems should be perfect for this.

However, to keep a reader's attention (and if you've made it this far, then I'm not too bad at it) requires not only following grammar rules, but also knowing when to break them.  I have a Greek chorus of writing instructors that scream in my ear every time that I start a sentence with 'And'.  And yet I do it often because it sounds 'right' to my inner ear.

In fact, most of us appreciate rule breaking in writing because it makes the writing more interesting.  It has to be done carefully and with intent, but that is what second and third (and fourth) drafts are for.  This is why it will be difficult for AI to 'own' content creation.  All artistic disciplines have these rules and all of them reward those artists that break them with intent.

Ultimately, this is because successful formulas become boring with repetition.  In our present pop culture zeitgeist, this is most obvious in summer tent pole blockbuster movies.  The current reigning champ is Disney/Marvel with their MCU which is going on nine years of movies since Iron Man was released in 2008.  Disney has also had success with family animation movies and princess movies and theme park rides.  Much is because they do have a formula, The Hero's Journey.  Yet, they do no slavishly follow all of its beats.  They mix it up, eventually pitting hero against hero in order to make the formula feel fresh (keep in mind that Civil War is really a Captain America movie, so all of the other Avengers in the film are there to distract us from the formula of Cap's journey).

Will AI be able to break the rules with intent?  No doubt some clever boffin will figure out the algorithm to make that happen.  Then Michael Bay will only need to enter a brief and a few actors' names, press a button and have another Transformers movie.  One that will make enough money to allow him to press the button again and again until the formula becomes old.  And there's the point.  New formulas require people to feed them into the AI.  New rules to implement and then break.

At least, they will as long as the AIs are writing for humans.  As soon as they start creating for themselves and their interests, then all of the rules are out the window.

The Ocarina of Control

The inspiration for this week's post comes from a reddit post. Or repost that got better traction.  For those of you who don't follow links in articles (shame on you... so I'll embed it below), these show a video/animated gif of a guy who can control his home through the tunes he plays on an Ocarina.  And that is trés cool.

But how long will he live with it?

Our intrepid YouTuber, 'Sufficiently Advanced', no doubt did this for a few reasons:

• As an exercise in programming
• To see if he could
• To jump on the 'Breath of the Wild' coat tails (which he admits in the video comments)
• Because it is insanely cool

However, I argue that he did not do it because it is PRACTICAL.  For most of us, home automation is not about being cool (or at least not only about being cool... in the same sense that squealing the tires is cool), it's about making our homes easier to live in.  Setting aside the massive security breach around whistling at the window, this project does not make living easier.

Remote Control or Automation

Using an Ocarina to control your home requires you to 1) have an Ocarina, 2) know how to play an Ocarina, and 3) hope no one else with those first two requirements know where you live.  Even with all three of those met, it is nothing more than a fancy remote control for the home.  In fact, most 'Smart' home systems are nothing more than fancy remote controls, albeit with app-to-hub authentication and fewer wires hanging around.  It reminds me of a post I wrote for Qioto last September that focused on the mental progression of a smarthome DIYer.  Because you won't click on that either, the TL;DR is:

The ultimate goal should be for the home to know what you want without having to reach in your pocket for anything, but that not all home systems are right for that level of automation.

It is not yelling at Alexa or the Google Assistant to "Turn on the Kitchen Lights."  That is useful, but not automated.  Instead, the system should know that you are in the kitchen and that it is dark outside so it should turn on the lights for you.  Then turn them off when you leave (or maybe a minute or two after you leave).

Not Quite There

To do that requires that there be motion sensors and smart switches and a controlling hub, all of which exist, but none of which really work 100% reliably.  The motion sensor needs to be in the right place, or there needs to be many of them to cover the area.  All of the lights need to be connected to smart switches and those all need to be linked to the motion sensors and a sunrise-sunset timer via the hub to make that work.  Alternatively, this can be worked out by location mapping our phone locations within the home, but GPS doesn't work well inside and the consumer version only resolves to about five meters (and Wi-Fi location mapping is not really there yet).

All of these things will become easier.  Many of the better systems (ones where the owners can afford to hire professionals to constantly troubleshoot it) can do it already.  Even the DIY systems say they can do it, but my experience is that they can only do it in very controlled conditions.

Until the reliability of smart home systems improves, take your smartphone (or Ocarina) with you.  It's dangerous to go alone.