TheMachine

Codeacademy is a start-up teaching people to code. It has tremendous succes. 

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made-and change the politics of jobs too

I've been going through lots of changes behind the scenes that is leading me down a new path I call "scalable living."

Situated Technologies, a project by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, is a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York.

The robotic future is here, and it looks nothing like we thought it would. Instead of humanoid, highly-intelligent robots that do our bidding, the future is increasingly one of robotic swarms, robotic quadrotors, and tiny robots no larger than insects that perform surgery.

Overcoming spinal cord injuries (I learned a lot about the spinal cord from the first segment, e.g. the systems that control walking are at the base of the spinal column, the brain has little to do with it), remote brain controlled mechanical hands, self-directed robots, and so on:

Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America's future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. 

n a forceful, hard-hitting policy brief, Executive Director Ann Mettler and Senior Fellow Anthony Williams look at the deep-seated changes afoot in our economy.

Canon Inc. is moving toward fully automating digital camera production in an effort to cut costs - a key change being played out across Japan, a world leader in robotics.

The Chicago Fed examines the evidence and says: we find limited evidence of skills mismatch They do find a few places where a mismatch might be present, but this is not the problem in most sectors (it's lack of demand). [via David Wessel]

New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris talked with artist Alex Rivera. The writer-director of the 2008 sci-film Sleep Dealer, Rivera has been working with drones since the 1990s, when he piloted a small quad-copter called the Low Drone back and forth over the Mexican-American border.

"n a recent Wall Street Journal interview about college costs and online learning, Stanford University President John Hennessy said, "What I told my colleagues is there's a tsunami coming. I can't tell you exactly how it's going to break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not to just stand there." "

I'd always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn't really know how. The original title of the talk was "The Robot-Readable World", but this didn't really sit right with me; it's one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

For advanced economies, such imbalances would likely lead to more long- term and permanent joblessness. More young people without post-secondary training would fail to get a start in the job market and older workers would drop out because they don't qualify for jobs that are being created. The polarization of incomes between high- and low-skill workers could become even more pronounced, slowing the advance in national living standards, and increasing public-sector burdens and social tensions. In some advanced economies, less-skilled workers could very well grow up poorer than their parents, in real terms.

America is transforming before our eyes, and with our focus on the short-term economic crisis, we are blind to what might very well be the most fundamental economic shift of the past 50 years: the nine-to-five, 40-hour-week job with benefits and some security is fast going the way of the compact disc.

*This piece was originally published, in Italian, in the exceedingly innovative (and very Italian) website "Che Futuro." *As somebody who spends a lot of time in non-Anglophone countries, this is a situation that I see commonly. I rarely see it as well-described as this.

The world just changed yesterday. You probably didn't notice. But I guarantee strategists at Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google did. What happened? Qualcomm shipped a new contextual awareness platform for cell phones.

Over the last year I've reviewed several ~1900 era future dystopias, such as Metropolis, We, and Pictures of the Socialist Future. I wanted to see fears of the industrial revolution, from an era when that revolution was still young enough for people could see things from a farmer era point of view, and yet old enough that people had some idea of where the revolution was going.

Dixit on 'the 21st Century's Economic Hurricane', by New Economist: Princeton emeritus professor Avinash Dixit is always worth reading, even when he is speculating about the economy over the next hundred years. Likening economic forecasting to weather forecasting (plenty of caveats and uncertainty), his approach is suitably skeptical. Here's how he kicks off:

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan and keeping track of how many steps I've walked. The question is, as it has always been: now what?