Reading becomes social

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I’m burning through highlighter and Post-It flags as I read Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. In the chapter titled Screening, he writes about what books have been and what they are becoming and it is good stuff.

With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow, we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we we read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. (All these tricks will require tools for finding relevant passages.) We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia-highlights, notes, questions, musings.

For years I’ve been transcribing underlined passages from books and posting them to my blog. Here are some of my favorite parts of The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly). (PDF)

Physician population aging faster than patients

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“The physician population is aging even faster than their patients, a lot faster, in fact. Fifty-two percent of orthopedists, 54% of cardiologists, 60% of psychiatrists, and two-thirds of oncologists are 55 or older. This will be the first year that more doctors retire than start practicing. […] The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2025, the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 90,000 doctors, and a dearth of specialists will account for most of the shortage.”

“On average, family doctors got a $27,000 raise in the past year, from $198,000 to $225,000, for a 13% increase. Doctors in the two other primary care categories, internal medicine and pediatrics, also had great years. Each garnered 15% bumps to $237,000 and $224,000 respectively.”

Full story at Fortune Magazine

Self-Driving Cars

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YouTube is going to need a thousand more servers for all the “Look, ma! No hands!” videos once self-driving vehicles become a reality. By some estimates, there will be 10 million self-driving cars by 2020. Shit, if it’s only _half_ that many.

You know the first thing a new owner is gonna do is record video while the car drives itself down the road. People will be eating and drinking (and fucking? Porn.hub gonna need more servers, too).

I’ve seen some amazing technology come along in my 68 years (moon landings, internet, Roombas) but none seem quite as impossible as self-driving cars. If these actually happen, the timing is almost perfect for me. With any luck at all, this tech will be ho-hum by the time I need it.

I am having a little trouble imagining how these vehicles will manage our steep hill when it’s covered in snow and ice but some really smart women and men (with slide rules have thought of that)

As for those “Look, ma!” videos… they’ll get boring soon enough and disappear, replaced by The Next Big Thing.

A blog is like a flower bed

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A website — especially a blog — is like flower bed. Stop weeding for even a few days and you have ass high weeds everywhere. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been pulling weeds here. Since starting this blog in 2002 I’ve posted about 5,700 items. These fall into four basic type:

So far I’ve deleted about 600 posts. Some got yanked because the off-site story to which they linked was gone; in some cases the embedded media (video, audio, images) stopped working; and some of the stuff I posted was just worthless (flushing sound). Of the remaining 5,000+ posts almost 700 include video and 90 have an embedded audio clip.

The most time consuming chore has been cleaning up meta data: categories and tags. I’m a bit anal on this topic and I’ll explain why.

The reason I started — and continue — blogging is so I’ll have a place I can put stuff and find it later. WordPress (the content management system this blog runs on) is great at search but with 5,000 items that doesn’t help if you don’t know what to search for. Putting each new post in one or more categories and assigning appropriate tags makes this easier.

For example, I have a category for Social Media and tags for posts about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Apple is a category… iPad, iPhone, iPod and MacBook are tags. You get the idea. If it sounds like a lot of tedious work, it is.

In some respects I’m like the guy that builds the scale model of the Taj Mahal out of Popsicle sticks in his basement. Nobody’s gonna see it but that’s not the point.

Ray Kurzweil is building a chatbot for Google

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Ray Kurzweil is building a chatbot for Google.
“He was asked when he thought people would be able to have meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence, one that might fool you into thinking you were conversing with a human being. “That’s very relevant to what I’m doing at Google,” Kurzweil said. “My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year.”

I have some questions.

  • Will my chatbot be able to suggest topics?
  • Could my chatbot ‘watch’ my YouTube channel? It could ‘learn’ a lot about me and my interests if that’s possible. Same for my flickr photo stream
  • Could I configure a sense of humor? Irony? Smartass-ishness?
  • Could I make it location aware? (“I see you didn’t go to the Coffee Zone today, Steve. Decide to stay home with the pups?)
  • My calendar (“Good morning, Steve. I see it’s been a month since you picked up Hatti’s anti-itch meds. Shall I email the vet to refill?”)
  • Can I instruct my chatbot to let me know when I start sounding whiney?
  • Can my chatbot follow what I’m reading and discuss it with me? Or offer to introduce me to others reading the same book?
  • If, after a year, I decide I’m uncomfortable having a chatbot ‘relationship,’ will there be an ethical consideration in terminating it?

I wonder if he chose to refer to this as a “chatbot” because it’s a less threatening term (and Artificial Intelligence). I have a hunch it will be (or eventually become) something far more.