Robin Sloan (he of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore) has hacked together a neural net trained on a corpus of old pulp magazines and a text editor to make… a kind of art project, I guess?

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

Justice as a service. And a robot doesn’t care what you look like.

Originally shared by Travis Bird

Robot lawyers?

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/robot-lawyers-dutch-conflict-resolution-technology-on-its-way/7572488

An intriguing approach from Hugh Howey: take an idea (he’s mainly talking about SFinal ideas) and tell the story about how it’s broken. Not necessarily how it breaks, even, but how it’s already broken and it’s up to your character to deal with that.

Now, Howey writes dystopias, which is why I don’t read his stuff, and his approach is not the only way to generate a story from an idea. But it’s interesting.

http://www.hughhowey.com/an-idea-broken/

This is an area of science that fascinates me, which I’ve used in several stories. The first, “Taking Pro,” is in the Futuristica 2 anthology, due out in November.

I have another that I’m working on, though, which has come to a stop because I’m conflicted over my own conclusions, in some of the ways that the article points out as issues for the technology. If I can portray that conflict effectively in the story, it’ll be a very powerful one.

http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/scientists-discover-brain-circuits-attached-to-mood-and-how-to-hack-them

Via Deb Chachra’s newsletter, a positive response to Brexit and similar disruptions that goes to the heart of the issue.

https://medium.com/essays-and-non-fiction/time-to-build-an-extremely-short-manifesto-d53af6a35b6f

Does whatever spider silk can.

Originally shared by Laston Kirkland

Spider silk. No spiders, modified yeast. Already making it by the kilo, planning to make it by the ton next year.

http://qz.com/708298/synthetic-spider-silk-could-be-the-biggest-technological-advance-in-clothing-since-nylon

Even if some of the actual proposed policies are questionable, at least lawmakers are thinking about the issues.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/22/technology/europe-robots-taxes-jobs/index.html