Nanoassemblers, and the post-scarcity world that they would enable, have been used in SF by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, among others. Whatever we can imagine such a world being like, we’re sure to fall short of the reality (if it ever becomes possible).
My novella Gu takes a slightly different tack – programmable matter – but more or less systematically imagines some of the impacts, in the format of a documentary. Again, I’m sure I missed a lot, just because I’m embedded in a society where things are made in a certain shape and stay that shape.
1. You know those fairy tales where it looks like you’re in a beautiful palace full of richly dressed people eating delicacies, and when you put the ointment on your eyes you see that it’s a hovel full of people dressed in rags eating slops?
2. You could live a full, and social, life, travel widely, have all sorts of adventures, without ever leaving your small, cheap apartment. Which, depending how you want to play it, could be a cover for a deteriorating dystopia (see also idea #1) or a celebration of the virtual riches of a future life. It might be interesting to write a story that plays out both ways at once.
3. Might this technology slow, even reverse, the several-thousand-year-old trend for the population to drain into cities and stay there, just as urban dwellers are becoming the majority? After all, if you can have everything that a city dweller has without leaving your small town, without the inconveniences of city living, why move?
4. Kabuki drones. This is an idea I’ve had for a while: little spiderlike drones that pick physical things up and bring them to you, and that are filtered out of your virtual perception, so that from your point of view the objects just come to your hand when you want them, as if by magic.
Goodreads have done a roundup of literacy-related charities. Most of them are specifically US, but there are some international ones, if literacy is something you want to help promote. It has a lot of leverage for improving people’s lives.
This makes sense to me. Not only does a dynamic, innovative economy involve a lot of disruption which requires supporting people as they transition out of jobs that are disappearing into new ones that are coming into existence, but being an entrepreneur is risky. If you weren’t already independently wealthy, would you take the risk of losing your home and your healthcare with no backup? A few people would, but a lot wouldn’t, and that’s potential innovation that everyone is missing out on.
Originally shared by Deborah Teramis Christian
“[A]s numerous Republican lawmakers have made clear, tax reform is only the first part of a broader effort to begin dismantling key components of the social safety net. And yet. . . the old doctrine that the safety net is always and everywhere antithetical to growth is beginning to be reassessed. Dawning instead, as we have observed elsewhere, is a recognition that a high-tech economy fueled by disruptive innovation actually requires a stronger safety net, if only to maintain the public’s tolerance for its inherent dislocations.
Well, that’s my 200th submission since 2012: a reprint to Cast of Wonders.
Forty different pieces, 200 submissions, 161 rejections, 20 acceptances, and I’ve made $1,621.41 USD. (I love The Submission Grinder and how it helps me keep track.)
There may be a flaw in all magic, but there aren’t many flaws in this book. Characters, pacing, worldbuilding and copy editing are all excellent, and it’s pretty close to my own Gryphon Clerks books in its setup. If you enjoy those, you may well enjoy this.
“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions. More importantly, it seems to me that artificially inflating the importance of the few female authors that might have existed would falsify the historical record. After all, the whole point of the feminist critique is that female voices were suppressed. This suppression is important to talk about, but you can’t rely on the suppressed voices in order to do so.”
I…
The…
Ehhh.
Read the whole article. It does have some interesting, and difficult-to-resolve, points about academic freedom, but especially in light of the quoted statement I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the professor just doesn’t get it.
Originally shared by Laura Gibbs
When I read articles like this, it makes me very glad that I have opted instead for building courses in which the students choose the reading, and it is my job to find a truly wide variety of readings that I can make available to them. The students then choose, and the students learn from their own choices as well as from seeing the choices made by the students with whom they are interacting through their blogs and projects, etc. This top-down approach (by professor and/or by committee) does not appeal to me at all. As for the attitude of the professor, every time I have challenged myself to improve my range of reading choices by going out and looking for more, I have often surprised myself by the great things I found by looking. It sounds to me like he is not looking very hard…
