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The Opportunity of Automation

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” – Dori Lessing in The Golden Notebook.

Automation will make most jobs obsolete. Rather than mourn the loss of the 9 to 5, we should see this as an opportunity to liberate humanity from the need to work for somebody else to survive. Coupled with universal basic income, it should be seen as a chance for every individual in society to more fully realize their potential.

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Microsoft on Friday unceremoniously revealed new prototype augmented-reality (AR) glasses that look like a normal pair of thick-framed glasses. The emergence of the technology indicates Microsoft has been thinking ways to go beyond the bulky and costly HoloLens headset it unveiled two years ago.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” Microsoft researchers Andrew Maimone, Andreas Georgiou, and Joel Kollin wrote in a paper describing the glasses containing holographic display prototypes, which employ a technique called digital holography. The researchers will talk about their work at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles in August.

The paper comes a few weeks after Facebook talked about building AR glasses. Snap, which sells camera sunglasses for its Snapchat messaging app, has introduced AR software features, although it has not yet indicated it’s working on proper AR glasses. Apple is also thought to be developing AR technology.

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Of the many ‘white whales’ that theoretical physicists are pursuing, the elusive magnetic monopole — a magnetic with only one pole — is one of the most confounding.

Compared to the Higgs boson in terms of its potential impact on modern physics, the magnetic monopole has been on scientists’ minds for even longer. And now our best shot at finding it just got weird — two phenomena that resemble the magnetic monopole have become one.

If you’re unfamiliar with the magnetic monopole, it’s a hypothetical particle that’s long been predicted by quantum physics, but no one has ever been able to prove that it exists.

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Being a pilot, you get to see a bunch of beautiful sights from above. Being a pilot for a South American airline, you also get to witness the stunning phenomena of storms as your job requires flying over regions that experience them.

Meet Santiago Borja Lopez — a Quito, Ecuador-based pilot who works for Ecuador Airlines. Whenever the pilot is off-duty, he pulls out his camera to capture the magnificent sights he witnesses in air. From incredible storms to even lightning bolts — the photos he captures are truly magnificent. Keep on scrolling to take a look and follow Santiago’s journey on Instagram. You can read more about one of Santiago’s shots in our previous article.

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