🧫Lab one step closer to understanding how life started on Earth: While the question of “why do we exist?” may be far more difficult to answer, we may be inching a bit closer to answering the “how” of our existence. Researchers at Simon Fraser university isolated a protein known as RNA Polymerase which they believe to have been instrumental in the chemical reactions that led to the formation of DNA. This development may help us further estimate the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life. (650 words)
🤖The robots are coming for your office: Conversations about the future of work and automation have been something human beings have been thinking about for a while. While the emphasis of said discourse has mostly been about the working class, it’s become far more apparent that the heuristics involved in a lot of “Knowledge Work” are going to be far more automatable than a lot of physical labor ever could be. This point had been made note of by authors such as Richard and Daniel Susskind in their book The Future Of the Professions. This podcast/transcript is an exploration of this particular theorization and possible solutions to it. (1 hour)
🇪🇸Spain Is Going to Trial a 4-Day Work Week. Could the Idea Go Mainstream Post-Pandemic?: The idea of a 4-day work week has stuck with me ever since I read Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. There’s a growing sense that a lot of the efficiency gains that we have gained through technology, have merely been used to make work a lot more pervasive. Work doesn't stop at the office. It persists in emails, zoom calls, etc. In all this, there’s also the sense that the work we do is far less impactful; that the increased hours a lot of people work now is showing diminishing returns. All this and more is spurning a renewed desire for a reduced workweek. In Spain, which currently has a strong desire to follow through with utopian ideas, a 4-day workweek is increasingly likely. Are there concerns? There always are. But at the end of the day, one rarely ever finds out whether those concerns are justified until one fucks around and finds out. The world will surely be watching Spain as it proceeds with this. (1721 words)
🚁AI Could Enable 'Swarm Warfare' for Tomorrow's Fighter Jets: There’s an increasing desire to automate warfare. Why? Processing time and execution. It takes an automated system with powerful enough hardware far less time to come up with an optimal solution in a given context. Place such a system in a scenario in which you have multiple life-or-death scenarios you could save… and take way more lives depending on which one chooses. The future of warfare in all its technical glory is bound to be frightening in more ways than we can imagine. (1239 words)
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