People who get anxious about robots and AI taking jobs are usually worrying about the wrong thing.

The thing to worry about is how to structure our society to best distribute the vast amounts of leisure time and resources freed by automation, not how to STOP THE ROBOTS.

Of course, in the USA, I don't expect the Republican party to fully grasp and understand the huge opportunity here until way too late. I'm only slightly more confident in the Democratic party.

(as an aside: a few years ago I posted a quote in image form from…someone at world bank maybe? addressing this very issue, but Google, who should be excellent at this, makes searching your own posts extremely difficult)

People who watch porn have more gender egalitarian attitudes than those who do not watch porn according to 24,000 men and women surveyed between 1975 and 2010.

For some reason Google+ doesn't want to make the regular link to this paper, that includes the page title, summary, and images…so just click this link: http://goo.gl/KFXTEJ

Why cryonics makes sense to those who sign up.

Ok, so TayTweets is an AI Microsoft put on Twitter that learns from Twitter conversations.

This is perhaps the best thing any AI has ever said:

How Netflix uses computer vision to crop, resize, and select images to help people select movies and shows to watch.

In the next decades this is going to cause increased taxes on the young and/or cut benefits for the old.

Possible future:

Many diseases are especially dangerous for the old. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise. Elizabethkingia anophelis, the bacteria that has infected 50+ people in the Midwest USA and killed nearly 20 of them or some other contaigon goes on to kill large swaths of elderly citizens across the USA and saving social security to the sad relief of other citizens. 50 years later the country is back in the same boat because people and politicians suck at planning for the future.

Domestic policy chief for Richard Nixon about declaring the war on drugs that Nixon started and has been going on in the US and across the world for the past 40 years:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

I'm somewhere in the middle of Season 2.

I was 14 years old when I first starting watched X-Files in the early 90s and back then I just though it was so cool.

I still think it's cool, but now that I'm older and interested in philosophy, rationality, science I find a lot of the conversations and actions almost … uncomfortable.

Fox Mulder is almost always on intellectually untenable ground.