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Archive for future

The Return to Delicacy

May 18, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Return to Delicacy

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/bocusini-will-3d-print-your-food-like-a-fine-robotic-pastry-chef/?ncid=rss

There needs to be a place for whimsy, even in our food.  It would be an easy thing to reduce all of our nutritional needs to a foil-pack of slightly gluey nutrients (in-fact, Soylent has done just that).  But for many people now, and in the future, there is a connection with the physicality of food that satisfies almost as much as the contents of the food itself.

Will this kind of delicate confectionery construction take over your supermarket shelves?  Will everything we consume be reduced to frippery?  Just like some people like their sandwich meat thin sliced and others thick, the 3d printed food will be a delight to a portion of the market, and a pain-in-the-ass to the rest.

 

 

Not For Us

May 14, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Not For Us

http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2015/05/meta-analysis-finds-self-braking-cars-reduce-collisions-by-38-percent/

I’m intimately familiar with programmed responses and how changing the technology that trained them can f*ck you up.  When I started driving, the standard practice was never to slam on your brakes when you got into trouble.  You pumped your brakes.  It kept them from locking up, it made your taillights flash to warn the car behind you.  It helped keep you from locking up all over so that you could continue to react as you slid, in the unstoppable grip of physics, down the roadway to your certain doom.

Then the technology got better.  Cars have computers that take care of the brake management for you (usually) so pumping the brake in most modern cars has become counter intuitive.  It f*ucks up the computer, throws it’s braking off sync.  So now, after decades of pumping the brake, I now have to do the opposite.  I have to stomp ont he brake and hope the computer is smarter than I am (let me point out, I work with computers, so I am intimately familiar with “smart” machines and the misconceptions that go with them).

What they describe here in the Ars Technica article is one step further.  They are discussing systems to handle the braking for the the driver, which means no foot-stomping at all.  That’s an even more drastic change than the one we went through from pump to stomp.

 

 

 

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