... or why Agatha Christie could afford to hire two servants, but not buy a car.

It boils down to an economic principle first elucidated by William Baumol. Although not all jobs enjoy the same increases in productivity from automation, the wages of the jobs that aren't so affected are pulled up by the increase in productivity of the jobs that are ( Read more... )

Here's another interesting discussion panel topic from Tampa Bay Comic ConMy response is predicated on parsing the title as a portmaneau of "cosplay" and "parenting," and draws upon the discussion of people feeling as if they're just LARPing their way through life ( Read more... )

Here's another interesting panel discussion topic from this year's Worldcon

And from everything that blew up with the Dragon Awards this past week, it's obviously still a controversial topic ( Read more... )

As we look at the outcry against Large Language Model art and text generating bots, it seems that some of the extraordinary vitriol (far beyond the legal questions of IP and copyright violation or the ethical questions that grow from them) is fear -- specifically, the fear of being replaced, of being rendered irrelevant, of having one's livelihood ( Read more... )

In school we learned that the Luddites were afraid of industrialization, and carried out campaigns of senseless destruction to fight the inevitable. The very term "luddite" has become a pejorative for a backward-lotoking person who rejects progress.

However, a new author has suggested a a more nuanced view of the objections of skilled craftsmen to ( Read more... )

Way back in the late 1980's, when I was writing the early versions of the saga of the Energy Wars, I anticipated ubiquitous cellphones. Not well thought-out, but at least the idea of the phone going with the person rather than being attached to a place, and it also being a radio and music player ( Read more... )

Recently there was a survey asking people how many Americans were working from home as the pandemic wore on. Interestingly enough, many respondents grossly overestimated the percentageWhen we take a closer look at the data, it turns out that many of these respondents are in fields where it is relatively easy to work from home. As a result, most of ( Read more... )

Speculations on how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the longterm population patterns of urbanization. The last several decades have seen an accelerating movement toward ever bigger apartment blocks in the world's major cities -- but could outbreaks of disease like this lead to a movement to less crowded ways of living?

( Read more... )

Like it or not, the human brain is the product of millions of years of evolution in environments in which the ability to identify and categorize potential dangers in a matter of seconds could be critical to survival. As pre-human and early human societies became more complex, it was no longer just predators like lions and hyenas -- rival tribes ( Read more... )