Twitteretter

I did an interesting exercise today, at least interesting for me. I calculated the date on which I’ll publish my last Twitteretter, post 1,001. 22 nd December 2022. Firstly, this is very fitting. When growing up in Spain, 22 nd December was the start date of the Christmas holidays, packed with the excitement of the break and festivities ahead, and with the feeling of having completed an important stage, the first term of the academic year. Ending Twitteretter on such a date works serendipitously. I wonder what I will be writing about at the time. I can promise you it will not be coronavirus, hopefully because it is gone and not just because I am fed up with it as a subject, which will happen much, much sooner. I expect I will still be writing about social injustice, inequality and political cloak and dagger. I hope I will, however, also be writing about amazing achievements in science and technology and the paradigm changes they may bring to our society and politics. I look forward t...

Last night I rewatched ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the great Stanley Kubrick movie. Have you seen it? If you have not, you definitely should. It is a movie from a time when movies were different and did not all follow the same rhythm and formula. That can make it a bit hard going, but it is incredibly beautiful and interesting. It plays with many concepts which would warrant their own Twitteretters. Alien gifted human intelligence, rogue AI, space and hyperspace travelling. The last 15 minutes are mind bending, light speed travelling, time travelling, uncertainty principle… What I also find very interesting is seeing the technologies they expected to have by 2001, and the ones they completely missed. The most noticeable of these are internet and mobile devices. Humanity can colonize the moon and travel to Jupiter with a conscious AI on board, but video calling happens from an over teched phone booth paid for with a phone card. I wonder what future technologies will completely blindside us...