Twitteretter

Modern society is characterised by risk aversion. As our resources increase, so does our ability to imagine potential risks. This represents a danger to our way of life, of which Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, already warned us in the 80s. The elimination of risk is futile, doomed to failure. But its mere existence as a desire changes the way we live, as individuals and at a social level. We elect authoritarian, populist politicians in the hope that they will, by limiting social freedoms, eliminate risks which are negligible and could therefore be ignored. Individually, we avoid activities or encounters in which we perceive a risk. We stifle the freedom of our children to grow up happy. We diet, we monitor, we stay in, we keep our children on the sofa on a sunny day. We accept abuses of the freedoms of minorities, callousness to refugees and immigrants, to those in need. We choose the certainty of a lesser life to avoid unlikely, if not imaginary, risks which never go fully away...

Writing the other day on the beauty of chess got me thinking about the risks of digital technologies to our new generations. It is not unusual for teenagers to rack up screen times of between 3 and 5 hours on their mobile devices, as a consequence of the addictiveness built by design into many of the apps they use. Before smart devices (more on this name later), this time would have been spent on pastimes such as chess, reading books or playing outdoor games, probably in a more haphazard and less dedicated fashion. Just imagine what a cumulative 3 to 5 hours per day of practice of any of these disciplines would create, chess grandmasters, erudite thinkers and elite athletes. We risk swapping those for champions in the dumb use of smart devices, with overdeveloped thumbs and passive brains. This may not be catastrophic to our future as a species, as we over time outsource complex thinking and problem solving to machines, but it does not strike me as an evolutionary step  Length:984 ...

You may not often feel like a Hollywood star in the workplace, but your career is at the same risk as theirs of the phenomenon called typecasting. From your early working life, the system, through its actors (your employers, other employers who might interview you, etc.), tries to put you in a box. You become an accountant specialised in budgeting, a speciality chemicals sales manager or a business manager for medium size businesses with a manufacturing focus, just as Bela Lugosi became a vampire or Errol Flynn a leotarded hero. This is, most importantly, liable to be very boring for you. It is not intentional, the system does not do it to you on purpose. But it does do it, because most of its actors dislike risk and don’t want to try you out at something completely different. This limits your choices to experiment and try and learn new things. But ultimately, you don’t have to accept typecasting. Instead of Lugosi, you could choose to be Oldman, instead of Flynn, Di Caprio  Length...

The title of this post is shared with a book by Rob Penn, based on the construct of Rob travelling all over the World to his favourite manufacturers of bike parts, to build his perfect bike. It’s a great idea and an enjoyable read. For me, it’s not about a specific bike, but about being on a bike. Specially, on the high roads. The great passes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and even of other, minor chains. The tunnels of Tourmalet from St Marie de Campan, the innumerable hairpins of Finestre, the desolate heights of Iseran, the majestic solitude of the climb over the last wall to the glacial cirque of Troumousse. The bike opens up landscapes in a way that no other means of transport does. Silent. Outdoor. Hard. Reaching each peak demands pain and pays back in satisfaction and awe at nature’s beauty. Every descent demands temerity and rewards with the occasional feeling of that perfect high speed line through the bends. A good bike is beautiful to look at, but even more beautiful to look fro...

Technological progress is becoming a challenge for the average human, continuously accelerating at a pace hard to keep up with. Whilst a XII century citizen would have almost immediately understood the World if suddenly transported to the end of the XVIII century, a 1930s citizen would be lost today, amidst internet, social media, continuous communications, gridlocked traffic, etc. Fast adaptation has become the sine qua non condition to success in modern society. And the pace of progress is likely to increase, a snowball rolling down a hill. The real time collaboration and knowledge sharing afforded by connectivity and the impending incorporation of artificial intelligence to problem solving efforts mean we will solve more problems, faster. At least those with technical solutions, we are perhaps slower in solving social issues, as individual behaviours adapt faster than social construct. But adapt we must, we should not miss the opportunities the golden era of technology offers us...

As you can see from the number at the beginning of this post’s title, I have been writing and publishing Twitteretter for a good while. Getting an established readership is proving extremely hard work. In fact, quite often I cannot even get my friends and family to read it. The Twitteretter format is designed to make it very easy to read and follow, as it is daily, very short and predictably so, due to its character limit. Are we really that busy that we cannot spare the time for one or two minutes of reading a day? I fear the answer is yes. There is huge competition for our attention nowadays, and it is very difficult to focus it on what is worthwhile (I am not implying Twitteretter is, that is for you to decide). It is not uncommon to finish a day feeling you have not stopped but you have not done much. Your smartphone is full of apps armed with functionality designed to catch your attention and keep you engaged. And when you engage with your phone, you disengage from all else  L...

Our technological capacity is growing at unprecedented speed. One of science’s Ithacas is enhanced longevity. Futurists like Ray Kurzwell tell us that the first humans who will live to 150 years old are walking the Earth today. Many react to this idea with concern, particularly about overpopulation, but such a change in life expectancy would also bring a change in habits, conception age, etc., which would most likely mean total population numbers will be unaffected even if life extension becomes widely accessible. It is easy to dismiss enhanced longevity as a fool’s dream, but the fact is that a longer life could be put to excellent use in the pursuit of greater knowledge, understanding, the solving of more complex problems or the creation of more beautiful objects. But most of the population are not engaged in these activities. The question we must answer is: do we want to extend life as it is today, or to change it at the same time, to give true meaning to its extension?  Length:...

Technological progress is your paradigmatic Damocles sword (if you don’t know the story that gives birth to this expression, you should read it, yet another beautiful early Greek story, but don’t google it, read the original). It brings great convenience and, in many matters, necessary support and certainty. But it has a downside, the difficulty to get lost. Google or iMaps will ensure you never deviate from the planned route, no more taking that wrong turn which will deliver you to beautiful, unexpected places. No more finding that quaint little hotel out of the way by chance, or that restaurant you stumble upon and keep going back to for many years. Technology allows us to plan and execute efficiently, and in turn threatens us with the lost opportunities of over planning and over efficiency. Intelligence (and that is still us, for now) allows us to decide when to use it, and when to leave things to chance. The choice is important, if variety and surprise still matter, which they do...

A common feature of the utopias and dystopias depicted by science fiction from the 60s and 70s was that, through technological success, humans were freed of work, which was carried out by machines. Humans freely explored their artistic and personal interest, free loving and carefree (I use free 3 times intentionally). This was also the consensus of predictions from most futurists in those days, Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley et al. Today’s reality is very different. We work longer hours than most of the population have at any time since the 1930s, chained by continuously growing demands on our time as labourers and consumers. We have exchanged citizens freedom for corporate profit, which grows exponentially as the anticipated benefits of technical progress concentrate in a few hands. We must go back to the original entente, we did not consciously forsake a realisable utopia for the profit of the few and we should not accept it willingly. We have the power to return to the old course...