Twitteretter

The coronavirus outbreak and our society’s struggles to control it provide ample material for this literary endeavour. Last night, I became embroiled in a discussion about the draconian Chinese measures to control the outbreak. It was not long before QR codes, anonymity and personal freedoms were at the conversation’s centre. The narrative, you see, is that by using QR codes which locate us and check for infection exposure we relinquish our freedoms to an unacceptable level. That is, of course, a one sided view of freedom. Should my right to illusory anonymity, which I willingly surrender to major social media corporates, be defended in detriment of my neighbours’ freedom to leave their houses without fearing for their lives? We have, in the West, built altars to personal freedoms, whilst abandoning the civic duties which helped us overcome the great challenges of the past. From this viewpoint, we are decadent and, as one of my interlocutors put it, faced with this virus, cannon fodder...

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 ...

Great social, political and philosophical ideas used to be brewed at meeting venues where intellectually engaged people would gather regularly to debate and discuss. My father, a philosophy teacher and political activist, used to have one such group, where philosophy, ethics and sociology would be discussed, providing fuel for the books and articles that several members were regularly publishing. Ideas are developed, shaped and tuned by debate and presentation, even hearing yourself present your own thinking to others allows you to further it. These environments are fertile ground on which the Marxist understanding of capitalism, neoliberalism and many philosophical and ethical currents were sowed and harvested. I am missing this custom with our generation, and certainly with millennials, more used to communicating and dialogue via apps. They may exist, and I may just not be aware. If they do not, we will struggle to develop new thinking with a potential to change the society we live i...

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...

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...

Science fiction books have frequently featured gadgets which would translate different languages in real time. This was a cool idea (the weirdest would most likely be the Babel fish you insert in your ear in Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy’). Today, it is no longer an idea, and the technology is already available. It combines voice recognition and text translation and it is deployed through several hardware set ups, typically earpieces with a mic. It does not work perfectly yet, as anyone who uses Google Translate will imagine, but it is improving all the time. Our first reaction, when reading about it, is to imagine how helpful it would be on holidays, or even business meetings. But what I am really interested in is seeing whether it will foster understanding between cultures by allowing us to go directly to the source without mediation, to discuss politics, economy, etc. without language barriers. How much more informative would an unmediated Putin or Qi Jinping be? Le...

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...

I have seen several social media threads objecting to the proposed EU Recovery Plan on grounds that the funds are earmarked mainly for technology sectors related to the new economy, and it does therefore not help companies that suffered most directly from the pandemic. This reveals a misunderstanding of how the economy works. Rather than direct compensation and support (MEDE fund is for that purpose in any case, not the RF), funds given to new technology companies with the potential to dominate a growing sector multiply as these companies grow. Money is spent locally, through purchases and salaries, and reaches traditional business that way, in larger sums than the direct help. Can you imagine the amount Google employees spend at restaurants, shopping malls, car dealerships or cafes in Mountain View, or Microsoft employees in Seattle? More than direct help to restaurants, we need to grow our own next generation globally leading companies, and this is what the Recovery Fund aims to do...