We are doing something about it, but it's not very good. Look at what is happening to the economy - there is a proliferation of low wage (minimum wage if your country has it) jobs that do not generate enough income to support the worker. The state then taxes the remaining middle class workers to top up the wages of those workers so that they can survive on those low wages. Everyone is getting smushed into a barely surviving precariat group - it's the death of the middle class.

The thing you have to remember is that robots will never drop to zero cost. All that has to happen is for wages to fall enough that a human worker is still cheaper than the robot. Once you start subsidising wages, this price clearing level can fall well below subsistence. If you continue to do this then you can keep humans in jobs as long as you want.

But think about that world - you have humans doing jobs that robots could do, because you are artificially trying to keep them busy doing shitty jobs. Meanwhile you are destroying the middle class to enable this.

This is essentially what we are doing. You can see the results playing out already.

I don't even think this is some grand conspiracy from the 'elites'. It's just what happens when you build a whole society where everyone is expected to work until they drop, and then you automate away all the work. I don't know how you fix this without some completely new social structure. UBI might be it but, honestly, I have no idea. Ideological shifts are never simple nor painless.

The issue is that China understood how to automate things like assembling phones, because they are making all the phones. In the West, there was a lot of steady progress towards automation before we started moving everything to China in the early 2000s. Then all that institutional knowledge got lost because it was cheaper to just get some Chinese workers to make it for us.

IMHO this is such a huge problem for the west. I have tried to make things in the west and you quickly run in to issue where some part can only be purchased from a Chiense company. You then realise that the Chinese company has people who speak perfectly good English, will actually get back to you (unlike many Western companies unless you are from a big name brand), and that they can do quality (if you're prepared to pay for it). You then just think, well, if I have to get some of the stuff made in China, then I might as well just do the whole thing.

I mean, Shenzhen is insane. If you are buying and LCD display, and you need a custom flex cable, you can get in touch with the company that is making the raw polyamide tape and visit their factory if you need too. In the west you used to be able to do that, now all roads lead to 'we need to talk to our supplier in the far east'.

I don't know how the west fixes this. I've talked to people in governance and they are stuck in the 'oh China will build the robots but we will make the software', which is nothing more than a colonialist attitude towards what the Chinese are capable of.

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Imagine telling someone back in the 80/90s that in 2025 we'd have driverless taxis that could run from renewable electricity, but people would be bitching and trying to get them shutdown because of the noise from their backup sensors.

We truely live in the age of stupidity.

I honestly think dynamic pricing is just the dumbest MBA think that has ever been dreamed up. We used to have dynamic pricing at markets, and you had to spend ages haggling over everything. The development of the 'price tag' - particularly in western countries - was a massive efficiency increase for the average consumer.

Now we a heading back to the haggling era - when booking flights I have to regularly mess around with user-agents and switching to mobile to check I'm not being scammed by the algorithms. It's just painful, and the biggest effect is that it puts me off bothering to buy anything. Especially for low cost providers, the whole thing was that you could buy from them knowing they had the best price.

It's the same thing with the 'pricing ladder'. It's just dumb. If you don't have a decent enough feature to distinguish between your 'premium' product and your normal one then stop confusing your customers with made up upgrade tiers. Many times I've been dragged up the pricing ladder to the point I decide that it's too much to spend and I just don't buy anything. I mean, dragging people up a pricing ladder by telling them the model they were looking at isn't quite good enough is going to do that.

I still remember the glory days of Apple when you went and bought the 'iPhone' and it was the one you'd seen on the keynote, and you didn't have to know all the specs because it would do everything they'd shown you.

Money. There was that AI guy who went to Meta and got something like a $100million sign on bonus a few months back.

I would imagine the payout this guy is getting is absolutely stratospheric.

You're absolutely right, but the reality is that most people really don't care. I mean, I'm in the tech world, and I gave up caring about privacy a long time ago. I don't do anything particularly dodgy, so if Google wants to know what I had for lunch good for them.

I'm not saying this should be acceptable, but the writing was on the wall for privacy a decade ago when we all started readily carrying around personal trackers and giving our data to Google in exchange for not having to pay.

I admire Apple for holding the line on this (though they had commercial reasons to do so), but my guess is they will water it all down now that it is affecting their ability to compete.

I've given trying to explain this to anyone. I mean, I'm pretty sure I learnt it in high school statistics. Yet it is incredible how much advice and even government policy comes from correlative studies alone.

My biggest bug bear is around second hand mattresses for infants. AFAIK there is one study that showed a small correlation between households that used second hand mattresses and an increase in sudden-infant-death syndrome.

Now, the obvious cause there is that second hand mattress use will be correlated with household income, and low income house holds have all sorts of material disadvantages that could explain an increase in SIDs. Yet if you ignore that and say it's something physically associated with the mattress, then you start getting lots of weird explanations around micro-biome exposure. This is just grasping at straws, especially when you consider that a LOT of people reuse baby clothes. Even in rich households it's not unreasonable to reuse clothes between siblings or pass them on to friends.

But anyway, there are millions of children's mattresses thrown out every year because of that study, and obviously nobody involved in the mattress industry is interested in doing further studies.

This sort of thing pops up all the time. I just have to ignore it because it drives me crazy.

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.

It's far from indisputable. Indeed, it's hotly disputed within the aviation industry. That does NOT mean that it was a short-circuit (although that is a theory that is under investigation), it merely means that "indisputable" is not the correct term to use here. You can argue probabilities or reasonableness, but you CANNOT argue "indisputable" when specialists in the field in question say that it is, in fact, disputed.

If you were to argue that the most probable cause was manual, then I think I could accept that. If you were to argue that Occam's Razor required that this be considered H0 and therefore a theory that must be falsified before others are considered, I'd not be quite so comfortable but would accept that you've got to have some sort of rigorous methodology and that's probably the sensible one.

But "indisputable"? No, we are not at that stage yet. We might reach that stage, but we're not there yet.

I mean a country is by definition sovereign, so the idea of 'legal precedent' is meaningless. You probably mean that it's not in keeping with the 'rules based global trading order' which is true, but that was/is simply a post-war construct that is getting pretty shaky these days. You're not supposed to be able to slap tariffs on whoever you feel like to strong arm them into doing your bidding either, but here we are.

Ultimately the government of India can fine Apple, or whoever they want, whatever they feel like if their voters don't kick up a fuss. I imagine that Apple has tried to appeal to the government and hasn't made any progress, so they're going for a constitutional ruling since this has authority over the legislature.

But I think Apple still has a lot of leverage here. They probably can't pull out of the country, though I imagine they could threaten it and see if the government calls their bluff. But they have large factory investments there (through Foxconn), people like their products, and I imagine lots of Indians work on products tied to the Apple ecosystem. Closing all of that out would not be good for the Indian economy. There is also wider leverage from the US government. I'm sure Tim Apple can find an even bigger piece of gold to gift to the administration.

Oh there will be plenty. You can imagine a one-hit-wonder type pop-star will jump on this to become the first 'AI artist' and then a bunch of tik-tok artists will jump on that bandwagon as well. Or a 90s pop star trying to get back into the limelight. I could easily see something like the estate of Michael Jackson, Dolores O'Riordan or Amy Winehouse jumping on the bandwagon if it brings in the $$$ - it just depends on who owns their rights in the end. Of course when it gets good enough, you bet that a record label will release a new Elvis single using it.

In the end this AI stuff is going to become the backing track at the supermarket, cafe and airport. Honestly, I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. There is only so much Robbie Williams and Spice Girls I can handle when I'm shopping. If they just have some generic bland backing music that removes the awkwardness of silence then so be it. Realistically, playing something like Animals as Leaders, or some free jazz in those settings would be entirely inappropriate anyway.