LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #30:

THIS NONSENSE OF EARNING A LIVING

_“The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all humans desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.”

~ Hannah Arendt_

Some chatbots just don’t want to have fun

Recently, I wrote a few things about chatbots. Here’s an interesting story about Alisa, a chatbot/virtual assistant developed by Russian Internet-Behemoth Yandex, and how it behaves very differently from chatbots developed elsewhere.

If you say “I feel sad” to Google Assistant, it tells you: “I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug”

On contrast, if you say the same thing to Alisa, it answers: No one said life was about having fun.”

There’s more to this answer than the cliché of Russians being tough . According to sociologist Eva Illouz, the difference between the two bots is a result of using different emotional regimes to train them - Google (and Amazons Alexa) is the product of what she calls “Emotional Capitalism”, “a regime that considers feelings to be rationally manageable and subdued to the logic of marketed self-interest.”.

Russian Alisa, on the other hand, is the result of “Emotional Socialism”, a regime that takes suffering as unavoidable, and therefore as something that has to be endured instead of avoided.

What do conversational agents tell us about the culture we live in? Here’s a fascinating read on the emotional world Google Assistant, Alexa and Alisa live in, how they are trained, and what role algorithms play in emotional management.

Visualising the orientation of city streets

You probably know by now that I’m a huge fan of cities. not necessarily as an inhabitant (more on that maybe later, but on a related note: any recommendations for a winter domicile in spain?), but as a basic building block of modern human civilisation.

And civilisation means mobility, and mobility means streets, and finally here we are, at the topic of this entry:

Geoff Boeing analysed the orientation of streets of 25 US-cities(with unsurprising, but still interesting, results), and then did the same for 25 cities around the world.

Rome. Of course. Because all roads lead there. Makes sense.

I wonder how much just looking at these graphs can tell you about the history and the culture of a city.

There’s a new shape in town

It’s called “Scutoid”, and it’s really, really, really important.

This nonsense of earning a living

(Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/poetarchitecture/26806590126)_“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

~ Buckminster Fuller_

There is not much I could add to that. Except that it was written in 1970.

(Quoted by Jason Kottke)

Thank you for reading this edition of Let’s Be Fwends.

I hope you find your eudaimonia, and don’t just earn a living, but actually, truly, work, in the best sense of the word. Please high-five yourself in regular intervals, you earned it!