Scott Adams's Blog, page 372

Future Jobs

In the early eighties I had a neighbor who studied computer programming in college but didn't pursue it as a career because he believed it had no future. His reasoning was that software coders were the future secretaries of the world, someday doing little more than rearranging the code written by those who came before. He figured the pay for programmers would approach minimum wage in 15 years or so.

We're still waiting for that to happen, but I think of his prediction whenever I see young peo...

Wikipedia on Autopilot

Do you think that artificial intelligence will ever reach a level where Wikipedia could write itself?

For that to be possible, all information that would ever be useful as source material for Wikipedia would need to be digitized and available on the Internet. That seems inevitable. I think we can agree that all of the source material will someday be on the Internet.

I can imagine a future law, at least in the U.S., that makes all published information available to Wikipedia's search engines ...

Shape Shifters

No one knows when the first Shape Shifters appeared on Earth, but we know they became aggressive at about the same time homo erectus acquired language skills, 1.8 million years ago.

The Shape Shifters were not like any of the species that came before. They could exist as an arrangement of almost any sort of matter. Their favorite habitats were brains, tree materials, and magnetic environments.

For the Shape Shifters, traveling and reproducing were part of the same process. They moved in packs...

Phone

For historical reasons, the device in your pocket or purse - the one that you use to browse the Internet and send email, is called a "phone." We need a new name for that thing.

Cellphone and Smartphone are words that recognize the historical roots of the device while making things worse. "Mobile phone" is archaic. Those are some ugly words. And all of those labels have the problem of making the phone feature seem highest in importance while it trends less so every day. Ask a teen how often he...

Future Generations Steal from Themselves

One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products. The problem with this analysis is that young adults have most of the guns and muscles. So isn't the younger generation complicit in stealing from itself?

Imagine a 20-something, muscular thug on the street, with a loaded gun in his waistband. A 60-year old banker with...

The Illusion of Winning

Let's say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning.

But I don't see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball to be predetermined, to about 95% certainty, based on who has practiced that specific skill the most over his lifetime. The remaining 5% is mostly luck, and playing a best of five series eliminates most of the luck too.

I've spent a rid...

The Coolness of Corduroy Explained

Yesterday I asked you to read an unusual paragraph and tell me how it made you feel. If you haven't already done so, please read yesterday's post before continuing.

Waiting...okay.

The unusual paragraph was neither hypnosis nor random. I wrote it, and the wording is engineered for a specific purpose. It's designed to activate different areas of your brain all at once.

The paragraph starts by activating the language part of your brain, obviously. Then it made you curious. Then your analytical ...

Larger Than the Coolness of Corduroy

Suppose a small red noise surrounds a concept that is faster than granite and bends like the distance. You want to wear its talents and drink its red. But you can't bend the view that your rushing is a pleasure and your texture sounds like the feel of aroma. Suddenly a noise drips into a clear blur and the wind feels tight. You see a three-pointed scent out of the corner of your head and your spine goes fresh. This must be the smoothness that everyone is so loudly ignoring. The secret rubs ...

Building a Green Home

In case you missed my article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend about building a green home...

Comic FAIL

My Dilbert strip on Friday got the lowest reader rating ever: 2.5 stars out of 5. Part of the problem is that the published size of the so-called art was too small for you to see what was in the CEO's 's shirt pocket.

 
Here's a zoom on the CEO. He has a tiny regulator in his pocket. Try to imagine that the CEO's shirt has a trap door in the back of the pocket so the regulator can turn around and get a snack whenever he wants. It's efficient.

 

Yes, I get it. The comic still blows. It's g...