This is interesting. I had always assumed, as the article says, that depression was a "first world problem". I don't say that to be flip, either - clinical depression is a real disease and should be taken seriously. But given the pace of life, broad sense of helplessness, and just enough leisure time for uncomfortable…

This is a great point that gets right to the root of the world's current processed food problem. Food science as we know it today was developed in the 1950s and 60s, by people who grew up during the Great Depression. Things like TV dinners, fast food, and shelf-stable condiments were miracles of science that promised…

Yes, it is. But – at least at the moment – there's a big gap between the intuitive human method of connecting disparate influences to make new creative work and an algorithm that randomly assembles pre-selected pieces. Robots can definitely build a house out of wooden blocks, and they'll only get better at is as time…

Porcupines are stealing our jobs.

Very interesting data! I wish I could remember where I read/heard this, but I recall a geneticist a few years back saying that, even though they come from every place and ethnicity, Americans are all united by the fact that, at some point, our ancestors picked up and moved to another country. The geneticist suggested…

This is just offensive. These people should be our enemies. They're unpatriotic, they don't share our values, and they're destroying our culture and way of life from the inside out. And now Marvel is promoting one of them to our children as a so-called "superhero"? Please, Marvel, stop putting characters from New…

Open question: What about design jobs? Will a computer ever be able to design a table or a building or a car, or even a human-usable UI? What about squishier creative tasks, like writing a novel or composing an opera? Obviously all these things can already be done using computers, and I'm aware of several projects in…

I was wondering what those were from. Thanks!

I've been thinking about this exact problem for a while. In the moment, we blame the Recession for high global unemployment, but perhaps historians will look at this period and say, "Oh, they automated labor to the point where the human population simply outstripped the number of available jobs."

Yes.

If they change the title to MOON PRISON, I'm in.

Awesome! There are some very cool 1960s and art nouveau design influences going on in these.

I mean, the screenplay was literally an unrelated script called "Hardwired", which the producers retooled by adding the Three Laws and swapping some character names. It's an homage to Asimov in the way say, Data from Star Trek or Bishop in Alien are homages.

Precisely. I recall reading somewhere that a similar protocol is sometimes used for lethal injections – more than one person administers the drug at the same time, but only one of them is really delivering the lethal drug.

Or an amazing band name. Trademark it, quick!

Yes. There's mounting evidence that children who grow up in abusive domestic situations or areas with high rates of violent crime suffer from PTSD. The disorder is not limited to the battlefield. This article is a good primer, and contains links to some further reading: http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/in…

(Please nobody do this.)

Here's my equally horrifying dystopian solution, cribbed from Ender's Game: indiscriminately mix training simulations and real-world sorties, and don't tell the operators which is which. Maybe 3 out of every 5 missions are fake, and only 2 are real. How's the operator to say which was which? Maybe he killed someone…

Uh oh...

"I, Robot" is a perfectly good sci-fi action flick that just so happens to have the title of an unrelated collection of groundbreaking short stories from the 40s.