IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Are we ready for intimacy with androids? Alex Mar from Wired delves into the evolving realness of robots.
The girl does not respond. She is patient and obedient and listens closely. But something inside is telling her to resist. “Do you feel strange?” her father asks. Even he must admit that the robot is not entirely believable. Eventually, after a few long minutes, the girl’s breathing grows heavier, and she announces, “I am so tired.” Then she bursts into tears. That night, in a house in the suburbs, her father uploads the footage to his laptop for posterity. His name is Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he believes this is the first record of a modern-day android.
2. The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare
When David Zax was offered a free mattress, he really didn’t expect to be drawn into a world of legal battles and digital mayhem.
So it was true. I scratched my head. Casper was on its way to becoming a 750-million-dollar company. It was the hottest of the bed-in-a-box disruptors, with investments from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Nas. And it was picking on some skinny blogger from Arizona?
3. Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded
A secretive group of women came together last March to form a sisterhood. But one participant wasn’t ready for it would take to get in.
Since the late 1990s, an estimated 16,000 people have enrolled in courses offered by Nxivm (pronounced Nex-e-um), which it says are designed to bring about greater self-fulfillment by eliminating psychological and emotional barriers. Most participants take some workshops, like the group’s “Executive Success Programs,” and resume their lives. But other people have become drawn more deeply into Nxivm, giving up careers, friends and families to become followers of its leader, Keith Raniere, who is known within the group as “Vanguard.”
4. How Silicon Valley Erases Your Individuality
Writer Franklin Foer feels that the monopolies of tech companies is stripping away our individuality.
More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They think they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? In annual addresses and town hall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature — a view that they intend for the rest of us to adhere to. Page thinks the human body amounts to a basic piece of code: “Your program algorithms aren’t that complicated,” he says. And if humans function like computers, why not hasten the day we become fully cyborg?
With the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria came an unforeseen consequence – the re-emergence of polio.
Most tellingly, it is in the badlands of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremists of northern Nigeria, along with stretches of the Pakistan and Afghanistan border controlled by the Taliban, where the planet’s last nurseries of wild poliovirus are found: no-go zones where terrorists actively stop vaccine from reaching babies and children.
Comedian Sean Hughes passed away on Monday. He was just 51. Michael Hann was a friend of the Irish comic and reflects on Hughes’ complicated life.
The last time I saw Sean, he was not drinking. It was peculiar, spending an evening alone in a pub with him, just a mineral water in front of him. My main memories are of large groups of people and large amounts of alcohol: one peculiar night getting very drunk with “some friends” who turned out to be most of the cast of EastEnders; the night a group of us were doing a pub quiz and Gem Archer, newly installed in Oasis, walked in – everyone turned around to stare, and Hughes observed, loudly: “He’s in here all the fucking time but until now he’s just been that cunt from Heavy Stereo.” As was often the way with Sean, it was a joke, but it felt as though it was delivered with teeth.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Private prisons are a multi billion dollar industry in the US. Mother Jones writer Shane Bauer spent four months undercover as a guard at one such prison. His revelations are three hours of incredible reading more than deserving of the investment.
The lock down lasts a total of 11 days. When it ends, Corner Store stands at the bars, waiting for me to let him out to work the floor. I ignore him. He pleads, but I am unbending. I have become convinced that he thinks he has influence over me, though I can’t articulate why. I become suspicious of his friendliness and wonder if he is manipulating me. I start to talk to him like every other inmate and he looks at me with confusion. When he lingers too long as I hold the gate open for chow, I slam it shut and let him stew. He calls my name as I walk away. I feel a twinge of guilt, but it lasts only momentarily.
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