I'm gonna bet that a large part of AR, XR, Mirrorworld and spatial computing, will be spatial audio. Not just stereo sound, not just 3d surround sound, but spatial sound. That means virtual sound that is very specific in its locations, like real sound is. If a cricket is cricketing, it is perceived as being in a very exact spot, which we hear, and our brain translates, as RIGHT THERE. When we turn our head, the sound remains where it is. Like in movies, spatial audio will be at least 50% of the immersive experience. Right now I am imagining that our smart glasses will have some sort of sound component that will direct spatial sound into our ears. Perhaps they will be speakers or bone conducting vibrators on the glasses stems.

It will not only be spatial sound, it will be always-on sound. That is important. Always-on is essential. A couple of things can come from that.

•  We can have real time language translation whispering into our ears. This will be a boon for the developing world and for travellers. I believe real time translation will accelerate the global economy by several orders because it allows so many with skills other than English to join the global economy remotely.

•  We can have Jeeves, or the AI in Her, or  a better Alexa whispering into our ears as we work and go about our day. I don't think we'll rely on an audio-only interface, but I do bet that audio will be a huge part of the interface. I think today's users of the Airpods are getting an early glimpse of always on audio power.

• Life will have a soundtrack. Yes, people will listen to their playlists, plural, perhaps even having one for different functions or moods. The system can play one set when you are walking to work, another when you cook, and another when it detects you are down. But I think the real innovation will be the ability for AIs and sensors to create new music/ambient sounds to match your life, almost as if you had some composer score a soundtrack for your day, each day. When you saw something cool, it would detect your emotion and ramp up the violins, or whatever you favor.

• There might be a need to cultivate a new skill of multi-channel listening, somewhat the way TV anchors can have a conversation with people even as their producer is chatting to them in their ear.

• Just as ordinary lives may get a soundtrack it is also possible to imagine getting a narration to your life. You could choose to hire an agent to be always explaining things to you, telling you what just happened, reminding you about what did happen, or what you thought before. Instead of our own "voice inside our head" this would be a different "voice in our ear" that might be able to displace the neurotic version in our head. It could be therapy or self-improvement.

• We would need to evolve a social etiquette for conversing — or not —with said voice in your ear.

There must be many more unexpected consequences of having always-on, spatial audio.

Bypass almost any paywall
If a website allows Google to crawl its articles, it shouldn’t then hide its articles behind a paywall. The website 12ft.io bypasses paywalls by displaying the Google cache of articles. You can either go to the 12ft site and enter the URL of a paywalled article or prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page — MF

How to do a Life Pie
The Six Spokes Theory, described here as a “strategy for an optimal life” is a great way to draw out a snapshot of your life and see what areas might need more attention. This is also called a Life Pie, which I first read about in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. You start by drawing a circle and dividing it into 6 slices. Each slice is assigned to an aspect of your life. You then draw a dot on the dividing line to the degree that you feel fulfilled. After connecting the dots, you’ll be able to spot in what areas you are lopsided. I made a short YouTube video outlining my process here. — CD

Productive meetings
This 1-minute video by John Cleese is all you need to know about how to have productive (vs unproductive) meetings. One minute! Applies to zoom meetings, too.  — KK

What books redditors are reading
Someone processed billions of comments to find the books most mentioned on reddit, and I am very grateful. Here are the most mentioned books in 2021 — the top one being “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” They are also grouped by subreddit which is super helpful. — CD

Roasted sesame seeds are the universal topping
I love these Roasted White Sesame Seeds by Shirakiku. There’s no salt or any other ingredient. Everything tastes better with a generous shake of the container – scrambled eggs, salads, ice cream, blueberries. Sometimes I’ll have a spoonful of the plain seeds as a snack. — MF

Smart grammar assistant
Grammarly is a super grammar helper that is much smarter than the default ones in most applications. I use it all the time. I’ve quickly come to depend on its artificial intelligence to improve my grammar and find more than the obvious typos. It seems context aware. And it runs at the OS level, so it works in most apps such as Slack, email, Discord, Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, etc. (It does not work in Google Docs for me.) Right now the basic model is free. — KK

Speaking to the world, I care about how good the security of your machines are. Are they easily hacked? Not just your computer, but any device. If your webcam, or toaster, or light bulb is online, connected to the grid, I care if it is secure.

Why? Because the security of a network is only as good as its weakest link, and we are now running a global machine. That global machine, made up of your devices and yours and yours, is the machine I use. Everything connected to this global machine is on MY machine. Every device connected is linked to all the other devices. Therefore the security of everyone is hinged to the weakest security on the lowliest thing. That might be a connected pencil that could be hacked. If someone can hack a pencil they can use that exploit to hack into a drawing tablet and from there extend into an OS, and from there into the network. The weakness of one small point can ripple across the globe and affect me directly.

In that way security on a network is equivalent to pollution coming from a small source. If you pollute the river, you effect everyone's drinking water. If your small device is hackable, everyone's network is hackable. When the network is a big as the world, then my security depends on your security, and thus your security affects all security. Just as we collectively police the river for pollution so we, the commons, have a duty to regulate your security. Your security is all of our business.

That regulation might take the form of some minimum standards required to connect. If you can't prove your device is up to minimum standards you can't connect it. If you are the device maker, you can't sell it. If you break the security minimum you are booted off, or fined, etc. In effect we would treat a security break like a public health breach. Until you can upgrade your devices to the minimum required standard of security, you are quarantined.

This system, or even mindset, does not exist yet. We are in the wild west days when anyone could pollute the commons without consequence. But in the long run we'll realize that security is not an individual circumstance; it is a mandate for society, and will be treated in a more social and networked manner. Your security is my security.

Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks, had a revelation that began his empire. He realized that people spent time in three different classes of spaces. They cocooned in private spaces, like their homes, and offices. And they spent time in public places like plazas, streets, museums. But all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone.  Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could "own" for a while. They were also uncommon in America. So he decided to make his coffee shops third places where people could walk in from the street and spend all day there if they wanted to in an intimate mode. His empire was built on a third way.

There are lots of third ways that can be alternatives to problems we have. Are Uber drivers employees or contractors? Well, Uber drivers are not quite self employed, and they are not quite employees either. They are a third thing. We shouldn't try to use the laws and norms for employees or self-proprietors with them. We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers.  AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it.

Huge monopolistic companies running platforms like Facebook and Amazon are not mere corporations, nor are they governments, even though they have many of the attributes of both government and corporations. They are a new third thing: platforms. We should not expect to regulate platforms like companies, nor expect them to behave like governments. We need a third category of rights and responsibilities for them.

AI is not quite a dumb mechanical process that only does what we ask it to, and it is obviously not human either.  We should not expect to relate to AI and robots as machines, nor as a human. Their behavior and creation can't be governed with our existing categories, nor with existing laws.  AI/Robots are a third thing.  They need to be treated in a third way.

This is the era of the third way. With the advent of genetic engineering, and ever more AI, and crypto and blockchain for organizations, we will be producing third things all the time. New ideas, products and services that are neither this or that, but something new that needs the third way. The most difficult part of this onboarding is opening our minds to the possibilities of a third way.

Here is why it is so hard to imagine an optimistic future:

God is a million times more difficult to imagine than the devil. We find horror, evil, chaos, destruction much easier to describe in detail than the details of the good, true and beautiful. That’s because the good and the beautiful are improbable, while the destruction is probable, indeed almost certain. This is the law of entropy: that everything in the universe is running down towards uniform gray disorder and chaos. Everything wears down, runs out, breaks down, and levels out into flat sameness. The universe is titled towards this low bottom, as is our imaginations.

Except there is an exception to the way entropy works. If we accelerate the run downhill, that is if we increase chaos and waste energy locally, we can — in the right circumstances — build up a chain of increasing order right in the midst of universal decreasing order. I call this anti-entropy, exotropy. One example of this exotropy is life. Life keeps going and keeps evolving by accelerating the creation of entropy outside of it while life decreases entropy within its realm making everything ever more complex. Like a magnifying glass that focuses sunlight into an intense beam by creating a shadow of no-light around it, ordered life endures by creating disorder around it. That wasted energy is dissipated in very familiar fashion as death, destruction, failure, fear, evil, crime, disasters — all of which we can easily picture. It is easy to imagine because it is a well worn path and highly probable.

On the other hand ordered, living systems are highly improbable. Life may be common in the universe but every specific example of it is unlikely. Flowers might be common but this particular species of flower is improbable. You and I are highly unlikely. The universe could roll its dice a trillion times and another one of you or I will never happen. All of exotropy is improbable.

The challenge in trying to imagine something good that has not existed before is that in order to do so you have to go uphill against the downhill force of entropy. While entropy is a broad and certain path, everything about the good is narrow and unexpected. This makes it very very difficult to specify beforehand, almost like predicting the exact sequence of a million tosses of the dice. The weird thing about life and minds is that they are not random, but they are as unpredictable as random.

All life-like, or exotropic, systems exist along a narrow path. Their existence is highly unlikely, and therefore highly difficult to predict. It also makes them highly difficult to describe before hand. Which is why we find it highly difficult to imagine optimistic futures. We have no trouble describing in very good detail catastrophe, destruction, extinction and the end of the world because these are inevitable states. But we find it near impossible to imagine a plausible, beneficial, supportive, desirable future because any of those specific futures are highly improbable. That is the nature of all good things: in a true cosmic sense they are unlikely statistical outliers.

Today, this moment, was a statistical improbability a year ago. Yet here we are. Life is a long unbroken chain of the improbable, which, despite the odds, will probably keep going. But to imagine it we have to be comfortable in imagining the improbable, and maybe even the ridiculous. If someone told us the future 100, 200, 300 years from now, we would not believe them because it would sound improbable, as improbable if we traveled back 100 years to tell them what our lives were like. So we have to get better at believing in the improbable.

.

David Yoon is the New York Times bestselling author of Frankly in Love, Super Fake Love Song, and for adult readers, Version Zero and City of Orange. He’s a William C. Morris Award finalist and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature Honor book recipient. He’s co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. He’s also co-founder of Yooniverse Media, which currently has a first look deal with Anonymous Content for film/TV development. David grew up in Orange County, California, and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Nicola Yoon, and their daughter. Learn more at davidyoon.com.

This is my main workspace, which really just is a corner of the main bedroom in my house. I like to do my work in small dim cloisters. I think because it reminds me of growing up as a latch key kid and having all this free time to hole up in my room and be as creative as I wanted to be.

Orbit Luxe Faux Fur Chair from Restoration Hardware ($2,599)
My wife (and #1 NYT bestselling author) Nicola got this big fuzzy ball for me, and it’s my favorite chair ever. The chair muffles sound and lets me shut out the world. Also it makes me feel weirdly safe.

ParcSlope for Macbook & iPad from Twelve South ($60)
It’s hard to see in the dark photo, but there’s a little riser underneath my laptop that makes typing easier and lifts the screen to a more ergonomic height. I know there’s tons of laptop risers out there, but this one is made with perfect precision from a single piece of metal, and is absolutely rock solid and stable to use. I’m all about stability and security these days, can you tell?

6-inch USB-C to Lightning cable ($10)
That black curlicue on the side table is a really short cable. I love short cables because they take up so little space and reduce clutter. I make video games as a hobby, so I’m constantly connecting devices to my laptop for debug builds. There’s a million of these on Amazon for cheap in every combination imaginable.

Tapered Edison Bulb Concrete Touch Lamp ($175)
I used to light a candle to give me something to stare at while thinking about stuff (my “light of inspiration”, lol), but got sick of having to change them constantly. This lamp creates great mood lighting and also helps offset the brightness of my laptop screen. You just touch the metal part to cycle through three brightness levels. There’s cheapo versions of this lamp everywhere, but I say go for quality and support wonderful indie retailers like Maker & Moss.

Upcoming projects
My next adult novel, City of Orange, will be published on May 24, 2022 by Penguin Putnam. It’s a post-apocalyptic thriller and intimate character study about a man who wakes up with no memory of how the world ended, and embarks on a search for his missing wife and daughter.

Thought experiment: You are sent via a special time machine to the same place on Earth 500 years into the past. Your machine can return with you and one passenger. For the passenger from the past it is a one-way trip into the future. You need to convince the person back then back then (a farmer, or miller, or cook, or King) to come to 2022. Even though I am utterly certain we are thousands of times better off now, no matter who they are, I think I would have trouble describing our time in a way that would make it desirable for them to entice them to come to our time. Convincing them it is better now is especially hard if they starting asking good questions. Our modern world might sound ridiculous, or maybe just unbelievable. However, the honest truth is all we would probably need to tell the average person 500 years ago is that they can have all the food they want anytime anywhere; they would climb right in.

So here is the experiment. A guy appears at your door. He has a glowing sphere in his hand. He says he is from the future and will transport you 500 years into that future. You want to know what that future world is like. What does he have to say in order for you to get in? What is the future equivalent of "all the free food you can eat"? Five hundred years from now, there could be abundance of material things enabled by machines that in effect makes everything "as if" it were free. That might be enough to get us to zoom to the future, despite the inevitable weirdness it will have. But for most people there might need to be more than free stuff.

Let's make it even easier call; it's not a one way trip. Let's say someone offers you a round-trip ride into the future 500 years from now — but you have to stay 2 years. What would this world have to have before you get in?  What would be an irresistible future?

Thinkism is the fallacy that problems can be solved by greater intelligence alone. Thinkism is a fallacy that is often promoted by smart guys who like to think. In their own heads, they think their own success is due to their intelligence, and that therefore more intelligence brings greater success in all things. But in reality IQ is overrated especially as a means to solve problems. This view ignores the many other factors that solve problems. Such as data, experience, and creativity.

For instance let’s take curing cancer or prolonging longevity. These two are problems that thinking along cannot solve. No amount of contemplation, creative brainstorming, or IQ will discover how the cell ages, or how telomeres fall off. In addition to thinking we need experiential data and experience to solve them.  We need experiments. No intelligence, no matter how super duper, can figure out how human body works simply by reading all the known scientific literature in the world and then contemplating it. No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working nuclear fusion in a day. Many other things besides smartness is needed.

Between not knowing how things work and actually knowing how they work, stands tons of experiments in the real world which yields tons and tons of data that will be required to form the correct working hypothesis. Thinking about the potential data will not yield the correct data. Thinking is only part of science; maybe even a small part. We don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. And in the case of living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time because biological organisms are involved. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. It takes time besides IQ.

IQ is overrated in science. The most innovative theories and experiments are not necessarily coming from the smartest people. Often the most imaginative succeed when the smartest don't. Sometime those that are most persistent win; they keep doing the experiment until it works. On the other hand we all know really smart people who do dumb things. Intelligence is needed by is not sufficient by itself.

Artificial intelligence is on its way to become a commodity. You'll be able to buy as much IQ as you want, or can afford. We'll soon apply large doses of intelligence to all kinds of tasks. The temptation will be to believe that greater intelligence will solve all our future problems. (This is one of the expectations of the Singularity.) But no matter how much intelligence you have, this thinkism alone won't solve problems by itself. Intelligence has to be combined with imagination, perseverance, intuition, and large quantities of data, experience, and conext to really be useful. It's these other qualities that our humanness can supply.

I wrote Out of Control 27 years ago (1994). That is a long time in the past for a book that promises to talk about the future. A lot in our world has changed in that time, including our attitudes about the future. Far too much has happened in the world of technology to be summed up in this note. But it is fair to wonder how well my book has held up for the past 25 years. Is Out of Control still valid? Is it worth reading today? And what might I have written differently given what I know today? What, if anything, would I change?

Beyond some typos there is nothing I felt I got wrong or incorrect. The principles I labored so hard to describe and explain are still valid and I believe still useful. In fact, I think they are more useful now than ever before. Today we are creating dozens of new synthetic systems each year, and the knowledge I collect in Out of Control can serves as helpful guidance. The biggest change in the last 27 years is that the benefits for decentralized systems, for distributed power, and for mechanical smartness is much clearer now. Whereas before the topics in Out of Control — such as emergence, beehives, hive minds, ant algorithms, social robots — all seemed like cute esoteric ideas that belong in a philosophy class. Now they are correctly perceived as essential, utilitarian, foundational notions at the heart of the internet, and especially to crypto. Two decades ago when I spoke of these things they seemed far away and speculative; now when we speak of them, they seem almost cliched. For instance now everybody knows that the wisdom of the crowd can be useful.

The fault of the book is what it missed, what it does not talk about. There was a chapter I did not write about how the economy is an artificial distributed system, almost like a video game, and almost like an organism. I had notes for the chapter, but it was too big for an already too big book. I didn't explore or deal with the system of news and information, or social networks, which now seems like a huge oversight. That would have been a logical thing to do. If I was rewritting the book today, I would include a chapter about the ecology of information.

One thing that really surprises me is that Out of Control is not more out of date than it is. In most fields of science, a book written 27 years ago would be horribly out of date. While I am happy that the examples and the specific cases I used to tell the story of emergence still work, my stories only do so because the field itself has not advanced as much as I would have expected. Today in 2021 in each of the 24 chapters in the book, I could now add an equal amount of new material to bolster my arguments. For instance many ideas that were mere notions in a notebook are now in research labs, and many of the ideas in research labs are now commercial products. But weirdly, there have been no major breakthroughs or hugely disruptive ideas in these departments in the last many decades. The one exception is the refinement of neural net deep learning, which has worked much better than anyone predicted it would. I should add that if I were writing the book today, I'd devote several chapters to neural nets (which I did briefly mentioned) because they have become so important to the chief new technology in the world: artificial intelligence. In fact, in case it is not clear, neural nets are the prime example of bottom-up, distributed, decentralized, emergent systems. They are a perfect example of all the things I wrote about 25 years ago in Out of Control.

Despite the great success of neural net deep learning, most of the other things that we did not understand 27 years ago we still do not understand today. We have the same holes in our understanding. We still do not have good grasp on how to build systems that can bootstrap — or upcreate — their own complexity to greater levels. We don't know how to program evolutionary systems to evolve their own evolution. We don't even have a decent theoretical idea of why exotropic systems work — that is why they endure and grow. We don't have working measurements for complexity, or even a working framework for making artificial life. Had you asked me when I was writing Out of Control in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I would have guessed back then that we would have answered at least one of these questions by now. But alas, these are still unknown.

We do know some things now. I feel confident to say that overall one big thing we collectively know now is that the nine principles of how to make complex things that I describe in the last chapter of Out of Control really do work. We really can make complex things built from simpler things that work, as one example. It is clearer to even non-scientific people that complicated machines have many similarities to living organisms, and that we prefer it that way. Again and again in the past two decades we've seen how very basic decentralized bottom-up systems have succeeded and progressed much further than we guessed. Even if a completely decentralized system may not take you all the way to what you want to accomplish, the bottom-up is usually the best way to start. These are the kind of lessons that have seeped into the culture and are taken for granted today.

I think Out of Control played a part in getting these kind of ideas accepted and mainstreamed. I am particularly grateful that the Chinese language edition of this book arrived in China when it did. It was perfect timing. The Chinese edition came at a time when Chinese entrepreneurs began to make large complex systems from scratch, and the deep research I drew upon was helpful to them as they experimented. In America, my book arrived too early. It was published before the internet really started. It got very few book reviews and was ignored at that time because tech was considered boring and unimportant. By the time the internet was growing rapidly, the book was forgotten. Now is different because people have been educated to appreciate emergence. Also other books by other authors have been published on these ideas. Out of Control now sells more copies than when it first came out.

There is a saying in the publishing world that the shorter the book is the more it sells, and the longer the book is the shorter the sales. Out of Control is a long book, but it would have sold much better if it were at least half as long. However if I were to re-write it today it would be even longer. So I am very grateful to any and all of my readers who stuck with this long book. It is dense, not easy to read. I thank you, reader, for staying on this journey with me. I hope my research is useful to you. And to new readers, I wish it was shorter!

In 1988-9 I led a project to make an electronic version of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog was a compendium of thousands of user-reviews printed on cheap newsprint and mailed to subscribers. It was an early pre-internet printed on paper. The idea, in 1988, was to take this venerable Catalog of ideas and products, and to be able to quickly search for, browse, and navigate through them in a non-linear non-book way. So this Electronic Whole Earth Catalog would have not just be a digital copy (as merely scanned online), but would want to be an interactive, non-linear, new thing.

A year earlier, Bill Atkinson, one of the co-creators of the Macintosh at Apple, inspired by an LSD trip, released HyperCard. This as an app for the Mac that was organized around the metaphor of  3x5 cards. Words on cards could be linked to other cards, in a million different ways. The text was hyperlinked. You can surf along the links from one idea to another. More importantly, you could make up as many cards and links as you wanted. HyperCard was the first consumer instantiation of Ted Nelson's idea of hypertext and hyperlinks. Today we recognize this hyperlinking as the web. But in the case of HyperCard this linking all happened within the confines of one computer. This tiny web was not connected to the internet.

Besides offering HyperCard for free to any Mac user, Apple had also just released an Apple CD-Rom drive. Now anyone could access the immense storage of data available on a new device called a CD-Rom.  A CD contained an insane amount of data — like 190 MBs! The problem for Apple was that there were zero CD-Roms all ready to play, so who is gonna buy an expensive CD driver? This chicken and egg problem of needing developers to create content for a new device or platform is now a standard biz development challenge. Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the Whole Earth Catalog, and he would later rave about it in his Stanford commencement address, but he had already left Apple. Another fan of Whole Earth at Apple was Mike Liebhold. He correctly assessed that the Catalog was kind of ready-made for hyperlinking. And it was vast, so it could fill a CD-Rom. And it was still popular. He approached Stewart Brand and us at Whole Earth and after a few meetings Apple decided to fund the creation of an hyperlinked version of the Whole Earth built on HyperCard and issued on a CD-Rom. This Catalog CD, Apple believed,  would be one of the reasons to buy an Apple CD-Rom Driver.

Apple assigned some ace programers to the project (like Tim Oren and Ted Kaehler) and we assigned a project manager and editors (Like Keith Jordan, Kathleen O'Neill,  Richard Schuffler, among others), and then began the huge task of digitizing images and re-keyboarding all the text (since nothing was digitized before). Everything was squeezed onto virtual 3x5 cards. We were even able to add sound files in the music section. Then the really fun part began of designing the user interface. How do you navigate through this ocean of material? How do you see how much of the catalog you have not seen yet? When do you leave a section? What does "going back" mean? How do you get back to somewhere you've been? To someone today who grew up on the web, these kind of questions seem obvious or cute, but in 1989 we wrestled with them. How do you search for anything? Oh, you need a search engine, which we made.

The final product had maybe 4,000 cards and was the largest set of HyperCards made and the largest hyperlinked document before Tim Berners-Lee got the world-wide web going a year later.  The EWEC never sold very many copies, in part because Apple never sold very many CD drivers. And of course once the web exploded, the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog was seen as a tiny self-enclosed web — not the world-wide version you really wanted.  But for a short time, those of us who worked on it were able to experience that weird/wonderful experience you get surfing along a string of links, following a flow state as you explore a vast possibility space at your own speed and interests.

I recently dug up my only copy of EWWC,  and made a copy it for the Internet Archive. Some folks there uploaded it with a Mac Plus emulator, and so you too can now enjoy the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog online at the Internet Archive. Download and play like you were back in the 1980s.

It's thrilling to see it 30 years later. No color, tiny pages, slow.  It was the Tiny Web —the web before the web.

P.S. I onced asked the Apple crew why, after having invented HyperCard — a hyperlinked web — they did not go onto make the world-wide web distributed onto the internet.  They were all net savy. Their answer boils down to this: 1) A few people had tried a web on the internet (Owl and others) and they failed, and 2) Apple could not see a business case for doing so. What would you sell?

One of the most worrisome graphs in the world is the correlation between the rise of cheap oil and the rise of living standards — or what we might call progress. Almost all the modern trends we tend to applaud, from rising population, to lengthening lifespans, more leisure, more choices, all depend to some extent on cheap energy. If we didn't have an accessible 200-year source of cheap energy we would not have been able to feed billions of people, build tall buildings, or run factories, or fill roads with cars and trains.

Thought experiment: imagine our planet had no significant natural reserves of coal or oil. To build any structure we use wood or earth and muscle power, either animal or human. We could make some windmills and watermills to harness wind and hydro power. We could make some wood-fueled steam powered engines, and build primitive factories. These are both limited in power and limited in the amount of fuel that can be gathered each year. We probably would have discovered electricity, but without cheap power to generate it at scale, it would be difficult to smelt copper for wires to make motors, and of course even harder to supply the power to run them. Motors might have remained in laboratories.

Earth has other sources of non-carbon energy such as nuclear, and solar, that are relatively unlimited. The question is, could science — and the development needed to support it — have progressed enough in a wood-world to achieve the mastery of nuclear power without all the easy wins that hydrocarbons and oil produced? Could you make enough equipment and metallurgy, and other equipment needed without cheap energy, in order to discover the principles of nuclear power? Same for wind energy. Would there be a viable path in a wood-steam-punk world to reach cheap solar panels?

In other words: is oil needed for progress? Can we imagine a planet in another galaxy that has no hydrocarbon fuels ever reaching advanced science? We might imagine a planet that for some geological reasons has tons and tons of steam geysers, or waterfalls every block. Perhaps you could extract enough cheap power in this centralized way to reach nuclear or solar. But maybe the power is not portable enough. Perhaps for civilization, you need not just a water planet, but a water and oil planet.

It is clear to us now that you can run an advanced civilization without burning hydrocarbons; in fact, we'd now say that any advanced civilization would not be burning hydrocarbons at all. Plentiful oil and coal is just a scaffolding technology, needed to build a civilization that can then run without it. Our tiny blue dot of a planet in the black vastness tells any distant observer that life has a good chance of blossoming there. But if we wanted to ascertain whether it was capable of developing a technological civilization, we may need some way to detect whether it contains internal hydrocarbons.

BTW, there is a minority theory that the huge deposits of oil on this planet are not biogenic — that is fossilized life — but rather geogenic — that is created by non-living planetary processes. The chief proponents of that theory — called the Deep Hot Biosphere — are Thomas Gold and Freeman Dyson. Whether this theory is true or false does not change the seemingly vital necessity of plentiful hydrocarbons on this planet in our own story of progress.

https://youtu.be/21w-Us7S1XY

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Wood Veneer Edge Banding Preglued

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Twenty five years ago, when I was co-editing Wired, we ran a controversial article called the Long Boom. This was a scenario forecasting 25 years of economic and cultural prosperity. (It also included 10 Scenario Spoilers that could disrupt the longer boom, which some people find eerily prescient today.) Today, on a global level, and on average, the living standards of most inhabitants of the planet were improved in the last 25 years. They were not improved equally, but they did get better. In that sense the Long Boom arrived, although many of the expected breakthroughs and  forecast innovations did not happen.

The next 25 years are very likely to be an era of global progress that will exceed the achievements of the last 25 years. The next human generation will experience -- on average, and in aggregate -- living standards and possibilities that will reach a record high level for this planet. The distribution of this progress will still be uneven, but all regions will experience more advancement than they have in the past. Given the dire past year, this seems like a wildly optimistic claim. I'll call this the Bigger, Better Boom.

The evidence for near-term global prosperity -- on average -- is already happening. Each of the seven trends I list here are large forces that happen only once on a planet. Each of them have a huge momentum behind them that is not easily derailed. And they will accelerate and deepen in the coming decades. These seven forces are like a tailwind that will drive progress and prosperity, and are worthy of being optimistic about.

1) Total Urbanization
Today’s widespread middle class living standard is the result of several one-time events for the planet, such as mass migration into cities, the movement of women into the formal working economy, and pervasive automation of labor. The first driver of optimism is therefore simply a continuation and completion of the on-going industrial revolution. While modernization has already played out in the developed countries, it has not saturated many developing parts of the world. That will change in the next 25 years, as almost everyone alive will experience modernity.

Some 90% of the planet’s inhabitants will be living in urban areas, relying on large-scale infrastructure to provide water, food, shelter, transportation, education, and health care. We will complete the urbanization of the planet, with the bulk of its inhabitants living in urban areas, defined as within 20 km of a hospital or health clinic. Urbanization provides the benefits of density, such as higher bandwidth, and more diverse jobs. These improvements are desired by most young people around the planet. Ask them what their dream is and they will tell you they want t-shirts and sneakers, an air-conditioned room with plumbing and wifi, and a job doing something of their choosing. Total urbanization is more than just making life convenient; dense urbanization leads to more, faster innovation, and prosperity for all, including those outside the urban area. Most importantly, this wide-spread modernity, while an end in itself, is an enabling force that supports and enables the following six forces for optimism.

2) Universal Connectivity
For the first time on the planet, all adult beings will be connected together. The penetration of connected devices is likely to reach 100%. This vast connection creates a huge continuous audience, a planet-scale market, and potentially unified global movements. A start-up in a small country has a greater chance than ever of having a vast billion-person customer base. Vast global audiences not only finance mega cultural creations, they also provide hundreds of millions of niche markets, a boon for creators, art, and commerce in any town on the planet. Global commerce increases, the global exchange of culture is enhanced (K-pop and K-dramas everywhere!), and best practices are spread around the globe. Universal connection is a new tool for harnessing the resident genius in 8 billion people no matter where they live.

When all adults on a planet connect, they can cooperate at a scale and speed never before possible. Existing large institutions are also enhanced by this acceleration, while entirely new forms of collaboration are now possible. In the next two decades we will likely witness at least one grand project created by one million people around the globe working together on it in real time -- a feat enabled by universal connectivity. When all 8 billion people are connected together we have more of a chance to prosper together.

3) Ubiquitous AI
Up until the industrial revolution anything that humans made, including cities and roads, had to be made with the energy of organic muscles (human or animal), which was drastically limited. With the advent of cheap artificial power, we could erect tall skyscrapers, vast continental railroads, immense factories, and mass manufacturing -- all way beyond what meat muscles could do. We have started to do the same with our natural thinking muscles, by seeding the world with artificial intelligences. A zoo of hundreds of different species of new types of mind will be working with humans to solve problems. These non-human minds (sometimes with bodies we call robots) will do work humans don’t want to do, or can’t do. Humans and AIs together will co-create new desires and new jobs. The long-term driver of progress -- automating physical jobs -- will continue, and then begin to take over non-physical chores as well. The three chief consequences of AI will be the liberation of humans from their unwanted jobs, the explosion of new services and formerly impossible products that are co-created with AIs, and new occupations and desirable tasks for humans. AIs and robots are designed for efficiency and productivity, while these millions of new human jobs are primarily tasks where inefficiency is tolerated. To excel in innovation, entrepreneurship, art, caring, hospitality, science and discovery, humans must try things that don’t work, embrace failures, encourage small talk and playfulness -- all inefficient. Efficiency is for robots. Ubiquitous AI is the most optimistic force we can imagine.

4) Sustainable Energy
The industrial revolution was fueled by burning a limited supply of easy to get cheap carbon. The world’s population, and market economy boomed in parallel to our discovery and use of carbon fuel. That was a one-time boon for progress. In the coming decades, we will switch to unlimited energy from solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. We can double our energy efficiency simply by decarbonizing the economy. In fact we can achieve 50% of what we need for climate change simply by powering all of our machines, furnaces, and vehicles with electrons instead of oxidation. We will use electric heat pumps instead of burning carbon in furnaces, electric motors instead of hot jet engines, cool electric cars instead of polluting gas engines, and LEDs everywhere. In addition to helping with climate change, electrifying everything will yield countless opportunities for business and employment in redesigning transportation, shelter, and civic infrastructure. Since so many of us will live in cities (which increases sustainability), this trend also raises millions of opportunities for the greening (and increased quality) of urban life.

5) Accelerated Innovation
In addition to the speedups brought by dense urbanity and universal connectivity, new learning tools are accelerating the velocity of innovation, which accelerates prosperity. This is a cause for optimism. The technologies of AI, advances in the scientific method, and rampant use of prosumer media like today’s YouTube, accelerate the speed and spread of knowledge. YouTube and Youku (in China) in particular are underappreciated learning accelerants. It’s not just make-up tutorials and workshop maker videos. Brain surgeons upload their latest techniques to YouTube which other brain surgeons watch, then innovate on, and share their videos within days. Almost every scientific talk or industry presentation is recorded and shared widely, and oftentimes analyzed and explained by another YouTube video. Until now deliberate, systemic innovation has been hit or miss. Sometimes seen in science and engineering; more recently imported into tech businesses. But intentional systemic innovation was still absent in government, education, military, social services, and civic infrastructure. Now for the first time innovation is being applied deliberately and effectively throughout society, and it will be expected.

Innovation in any field is the new norm, at least the norm to aim for. Best practices for innovation, universal connectivity, and new media including the augmented realities of smart glasses -- even better video teaching -- provide the tool for accelerated learning. These tools are starting to give us metrics to measure real learning, and thus ways to optimize learning in different situations. In particular, education itself will be amplified by AI, tech, and globalization, till learning overflows the confines of schools and is more embedded for lifelong learning in work and personal life. When learning accelerates everything else does as well.

6) Bio-Engineering
For the first time we will engineer biology, both of ourselves and other species, existing and invented. This has been a long promise of technology -- and it will take centuries to fulfill -- but the force is already beginning to work. Witness the speed at which we humans created Covid-19 vaccines, and the tremendous life-and-death difference they made. Our response to the pandemic should be a cause of optimism rather than despair. Much of this success is due to our collection of genetic data at a huge scale which will continue and accelerate. Further Increasing control of living systems at their foundational level will provide great progress in our own longevity and wellness. But this revolution also gives us powers to create new materials, new forms, new goods, new foods that we’ve only dreamed of before. One small example is deathless meat grown from animal cells, which has a different ecological footprint and the potential to taste even better than natural meat from killed animals. In the next two decades we are likely to be able to sell proxy fish grown from fish cells, and begin the elimination of harvesting wild fish before their extinction. Establishing vast no-fishing wilderness parks in the ocean would be a tremendous boon to the planet. The benefits of biotech are much slower to happen than other tech, but much greater in impact. The arrival of biotech may be the best reason to be optimistic.

7) Generational Handoff
The world-wide Boomer generation will be retired and made redundant in 25 years. The next generation will come of age. This is good news for the world, because the young have better ideas, and the ambition to see their change come about. All around the world this new generation will have grown up studying the same curriculum in school. Their textbooks always include math, science, history, literature, and usually these days, English.

They will be accelerated learners with access to free online encyclopedias, libraries of books scanned for free, and the entire universe of video tutorials. Universal real-time language translation in ear pods -- which will be available in a few years -- will unleash the skills of billions of this generation. Many fantastic youths in far-flung places may have all the coveted skills required by a remote employer -- except the skill of English. With universal real-time translation this is no longer a problem, and they can easily join the global economy -- raising the prosperity of them and everyone else. For the most part this generation has their goals set by the best on the planet. They know what is possible. If generational history is any guide, this global generation will be very civic-oriented and will be eager builders. They are more optimistic than Boomers and won’t be asking permission. One survey by the World Economic Forum asked 26,000 young people between the ages of 18-35 whether the world was full of opportunities or struggles. Over 70% of those millennials were optimistic, believing (correctly I’d say) that there were more opportunities than struggles.

A caveat: I am talking about the state of the world and its future on average global terms. Even an extremely healthy person will have local ailments and small injuries on their bodies every day. In fact some of the healthiest people on the planet -- professional athletes -- have constant pains and injuries as a consequence of their extraordinary achievements. Local harms are the norm. In the same way, even in a world of indisputable progress not all regions will experience the same health. Parts of the globe may suffer war, disease, famine, unrest in times of prosperity. It may be very bleak in some areas, where pessimism seems totally appropriate. History suggests these bleak times are temporary, and that on average, better times will come. The case for optimism is a longer-term view, and a bigger-place view. Based on the evidence, we should be able to picture progress at the scale of two decades around the planet for the average person, even if there are scars of inequality throughout it.

*

Note: This is half of an essay originally published as Kevin Kelly: The Case for Optimism on WarpNews, on 02/08/2021.

https://youtu.be/DNvlg7Q4_K8

Links:

Mini Thermos
Starbucks VIA Instant Coffee
Anthony's Heavy Cream Powder
Vending Machine Clear Capsules
Blotter Paper
Pom Maker

Instead of suggesting the best products that I encountered this year, I want to suggest the best products I know about and still use today. Think of these as golden oldies, that are still golden.

Procreate
This $10 painting app is the best $10 I have ever spent. It enables my iPad to become an art studio. I paint with Procreate every evening to make my daily piece of art. The app includes different “brushes” which turn the stylus into different kinds of media -- say a pencil, or an ink pen, or an oil paint brush, or a calligraphy brush -- so I get a whole studio of different art supplies. I can paint with textures, mask edges, replicate and manipulate basic digital functions like copy and paste. And there is a large Procreate community offering custom brushes, and tutorials. Powerful tool, and cheap.

Seek
I use this free app on my phone to identify plants and flowers. Aim the phone camera at the unknown botanical and it will quickly offer an identification of the species, or second best, the genus. It gives an answer about 95% of the time, including domestic and wild plants. Once you get an ID, you can look up more info about it on the web.

Merlin
This app will identify a bird from its song or chirp. Even if the bird is hidden, or not close, this app will usually identify the species. In the app you can play a pre-recorded bird song of that species to confirm it is correct. Merlin can also ID two bird sounds at once in the same place. It’s free for iOS and Android.

Pilot G2 Mini Pen
My go-to pen is the Pilot G2 gel. It lays down a very smooth, very dark line. This popular pen also comes in a mini-version which is shorter than the regular ones, which makes it perfect for carrying in my pocket. I have a Pilot G2 mini in every pants and jacket I own.

Chevy Bolt
I love our electric car. We bought a Chevy Bolt because it was way cheaper than any Tesla at the time. It is the best performing car I’ve ever owned. It’s powerful, agile, and quiet. We are very happy with it. The joy of never visiting a gas station can’t be measured. There are more EV options now, so we might not get a Bolt if we had to buy one now, but there is no way I’d go back to a gas car.

Cordless Glue Gun
Workshops have gone cordless. Every power tool made is now available in a cordless version, which makes it faster to get, and easier to handle. One of the last tools to go cordless is a glue gun. Like other cordless tools, being cordless makes it easier to work with, particularly if you are sharing it, or working on something large. It is really liberating to have no cord while gluing. This one needs Ryobi tool batteries, or an adapter for other brands (I use it with Dewalt batteries).

Airpods Pro
These earbuds work perfectly with an iPhone. The audio is sterling, and the built-in microphone works amazingly well. I use them to listen to podcasts while walking and to have distant conversations while walking. They are pricey, but hassle free, so worth it to me.

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What was your favorite tool this year? Why? It doesn’t have to be a new tool just one that comes to mind when asked this question. Send me your answers (with a pic, if possible). I want to do a round-up of readers favorites for 2021. I’ll pick one of the respondents and send them a copy of my tips book.

Making a Simple Storage Case Rack

On the Shop Hacks FB group, member Riley Schatz posted a pic of his simple solution for a rack to hold his plastic storage cases. Many of us have these plastic cases and there are numerous projects online and on YouTube for building more elaborate racks. This is the simplest to date, little more than some scrap 2x4s and plywood hung below a workbench.

Review: Amazon Removable Compartment Professional Organizers

Speaking of multi-compartment storage cases, Amazon just recently (I think) began offering cases under their Amazon Basics brand. Being something of a collector of these cases, I decided to get one and try it out. I got the smaller 15-compartment case (8.3" L x 13.3" W x 2.4" H). They also carry a 19-compartment case (16.5 x 13.2 x 2.4). The 15 case is $17.80, the 19 case is $20. The case I got is much small than the Stanley, Harbor Freight, and other cases that I have (which are closer to the 19-compartment case). I purposely went for the smaller case because I want to use it to house game components and didn’t need the larger size. In terms of features, the removable trays are a must-have for me. They have a nice compliment of small, medium, and large trays. In terms of quality, these cases are on par with the Harbor Freight ones. Like the Harbor Freight cases, they are made of heavy-duty polypropylene. The latches are the weak spot on the both brands, with the Amazon ones being nearly identical to the HF closures. Even with medium use, I’ve had the latches on two HF cases fail. The Amazon cases are comparable, but HF still has them beat on price. Their (full-size) 20-bin case is only $10 (as low as $8 on sale) and their deeper 8-bin case is $15 (as low as $11). The only reason to recommend the Amazon cases is if you want the smaller size.

Using Wire Ferrules

Flat Panel Speakers Made from Foamboard

This is more of a project recommendation than a shop tip. On the AmplifyDIY channel, they build these cheap (a few hundred bucks) and easy-to-make flat panel speakers using little more than insulation foamboard, a pair of exciters, and a mini power amp. They results are very impressive. Also: Be sure to check out the follow-up video. In it, he tests out different shapes, panel treatments, adding a second exciter to each panel, and other tweaks.

Why You Need a Vise in Your Workshop

In this Essential Craftsman video, Scott explains the virtues of a vise and why you need one in your workshop. In our new house, there’s a big gaping hole in the wooden workbench in the garage where the vise appears to have been unceremoniously ripped out. I’ve already spotted a sweet small bench vise with an anvil at a local antique store. I’m looking forward to buying and restoring it soon.

Making a Spray Can Shaker

In a recent Adam Savage video, he extolled the virtues of a drill-powered paint mixer. The one he linked to on Amazon can be found here. You can also easily make your own.

How to Tune Up a Cheap Chisel

In this video, Anne of All Trades shows how to properly sharpen chisels, especially how you can sharpen cheap ones and get them closer in sharpness to more expensive tools. I especially appreciate that she demonstrates how to hold and use your body to get the right angle and pressure on the blade as you sharpen

Switchplate Identifiers

We just moved into a house that has these crazy 4-switch light and fan panels in the bathrooms. Unlabeled, a newbie can do a lot of speculative switching before finding the one you want. So, not surprisingly, these 3D printed switchplate symbols have caught my eye. As soon as I get my 3D printer set up, I might be printing some of these.

Maker's Muse

[caption id="attachment_39452" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Wait for it...[/caption]

Shop Talk
In the response to my “Put the Dang Tools Back!” in the last issue, reader John M writes:

“I’ve been working on the "put the dang tools back” for years now. Coming up on three years since the last shop move, the problem that looms the largest is that there is no “back” to put things until you create one. The last move went from 3,000 sf to 1,600 sf, so it’s been tricky. Making the job harder is the need to be functional over the need to be organized. Yes, taking the time to organize will make the work easier, but that job needs to get finished NOW so we can pay the rent! Needless to say, instead of spending my limited time pursuing personal projects, I tend to spend it cleaning and organizing. Somewhat satisfying, but not as much as other projects.“

***

Also in response to "Put the Dang Tools Back!,” Cool Tools reader LarryA2010 writes:

“Good advice. Easier said than done. I have projects at varying stages, piles of tools and materials, and other stuff strewn about my workshop and I hate putting things back. I do keep some tools and materials organized though. I have a worktable made from a solid core door on top of two wood filing cabinets which hold folders of sandpaper and other useful items. Most-used tools are in a simple tool caddy on the floor. Two old bureaus hold sets of wrenches and other large tools. Plastic totes hold unfinished projects. Solvent cans are in a row on the floor next to my chair with a strap wrench on top to tighten them so they don’t evaporate. I still have tools and small materials covering much of my table, and tools and materials spread all over the floor. I can’t get myself to organize them. One thing I do have that I keep in order is this really useful Alvin, Spin-O-Tray, Rotating Desktop Organizer on top of the desk. It makes it easy to replace often-used small tools after I use them.”

There are roughly five different models we can adopt for our relationships with AIs. In the future our lives will be packed with thousands of different species of AIs, so we'll relate in multiple ways depending on the type of AI were are using at the time.

Pets. Many, if not most, of the AIs we encounter will feel like pets or working animals to us. They will be engineered to be smart in specific, useful ways. Just like some of the animals we have selectively bred for our pets, these AIs will be optimized to respond to our emotions and gestures. They will have limited autonomy, not straying too far from their purpose. While bred to excel in certain jobs, they will lack awareness and intelligence in other dimensions outside their expertise. For example they might be really good at translation, but not navigation. This will summon our most common complaint about them: they are dumbschmarten. They are geniuses in some things, and idiots in others. We'll swear at them, "how can you be so dumbschmarten?" MIT researcher Kate Darling has written an insightful book about this model, The New Breed. She argues that we already have a well-proven extensive framework in law and cultural norms dealing with the behavior of pets and work animals owned by humans which can be used for AIs and robots. And like the domesticated animals in our lives, these AIs will have recognizable variations and personalities. We'll prefer one particular individual over another of the same type.

Aliens. More advanced AIs might be thought of as artificial aliens. Their smartness can be encased in degrees of self-awareness and consciousness. Like Spock or Data in Star Trek, their intelligence will be significant, but also non-human-like, or alien. This alienness is actually their chief attraction, because they think differently. Even if their cognition doesn't wow us, the fact that they have an alien — different — approach makes them a good collaborators. These AIs need a sufficient human interface in order to keep us comfortable working with them. They will be conversational and will mirror our behavior. As we elevate the level of self-awareness and consciousness in these alien AIs, they become more difficult to work with. They can exhibit more attributes of mental dysfunction caused by self-reflection. The price of an alien AI collaborator will be their unfathomable thought process; always surprising us (good and bad) by their reactions. At the same time, some humans will find an affinity for their alienness and will develop careers as AI Whisperers. They will be comfortable working with them, and will be able to get the best from them, which other people will find magical.

Spirits. Many religions around the world perceive spirits or gods that inhabit places, buildings, and objects. This spirit animation is understood to be energetic and lively, but not necessarily highly intelligent. Many of the objects, structures, and systems we make in the future will have mild AI in them that can animate them in a lively way. They can adapt, learn, probe, respond as a living system might. Their intelligence is slow and diffuse, but persistent. It is distributed in the system, and therefore hard to eliminate or even damage. In this way, this kind of AI is like a spirit god inhabiting an old tree, or even a lamp. It has an enduring presence, and can respond to new things, adapt to injuries and assaults, and will persist for a long time, but otherwise it is obscure and vague. The primary purpose of these spirit AIs is to protect the system, and it will collaborate with us to the degree that we cooperate with it. We can imagine an AI spirit god in say the security system of the power grid, or in submarine, or even a piano. Keiichi Matsuda wrote a short essay that explores the idea of using the god metaphor for AIs.

Slaves. A well-worn model for relating to AIs will be to treat them as servants and slaves. To the extant that they are obedient and capable, they act as servants, doing the dirty, hard, unsavory jobs that need to be done. For some humans, these AIs are the perfect servant or slave because they are unambiguously not human, and therefore not deserving of our kindred compasion. They can be considered disposable, interchangeable, and without feelings. They are machines, and so we can excuse any harsh treatment of them. Whatever human-like characters they may gain — such as some levels of self-awareness — these will be cast as mechanical. No matter how much they grow or learn, they will be considered to be made not born, so will always be a machine, and a servant or slave to us. The problem with the master/slave relationship is that it is toxic to us. The AIs might not be bothered, but our human souls are corrupted when we treat sentient beings like slaves. People who mistreat animals will mistreat people, and people who mistreat AIs will also mistreat people. For this reason, we should educate and try to minimize the slave/servant mode of relating to AIs.

Overlord. In science fiction movies the sole model for powerful AI is to become our overlords. In these scenarios the AIs keep getting smarter until they exceed us in brainpower, then they take over and kill us. This mode is often called the Superhuman mode, or the Singularity. While a few prominent tech leaders believe superintelligence is a possibility, I think this mode is highly unlikely and the fear of it is totally misguided. I wrote a long essay on why superintelligent overlords won't happen (see The Myth of Superhuman AI); the gist of the argument is that superintelligence (as defined in this context) is a distortion of what intelligence in humans actually is. The major human accomplishment of making many varieties of AI will be overcoming our ignorance of how our own minds work. We will discover that the Superhuman Overlord breaks the engineering rule that you can't optimize everything in all directions and that any real creation — including cognition — must entail tradeoffs. But just as Superman is impossible in real life, yet the myth and archetype of a Superman endures, so even if the Superhuman AI is impossible, its mythic role will endure. There might be times when we feel we are subservient to an AI overlord, even if we aren't, so this mode is important to recognize.

The types of relationships I don't expect us to carry on with AIs are the classical human-to-human ones of friends, parent/child, co-workers, or lovers. I believe we'll reserve these for other humans. I suspect the first attempts to replace humans with "friendly" humanish AIs won't last. For instance, telephone call centers or retail stores that replace human operators with AIs that sound exactly like humans, will find that ordinary people will prefer to talk to a really intelligent alien rather than an almost-human. The small gap between real and fake feels weird in someone trying to pass as a human, while it is almost charming in an alien. Over time, designers will make AIs more alien rather than trying to fool us into thinking they are 100% human, in part because we are hard to fool this way. At the same time, as we fill the world with myriad new kinds of AIs, I can certainly imagine other models of relationships emerging beyond the five outlined here. If I have missed one that is already latent, please make a comment.

https://youtu.be/85pzbwApI2g

Recomendos:
DEWENWILS 30 Ft Retractable Extension Cord Reel

JianHan Reversible Micro USB Cable

Aarke Carbonator Sparkling & Seltzer Water Maker

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If you have tips, tool recommendations, favorite maker jargon/slang, or feedback, please share with me.

Put the Dang Tools Back Where They Belong!

Recently, in moving into and setting up our new house, I’ve gone for a driver or a drill bit several times and the exact one I need is missing from the index. This happens to me far too often. So, instead of doing the job at hand, you end up having to go on a holy grail-like quest through your house and shop in search of the missing tool. There’s a reason why people often outline the tools on their workbench pegboard, to visually remind themselves that a tool is not where it’s supposed to be. Too often, in the heat of a project (or its cyclonic aftermath), we don’t want to take the time to do a thorough clean up and re-org. And so we pay for that during the next project when we don’t find things where they belong. So, be kind to future you (as Adam Savage puts it) and PUT THE DANG TOOLS BACK!

Matching Any Color

Via Kevin Kelly and Recomendo comes this tip:
“Mixing a specific color by hand — I want to make this particular shade of green starting from primary colors — is a super skill that artists acquire and is much harder than it looks. I watched many YouTube tutorials to learn how to do this with paints and this one by Draw Mix Paint was the best method for me. It’s still more art than science.”

Ten 3DP Tips from a Seasoned Maker
On Alexandre Chappel YouTube channel, he offers up ten top 3D printing tips. His advice includes:
* Upgrade to a .06mm nozzle.
* Increase perimeter (wall thickness) over infill to improve part strength and reduce print time.
* Don’t get distracted by all the fancy filaments out there – most everything you print can be done with PLA.
* Use glue stick for better bed adhesion.
* If you have a large or complicated part, print out a small section of it to test fit and function before committing to a full print.
* You don’t have to 3DP everything. Create hybrid objects with 3D parts and conventional hardware (bolts, screws, threaded rods) – saves time and adds strength.
* When designing parts, avoid support structures as much as possible.
See more details and the rest of his list here. [H/t Kevin Kelly]

Which Hole Saws Are Best?

Todd of Project Farm did his usual admirably-thorough testing on a number of hole saw brands, from DeWalt, Irwin, Bosch, Milwaukee, Lenox, Morse, and others, testing 13 brands in all. He tested for material hardness, speed of cut, accuracy of cut, chip dispersal, and wear on the bit. Three different thickness/hardnesses of metal were drilled. In the end, the best performer was the MK Morse brand with carbide teeth. Proving that expensive doesn’t always mean best, the MK Morse only costs $8.45 (compared to other brands costing upwards of $40). Todd also found that the Milwaukee Dozer ($9.45) performed very well, as did the Irwin (at $8.42).

The Glue Donut

On the Infinite Craftsman’s Instagram account, Tom posted a fabulous little solution to a problem that lots of us have encountered. You’re holding something with one hand and you need to open the top of your carpenter’s glue with the other. The plastic nozzle is not conducive to such a move. So, Tom 3D printed a little ring that goes underneath the lip of the nozzle so that you can push the donut to push up the nozzle. I assume Tom will eventually have these for sale in his online store. He usually makes his clever shop solutions available as “small batch” products.

Etching Glass with a Transfer Mask

Laser-etching glass has a reputation for being difficult. According to Mike Clarke on his YouTube channel, it doesn’t have to be. The trick he says is using vinyl transfer mask (also known as transfer tape). You can get this online and at any vendor that sells sign-making supplies. You simply apply the mask to the glass where your image will be and let the laser etch through the tape. After etching, you use water to clean off the remaining tape. This process results in much finer details in the etch. See Mike’s video for full details.

Notable Quotables
“Making (in the physical sense) is about taking large chunks of material and making them smaller in precise ways.” -Jamie Hyneman

Mistakes Were Made
In the last issue, we identified Andreas Spiess as Swedish. He’s Swiss! Apologies, Andreas.

Shop Talk
On Cool Tools, reader Dom writes:
"The "Watch Your Step” tip reminds me of the story of Cheaper by the Dozen by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr who used motion studies to reduce workers’ movements and fatigue. They’re the reason there’s a person who hands the surgeon things while they’re working."