Lately I've been thinking a lot about futureproofing my career. It's a weird world we find ourselves in, and the pace of automation is such that more and more people will lose jobs as we go on. In the US, it's reasonable to expect 20% unemployment rate in fifteen years, and the rest of the world will follow.

To protect myself and my loved ones from what's coming, I began steering my skill set toward IT and mathematics, as I don't think those jobs are going anywhere soon. I think I'll have work for a couple more decades at least.

But while a person can make sure they have something meaningful to do for a while by going into IT or trades, there is no futureproofing our society. We must rebuild it so that everyone won't be miserable and desperate when unemployment hits thirty, fifty, eighty percent worldwide as this wave of automation destroys millions of jobs replacing them with thousands.

Happy 2019, everyone!

May you get done whatever you need to this coming year. And may everything else fall away if you don't enjoy it.

I’m going to see Mortal Engines this week, based on the eponymous book.

In the novel, the main heroine has an ugly scar across her entire face, and a chunk of her character development is learning that there are people who will accept her despite her appearance. In the film, her face is fine and the scar is cosmetic. Some fans got upset over the change, signed a petition, and even got a reply out of Peter Jackson.

Truth is, you cannot have the protagonist of a movie be physically repulsive, unless you make the entire movie about them overcoming that disability (and probably make the movie low-budget). A book can do mutilated characters, because when I read a book, I can be analytical: there is no moment of instinctive recoiling that I feel when I see on a person with a destroyed face in front of me.

I think one of the biggest challenges of modern life is how different our life has become from the conditions we evolved in as a species. In my experience, we are wired to be dissatisfied unless we fulfill biological goals (get food, create a safe environment for children, secure a position within the community, etc.) And yet we also cannot be happy unless we fulfill the values we are taught through upbringing.

How to reconcile the vegetarian with the hunter, I wonder?

Some people believe that the reality we experience is a simulation run by some super-advanced machine. Okay, it might be. But I wonder how these people can function while holding this belief?

Because, in my opinion, if you believe that reality is simulated, then there is very little reason to believe that anybody but you is conscious in this simulation. You could conceivably be a creature of some sort playing a single-player game, and everything and everyone else could be an NPC.

Consider this next time you look into a loved one’s eyes: to be rational, some people must believe that when they look at their child, there is nothing there.