The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.
In July 2009, Amazon reached into the Kindle devices of thousands of customers and deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The company had discovered that the third-party publisher selling those editions lacked the rights to distribute them in the United States. Amazon issued refunds. Then it erased the books. A high school student in Michigan lost his annotated copy mid-assignment. A class-action lawsuit followed. Amazon’s CEO called the decision “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” The company settled and promised not to do it again, unless a court ordered it, or unless the company determined it was necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, or unless the consumer failed to keep paying.
Continue reading → The Rental Life: What Happens When You Own Nothing and They Own You
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive. I used the same prompts for all three attempts.
We confess to getting a little thrill whenever we see a mainstream media outlet use the made up title of this Panopticonic blog in print on their pages. The latest media monster to invoke our “Panopticonic” is CounterPunch in a fine article — A Bloody Awful Question of Liquidity — written by Stephen Martin.
Sometimes, wacky technical ideas belong deposited straight in the dustbin and should never make it into actual production — or on a public web page. Meet the “Bite Me” hearing aid — okay, it’s actually called “SoundBite” but “Bite Me” is a so much more fulfilling meme — considering the silliness of the product. The Bite Me hearing aid sits on your teeth to better conduct sound. I wonder if their slogan is: “Clench and Listen” or “Bear Down and Hear Harder” or “Shut Up and Bite Me!”
Continue reading → Shut Up and Bite Me! The Hearing Aid You Can Chew
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