Weeknote for 9/1/2019

Life maintenance

Work

😐

Last week was swallowed up by work, my final push to get this big pile of ebooks done, and it left me little time for anything else. This week my workload and schedule should be back to normal.

Car shopping

😐

I was going to go to Carmax last week, but work crowded out my plans, so hopefully I can get a car or two transferred and look at them this week. Meanwhile I’m liking my rental Elantra, though I probably won’t buy one, since it didn’t come up in the lists of high ranking cars I consulted.

Money

🙂

I made some calls to help me piece together my medical billing puzzle, and I learned enough to feel okay about paying my mystery bill, though I still have steps after that to resolve the situation to my satisfaction. It’s actually pretty fun to get little revelations in each call and progressively learn how the system works.

AI Field Map

🙂

I didn’t get much further on this, but I did make some plans: (1) to focus only on the lists from Wikipedia for now; (2) to start with the list of AI projects, since it’s a bridge between researchers and topics; and (3) to cheat my project schedule by continuing this one as a learning example during my upcoming project to study Semantic Web technologies. For the rest of this project, I’ll create a basic set of entries from the AI projects list with a few standard properties for each one, which I’ll convert into something more formal when I get to the Semantic Web, which will probably be next month’s project, starting next week.

Video

😎

I continued my AI movie project with the 1927 silent film Metropolis, which felt iconic and mythic to me, and I liked it a lot more than I expected for both its surface aesthetic and its hidden depths. It was about society’s relationship to machines, and the AI occupied a fascinating and troubling blend of roles that reminds me that our relationship to AI will likely be very confused and will also highlight ways we relate to our fellow humans, such as the way we tend to use them as tools.

Podcasts

🙂

I caught up on Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, which I appreciate not only for his optimism but also for his book recommendations, where I can see the technologies and scenarios he talks about fleshed out in story form.

I’m still not sure what audiobooks I want to listen to next, so in the meantime I’m catching up on my friend Adam’s technology criticism podcast, Device and Virtue.