Turns out your answer depends a lot on whether you’re the car or the pedestrian.

Self driving cars sound awesome. Less traffic, fewer accidents, more free mental bandwidth while commuting. But nothing is perfect, and some scientists are beginning to examine how automated cars should handle accidents:

Here is the nature of the dilemma. Imagine that in the not-too-distant future, you own a self-driving car. One day, while you are driving along, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, the owner and occupant. What should it do?

One way to approach this kind of problem is to act in a way that minimizes the loss of life. By this way of thinking, killing one person is better than killing 10.

But that approach may have other consequences. If fewer people buy self-driving cars because they are programmed to sacrifice their owners, then more people are likely to die because ordinary cars are involved in so many more accidents. The result is a Catch-22 situation.

So one could abstractly argue all day about what’s right, and if you’re able to take yourself out of the equation, the math is what it is.

If it were up to you to decide how autonomous cars handle accidents, what do you program them to do?

How does your answer change if:
a) you’re the first one driving one?
b) you’re also in charge of convincing other people to buy one?
c) everyone is required to drive one (and is that worth doing)?

Also, which day of the week would you never want to work again?

Corporations dream of continuous growth. It shows prosperity, guarantees healthy stock prices. If GDP moves up, the country is healthy; if it remains flat, the country is “stagnating”. Our whole financial system is based on chasing more and more growth for greater and greater rewards.

Some economists suggest there may be another ideal, the steady state, at which productivity increases lead not to continuous growth, but a more equal distribution of limited resources, and for much of the currently employed, a reduction in work hours as employment hours and free time are essentially redistributed. I’m drastically oversimplifying the premise for a setup here, but if you’re into the economic argument, this fantastic Mother Jones article goes in depth.

Essentially, the proposal is that we all share the amount of employment needed to maintain a healthy steady state, then tax big corporations and the very rich to supplement the services a healthy society shouldn’t make its citizens go broke paying for itself (like health care and education) to make our remaining pay go farther. Interesting theory.

But at the end of the day, an immediate change would be you work less, but make less. We’d have to adjust to less money (and therefore less consumption), and more free time.

Would you be willing to go from a five day to a four day work week for four-fifths (20% less) income?

How would you adjust to having less money? What would you do with the extra time?

What other societal implications or changes might result from a shift like this? Would we be more or less informed and engaged? More or less relaxed and satisfied with our careers? More or less able to travel, or create or appreciate art and culture, or any other positive pursuits?

More and more, the emoji form of this gesture is being interpreted as a high five.

New surveys say that religion is on the decline. According to Pew data reported on NPR, both America as a whole is trending away from devotion:

Among the findings:

• The share of Americans who say they are “absolutely certain” that God exists has dropped 8 percentage points, from 71 percent to 63 percent, since 2007, when the last comparable study was made.
• The percentage of adults who describe themselves as “religiously affiliated” has shrunk 6 points since 2007, from 83 percent to 77 percent
• The shares of the U.S. adult population who consider religion “very important” to them, pray daily and attend services at least once a month have declined between 3 and 4 percentage points over the past eight years.

But more dramatically, young people in particular are practicing at a much lower rate:

Skepticism about religion is especially evident among young people. The Pew study found that barely a quarter of “millennials” (born between 1981 and 1996) attend church services on a weekly basis, compared with more than half of U.S. adults born before 1946. Only about 4 in 10 millennials say religion is important in their lives, compared with more than half of those who are older, including two-thirds of those born before 1946.

While we can debate all kinds of fun things around this topic, like what’s causing it, if the trend is permanent or reversible, the juiciest might be what it means for the country.

How will a less-religious citizenry affect life in America, both for good and bad reasons?

Does that mean a net positive or negative for society as a whole?

Is this a trend worth encouraging or preventing?

If religion is personal, should it even matter?

It’s so great when friends get together like this.

This piece from the NY Times on how phones keep us disconnected hovers around a topic we see covered a lot (and that I keep coming back to myself, here), but references several studies that make it hit harder than your average thinkpiece.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

The studies make it seem undeniable, but the interpretation here isn’t simply about people having short attention spans or being shallow. There’s a more poignant spin that we’re just afraid to expose ourselves and be open, and the less practiced we are at that, the easier it is to retreat to the safety of the mediated conversation over the one right in front of us.

How often do you turn to the phone when you should be engaged in conversation? Why do you think you do this?

When other people do the same thing, what do you think of them?

Do you think your ability to have a meaningful conversation is improving or suffering over time? Does this have anything to do with the technology in your life?

Do you even want to change this trajectory, or is this an acceptable evolution of how we interact for you?

[Note: photo taken from artist Eric Pickersgill’s series of group photos with the phones removed for effect. Lovely project.]

Or ignore this post and try a truly controversial topic: Is Scorsese overrated? (Yes, I know I’m asking this in the caption to a shot from Coppola.)

The Godfather and Goodfellas are classic guy movies. We quote them we reference them, their influence is undeniable (even though the latter is a bit over-rated; that’s right, I said it). The Sopranos changed television. Though we know the characters are criminals, we find an admirable dignity in their way of life, we excuse their actions because we’re seduced by their brazen individuality.

When The Wolf of Wall Street appeared in 2013, Scorsese told a story similar to that of Goodfellas, only set in a different kind of criminal enterprise. The same rise to power, the same brotherhood of exploitation and excess, the same kinds of mistakes leading to the same ultimate downfall (though in both cases, a sort of escape from true justice). And yet, Wolf made me viscerally angry. Despite any praise for craft, I sort of hated it, walking out that day. And it always bothered me a little that I couldn’t quite explain why I felt so disgusted by the Wall Street version of this story but entertained by the Mafia one.

Then I read Maria Konnikova’s piece in The New Yorker that basically spelled it out for me (though this excerpt only touches on the larger reasoning).

[P]sychological distance doesn’t require time. Under the right conditions, it can flourish in the moment. The psychological distance provided by “otherness” mimics the distance provided by time. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the mafia. It’s easy to glamorize warfare when there is no draft, or to idealize anyone whose life style seems risky and edgy without putting you, personally, at risk—spies and secret agents, rebels without a cause, the beatniks of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” As long as there isn’t an easy-to-recall, factual reminder that brings us down out of the clouds of romanticism, we can glamorize at will. The lives of serial killers offer those concrete reminders: they lurk in neighborhoods like ours, threatening people who could be us. The mob is more abstract: it’s a shadowy, vague “organization” whose illicit dealings don’t really impinge on us. Abstraction lends itself to psychological distance; specificity kills it.

We grant mobsters dignity because we enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own.

Mobsters are far enough removed from most of our realities that we can see them as fictional, as other, and not feel personally offended, harmed, or threatened by them. Bankers, on the other hand, very recently did direct harm to most of the country. They’re too real to admire; or at least, they should be if you’re any sort of moral person.

What qualities are admirable in mobsters? Are there any that would actually apply to your life, or do they only serve as an escapist fantasy?

Do any of those apply to the popular idea of bankers as portrayed in culture? Are they actually that different, or as this article suggests, just degrees of separation from our actual realities?

If you had to be one, which would you want to be? Or rather, which would be the most fun on the one hand, but which would be the most practical life decision? How would you feel once you’d gone down that path?