Once inside, they befriend tattooed Yakuza and form the basis of a hilarious sitcom.

Recently I stumbled across this eyebrow-raising article. In Japan, a country with the world’s oldest average age, the number of senior citizens committing crimes is on the rise — primarily because they are lonely. It seems that socially disconnected seniors would prefer the stability and community of prison over the more metaphorical solitary confinement of their later years.

Boy, those grandkids must feel record-breaking levels of guilty.

Would you choose living the rest of your life effectively alone, or living the rest of your life in prison?

What could change your answer? Do you think you’d feel differently as you age?

Guys? Little help? Trying to maintain the primacy of the individual over here.

Lately I’ve been gravitating toward sci-fi stories, no matter the medium. The way good sci-fi focuses so clearly on asking an interesting question, then exploring the implications of the answers that come back… strikes some chord deep in my brain.

Looks at website description above.
Oh. Right.

Sea of Rust doesn’t strive for literary prose or nuanced character study. But it does explore a specific potential version of a post-humanity world with a surprising depth of thought and feeling.

In this version, humanity created AI, and AI destroyed humanity. In the aftermath some AI are individuals, former servants or laborers scrounging for survival in a robotic Mad Max-style future. And they live in fear of hive-mind-style OWIs — skyscraper-sized “One World Intelligences” fighting to be the one and only being left on earth. OWIs want to subsume every other mind in existence; or use their mind-linked automaton armies to wipe out anyone who still clings to independence.

What it means to be an individual, what it means for a machine to have a soul, the long-term purpose of any “thinking thing” in the universe; these are big questions for a fun genre book full of robot gun fights. Instead of stopping at Terminator‘s Skynet, this book wonders what comes next when the artificial intelligences that outlive us start having conflicts among themselves.

What will the robots fight over once we’re all gone?

Is there anything essentially human they’d value enough to maintain in our absence?

Great, now everyone knows you’re a dog on the internet.

One of the greats when it comes to thinking about where technology meets humanity, Paul Ford writes in Businessweek that maybe we need a Digital Protection Agency, much like we have (or at least, used to have) an Environmental Protection Agency. He even lays out a few potential roles it could play:

Lots of helpful information, plenty of infographics, a way to track just how badly you’ve been screwed, and, ideally, some teeth—the DPA needs to be able to impose fines. I’m sure there’d be some fuss and opposition, but, come on. The giants have so much money it would hardly matter.

And that might barely scratch the surface of what we need, or will need in the years to come.

What regulations would help sort out the mess that’s become of the internet in the hands of the big power players?

What corporations would suffer the most if we did? What would the biggest benefits be?

What are the biggest changes, or sacrifices, we’d have to make to ensure they work?

By law, the pre-self-driving stage still requires nerds to sit nervously in driver seats, unsure what to do with their hands but excited to be part of “the future”.

Well, it happened. The first reported autonomous car crash fatality. Testing suspended, people freaking out. But… should they?

If I were a less lazy researcher, I would track down local newspapers calling for an end to automobiles in the 1890’s after those first killed a pedestrian. We could have a good chuckle at how short-sighted those hat-and-vest-wearing luddites were way back when, what with their trying to curb the inevitable advance of American car culture and all.

But let’s be honest (and check Wikipedia): “National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 2016 data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.” And that’s now, before all that pesky safety stuff Nader fought for.

So people being killed by (shall we call them “driver-ful”?) cars — though widely considered terrible tragedies, is something we accept as part of the price we pay to have cars at all — something we mostly agree we mostly need.

What’s different about crashes without a driver that causes each incident to generate so much interest?

Is that going to change in the coming years as we get used to them being part of life?

The key to any strong friendship, or business, is well-coordinated hairstyles.

Not every good professional collaboration becomes a social friendship, some friendships make terrible business partnerships. Maybe the qualities that make people good at working together are different from the ones that develop into deep emotional bonds, and that’s okay.

At the same time,  friendships start in workplaces every day. And doesn’t it sound like a dream to start a fulfilling and successful business with your best friends? How fun would that be?

I have personally found leaping the gap from cool coworker to actual friend very difficult. Maybe that’s just my hangups. How about you?

Do people you like at work become your friends outside of work?

What’s behind your failure or success to merge those worlds?

Do you like things that way, or wish you could change them?