A seemingly innocent article in The New York Times discusses how start-ups are capitalizing on the GIF craze in mobile messaging. But it caught my attention not just because its author seems like a stodgy business writer coming several years late to the party. More eyebrow-raising are the handful of somewhat troubling quotes he casually drops in that hint at something bigger, deeper, and possibly more depressing going on with how we use images to connect:

“I’m not that great with words,” Mr. Howlett said. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.”

…

“A GIF packages your message for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to express yourself,” Ms. Baron said.

…

”Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”

In isolation, these can sound like cries for help from a generation incapable of speaking to one another; or on the other side, for anyone who places real value in articulating meaning through words, like the last gasp of our society giving up any pretense of attempted sophistication.

Are we willingly dumbing ourselves down by falling back on emojis and GIFs to communicate?

Will society gradually value words less and less as a form, in favor of the simplicity of images?

Or will there be a growing divide between those who care enough to use words and those who don’t, based on class, or education, or age?

Or is this all just reactionary, and we’ll simply have a richer variety of ways to express ourselves?

Hopefully no killer robots travel back from the future to prevent said ban.

And now for the flip side of the robots-replacing-humans coin. Not that I was going for an AI theme this week, but as it turns out, the world’s top AI scientists proposed an international ban on AI-controlled offensive weapons.

The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.

The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

…

Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.

“The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,” said the authors.

Time to have all the arguments we’ve had for years now about the ethics of drone warfare, with a new and exciting layer of sci-fi conjecture.

Assuming the nations and corporations of the world all comply, is there any argument against this ban?

If the world can’t agree on an outright ban, what does the new arms race look like?

If AI weapons do move forward, what regulations or limitations would you put in place to prevent disaster — or even apocalypse?

Kids today think “basically, TV sucks”.

A bit of research from an AdAge article entitled “Televisions Are No Longer the Screen of Choice for Kids” suggests that interactivity is becoming a requirement for those brought up in the age of touchscreens.

According to a research report from Miner & Co. Studio, televisions are no longer the screen of choice for kids who have ready access to tablets and smartphones. More than half (57%) of parents surveyed said their children now prefer to watch video on a handheld device rather than on TV.

Mobile devices are so popular with kids that nearly half of the 800 parents quizzed by Miner & Co. reported that they confiscate their kids’ tablets when they act up and make them watch TV instead, thereby fostering a sort of Pavlovian response that equates TV with punishment. (That these parents simply don’t restrict their kids’ access to video altogether when they misbehave suggests that they’re raising a generation of spoiled content junkies, but that’s another story.)

Some kids are so obsessed with the small screen that they’ll even forego treats for another few minutes with their portable video device. When given the choice between spending quality time with the tablet or having dessert, 41% of the parents surveyed said their kids would pick the screen over the snack.

Is this unique to kids with low attention spans, and something they’ll grow out of, or a permanent generational shift?

What, if any, real benefits come from consuming video on a portable device vs a static television screen? Are there benefits to TV that are being lost?

What other side effects will come from kids growing up with touchscreen technology?