Tag: russel brand

38 Equip: Synthetic Core 88

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

I think we can say that we are now living in the post-truth era. If we’re not, we should still say it. That would make the statement untrue, which would actually prove that we are living in the post-truth era, Which would make the statement true. Though, since we’re living in the post-truth era, the usefulness of saying that we’re living in the ‘post-truth era’ is debatable, as the truth is no longer what we deal in. However, if I say WE’RE LIVING IN THE POST TRUTH ERA really loudly and marry it with whatever’s trending on Twitter right now (Josh Gordon, whoever he is) then perhaps you’ll decide this post is worthy of note.

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Eugh, he’s an American football player?? I thought he was a real person

But when did we enter the era of post-truth? When were we pre-truth, when were we resolutely amid truth, and at what point did truth become a rapidly shrinking figure in our rear view mirror. Some say that the era started with that last paragraph I wrote. This is definitely a minority view however, as at time of writing I am the only person who’s seen that paragraph, and I certainly don’t believe that. Me stating that, however, is another good example of the post-truth age. What do you think of when you think of post-truth? Donald Trump and Brexit? Was 2016 the end of our often fractious relationship with reality?

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82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

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The human race is kind of resigned to losing all of it’s jobs to robots. In their March 2017 paper, ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from the UK Labour Market‘, Acemoglu and Restrepo found that the addition of one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18 – 0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25 – 0.5 percent.

Of course, I wouldn’t be the widely lauded and routinely celebrated investigative journalist that I am if I didn’t investigate their findings and see if such statistics could be replicated in the UK job market. Unfortunately, Manchester Refugee Support Network only employs 5 people, so in order to get a proper reading on effect on one robot per one thousand employees I had to measure the effect of

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one two hundredth of a robot on our work. I think. There’s really no way of knowing exactly what the maths are, but that’s what I did so it has to be correct.

It’s hard to truly say what would represent 0.5% of a robot, but my contacts in the robots industry* tell me that equates to roughly a robot eyeball. With this in mind, I introduced a fully automated eyeball to the office at MRSN. Well, I initially assumed it was a fully automatic robotic eyeball, but later examinations have suggested it may in fact be closer to a chocolate ball wrapped in tinfoil. Again, there really is no way of actually knowing, but talks conducted with my contacts in the scientific research industry* have confirmed that this trivial matter should have had no effects on the findings.

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