Gene Morphis ' View

From time to time one reads a book that is important. The Second Machine Age Work Progress And Prosperity In A Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is important. In the authors’ view, the confluence of falling technology costs, increased computer processing power, cheap sensors and the quality and ubiquity of networks, are ushering in a revolution equally as potent and far-reaching as the Industrial Revolution. Drawing parallels to the effect on civilization of the Industrial evolution, and how long its subsequent impact has continued, they see brilliant technologies in the early stage of changing about everything. They provide a historical context on the growth in living standards, starting with the domestication of the horse, development of agriculture, which led to cities, afforded great armies and so on.  Things really didn’t advance much from there until the steam engine was perfected, which created factories, mass transit, electrification ...

The most recent trustees’ report forecasts that the Medicare trust fund will be exhausted in 2030. While that is a financially frightening prospect, there was good news buried in the report: the previous forecast indicated the funds would be gone in 2026. I believe there are reasons to be far more optimistic. Here’s why: 1.        There are cheaper medical services on the way. Theranos has a totally new approach to blood analysis as an example. Founded by Elizabeth Holmes, and backed by a who’s who, Theranos has micro labs that can be installed anywhere and only require a few drops of blood. Millions of us troop to a Quest Diagnostics center, or one of its competitors, to have our blood chemistry tested for any of thousands of things like cholesterol levels, hepatitis presence, insulin and blood sugar and so on. Quest, of course, bills the patient, and/or the patient’s insurer, including Medicare. Theranos is an example of a better, cheaper, faster op...

If you are a William Gibson fan, you’ll likely be excited to learn that he has returned to his particular flavor of science fiction. He has detoured into more conventional (but no less enjoyable) fiction recently, exploring conflicts among ad agency/security firms, investment denim creators, spying drones controlled by smart phones, etc, but returns to the scifi genre in The Peripheral . For folks who’ve never read his work, his prose is exactly right-not unnecessarily long, not too spare. Just right.  He is the guru of the near-future; one reads about things in his work that you are certain don’t exist, and then observes them in a few years. This novel however reaches a little farther into time than his previous work. It presumes that multiple presents and futures exist-that is the multiverse or quantum universe hypothesis. Within that framework, he shows his craftsmanship in creating characters that the reader immediately envisions, easily finds believable and become interes...