Taking Chances With Your Career
Why'd you take the chance?
Capital Thinking • Issue #102 • View online
“I don’t mean to put you on the spot,” I said, “but how would you make X funny?”
I do this to every comedian who comes on my podcast.
But Mike’s not a comedian. He’s a writer. And he made this very clear.
But that didn’t stop me from asking for more jokes.“
I am a comedy writer. Not a comedian. It’s like the difference between phone sex and real sex.
One is just a hollow, empty, degrading experience and the other one really runs up your phone bill. In my case, it’s $20 for four minutes either way.”
According to James Altucher, Mike Reiss started writing for “The Simpsons” because NO ONE else would take the job.
“I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing,” he said. “It seemed like not only a surefire loser of a show, but actual career poison.”
We all know now how that story went.
The show became the #1 animated series on primetime TV. In fact, it became a cultural phenomenon, inspiring an entirely new genre of television: adult cartoons. Without “The Simpsons” we wouldn’t have “South Park,” “Family Guy,” etc.
“Why’d you take the chance?” I asked.
There's a New Sheriff in Town
One might say that not since Y2K has there been so much hype and opportunism driven by a deadline. From where I sit, however, there appears to be a third reason that businesses should care about the GDPR: Many businesses today are simply not prepared for the rising tide of regulatory action that has become the new normal for businesses.
On balance, I believe that the GDPR is a wake-up call, for it’s given businesses everywhere an opportunity to review and modernize their cyber risk practices to secure their digital futures.
I think that GDPR is just the tip of the iceberg – what’s most visible – of the regulatory change that’s coming.
- Don Elledge
Don Elledge
But I'm a Smart 'Bot - and I Wanna Vote!
From The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future.
A conscious computer would be, by virtually any definition, alive. It is hard to imagine something that is conscious but not living. I can’t conceive that we could consider a blade of grass to be living, and still classify an entity that is self-aware and self-conscious as nonliving.
The only exception would be a definition of life that required it to be organic, but this would be somewhat arbitrary in that it has nothing to do with the thing’s innate characteristics, rather merely its composition.
Of course, we might have difficulty relating to this alien life-form. A machine’s consciousness may be so ethereal as to just be a vague awareness that occasionally emerges for a second. Or it could be intense, operating at such speed that it is unfathomable to us.
What if by accessing the Internet and all the devices attached to it, the conscious machine experiences everything constantly? Just imagine if it saw through every camera, all at once, and perceived the whole of our existence.
How could we even relate to such an entity, or it to us?
Or if it could relate to us, would it see us as fellow machines?
If so, it follows that it may not have any more moral qualm about turning us off as we have about scrapping an old laptop. Or, it might look on us with horror as we scrap our old laptops.
Would this new life-form have rights? Well, that is a complicated question that hinges on where you think rights come from.
Let’s consider that.
