Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #183

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• Autonomous Vehicles and the Labor Question – Taming The American Idol. "Stories of self-driving cars, or flaming batteries, grab headlines. But if you look at the long-term impact of autonomous transportation, it becomes a jobs question. Pushed into the limelight by Amazon‘s announcement of drone-delivered packages, this is a topic that, much as steam power did, will galvanize unions and make us reconsider the boundaries of work. When we had steam power, we got the weekend and the end of child labor. What will automated logistics yield, and how much fighting will happen beforehand?" (Alistair for Hugh).
• Thailand: Videos of police and anti-government protesters clashing – Asian Correspondent. "While we’re on the subject of drones, it’s fair to say that when it comes to revolutions in big squares, Twitter is so 2011. No, the new tech for protesters and uprisings is aerial drones that show the battlefield, helping protesters thwart the authorities and show the world the lobbing of tear gas. Exhibit A: protests in Thailand." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Pirate Bay switches address for the sixth time this year – The Guardian. "The ongoing battle between big media companies and various file sharing/streaming/unauthorized copyright infringing entities continues to be a fascinating case of the ponderous legal apparatus chasing the nimble motivated techie. The Pirate Bay is the best-known torrent site – where visitors can find links that let them download all sorts of things – most of it infringing copyright – from peer-to-peer networks. Legal pressure has meant that The Pirate Bay has had to change its domain name multiple times. This finally got so annoying to The Pirate Bay that they have built a new kind of browser, based on peer-to-peer technology, that will ‘enable users to store and share files without requiring a central hosting, eliminating the need for a domain name.’  This technology, if it works, is a fundamental reshaping of how the web currently operates. Time, as they say, will tell how successful the pirates are at keeping the legal system at bay." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Is It Already Too Late to Stop the NSA? – The American Prospect. "After Mitch’s David Simon link last week, here’s another one to add to the Christmas cheer (1984 version): has the power of the NSA grown so great, and the distance between the people and our governments grown so large, that we just can’t do anything about the NSA?" (Hugh for Mitch).
• Google’s Robot Army – The New Yorker. "I have become very fascinated with robotics, wearable technology and the Internet of things. So much so, that over a year ago, I started a new blog (on Tumblr) called, We, Robots. The main area of interest for me is not in how robots and this physical technology with automate our lives, but rather how this technology will augment the work that we do. And, if you check out We, Robots, you will see so many instances where technology and robots are helping humans be so much better at the work that they do. While everyone is spending their time and attention thinking about Amazon and drones, they may not have realized that Google has been on an acquisition tear by scooping up close to ten of the major robotics companies out there… and there is no sign of them slowing down. While this may seem curious to some, it seems obvious to me. If we have the Internet and connectivity everywhere (think Web, Android, driver-less cars, Google Glass and more), why wouldn’t we have robots as an important part of lives as well? Google has the war-chest to make an early run at this for market dominance, and that’s what they’re doing." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being – Scientific American. "Not to be a downer, but as everyone preps for the holiday season, it’s not all about joy and cheer. This time of year, people get stressed out and depressed… a lot. If fact, if someone is prone to be more anxious or depressed, these holiday seasons are prime time to get pushed further along the downward spiral. Whether you are dealing with negative emotions or know someone who does, the medical community is making significant strides in this space. Guess what? Telling someone to ‘cheer up!,’ ‘get over it!,’ or ‘just try to enjoy yourself,’ is probably the wrong strategy. What we’re learning is that negative emotions are important to our well-being. They help us create balance and get us off the treadmill of constantly battling to be ‘happy’." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.