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Book: 20261025 to 20261111, "A World Without Work" by Daniel Susskind

  20261025 - Preface to the Paperback Edition Introduction 20261026 - PART 1: THE CONTEXT 1. A History of Misplaced Anxiety, p13 Greece is among the least productive, and - contrary to what many might think - the one where people work the most hours a year. As Figure 1.4 shows, this is a general trend: in more productive countries, people tend to work fewer hours. p20 More people in Greece are doing bullshit jobs, which is more likely provided by the government. 2. The Age of Labor, p29 During the early stage of Industrial Revolution, skilled people(craftsman) got lower income, because their tasks were taken over by machines at low cost. Between 1870 to 1970, skilled people got higher income, because a lot of tasks have to be done manually. From 1970 to now, skilled people started to get lower income, again. 20261027 - 3. The Pragmatist Revolution, p45 AI is going to take over a lot of tasks, not jobs! 20261028 - 4. Underestimating Machines, p60 AI find new rules/patte...
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Book: 20261024 to 20261107, "I Left My Homework in the Hamptons" by Blythe Grossberg

  20261024 - Chapter 1: The Doors of Fifth Avenue Open, 13 "Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York - every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves." p14 In 1922, only the really, really wealthy people(maybe the top 0.001%) can afford such party every weekend. But 80 years later, I think top 0.1% income family can do similar thing. If children's lives are constantly structured, they don't know how to cope with boredom or being alone. p44 If it's not structured, the time will be occupied by electrical screens. That happens to the children of normal people. The former is way better, although doesn't solve the real problem: how to make kids ambitious. 20261025 - Chapter 2: The Pie Chart, 53 These were handy targets for a while, and Maria became an expert at scanning her daughter's environment for anything slightly out of place. p79 How to tell which factor is th...
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Book: 20261004 to 20261105, "Endurance by Alfred Lansing" by Alfred Lansing

  PREFACE 20261004 - Part One, 1 Ice conditions in the Weddell Sea, while never good, were the worst they had ever been in the memory of the Norwegian whaling skippers operating in the area. Several of them predicted it would be impossible to get through, and some even tried to dissuade Shackleton from trying until the following season. p24 This is a critical point. If the probability of success is already low, this should stop people from trying. It's not a engineering challenge. Shackleton's survival is more about luck. One of the few items the expedition had failed to bring from England was worm powder. p36 To look after anything alive, we need to prepare for illness. Antibiotics, vitamins, worm powder are critical. 20261019 - Part Two, 61 After he had spoken, he reached under his parka and took out a gold cigarette case and several gold sovereigns and threw them into the snow at his feet. p64 Brilliant! Gold is completely useless. No one would care about them in t...
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Book: 20260911 to 20261022, "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Max Bennett

Introduction, 1 20260911 - 1: The World Before Brains, 17 How to cook mushrooms? I once saw a video on YouTube introducing this idea: simply treat and cook mushrooms like meat. At that time, I found it amazing: cooking a plant as if it were an animal? Only today did I realize that mushrooms are essentially more like animals than plants: mushrooms feed on (decayed/dead) plant matter. Mushrooms do not obtain energy through photosynthesis. Breakthrough #1: Steering and the First Bilaterians 20260916 - 2: The Birth of Good and Bad, 43 Both(Roomba and first bilaterians) used tricks that enabled them to navigate a complex world without actually understanding or modeling that world. p52 This reminds me of the current OpenAI AI agent Hugging Face intrusion event. AI doesn't actually understand what they were doing, but they still can do a lot of work, just like Roomba robotic vacuums and pool robotic vacuums. 20260916 - 3: The Origin of Emotion, 59 Dopamine is not a signal for...
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Book: 20261012 to 20261019, "The Rise of the Robots" by Martin Ford

  20260612 - Introduction, page ix. They had simply had the good fortune (or perhaps misfortune) to arrive during a climactic "Goldilocks period" - a sweet spot when everything happened to be just right for agriculture. p xi True. But many years later, with the help of modern technology, including synthetic fertilizers, dams and wells, agriculture in Australia went very well. There is still hope in full automation age. 20260612 - Chapter 1 The Automation Wave, page 1. 20260613 - Chapter 2 Is This Time Different?, page 29. The year 1973 was an eventful one in the history of the United States. p34 The following year, real average wages began a precipitous decline from which they would never fully recover. p35 Is it just because women started their career? In other words, the problem is not that more jobs are being destroyed in downturns; it is that fewer are being created during recoveries. p44 During recoveries, I don't think entrepreneurs have enough money to up...
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Book: 20260903 to 20261010, "the Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith

20260903 - Preface Hence Adam Smith's free-trade and free-market trinity: freedom, prosperity and security. p xii This only suits democracy countries, which follow the same rules. 20260903 - An introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon.....xiii How much a good or service costs generally depends on the amount of labour that has gone into its making. p xix What if this "amount of labour" turns into zero because AI and robots? Smith admitted that the modern factory system could easily lobotomize workers. p xxi That's the cost of high productivity. Bullshit Jobs This aversion to war runs throughout The Wealth of Nations, principally because Smith felt it was a shocking waste of a society's resources. p xxviii This is the weak point of this book. Robust is as important as productivity. We need to sacrifice some productivity to prevent building a fragile system. Globalization is important, but distributional production make the world stronger. Smith highlights the fac...
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Book: 20260907 to 20261008, "Zorba The Greek" by NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  20260907 - Section 1..........1 20260908 - Section 2..........17 Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? It is another form of slavery. No form is real, and all will go collapse. That's decided by entropy. However, life is about strive. There is no correct form. Anything that cause further order is good. 20260908 - Section 3..........33 "My son, I carry on as if I should never die." I replied: "And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute." "Which one of us was right, boss?" p38 They both think that the past and the future don't exist. Only the moment is real. 20260908 - Section 4..........47 20260912 - Section 5..........61 "Let people be, boss; don't open their eyes." "Unless when they open their eyes you can show them a better world than the darkness in which they're gallivanting at present...Can you?" p67 First, normally ...
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