Benjamin Franklin - An American Life

I red Benjamin Franklins biography written by Walter Isaacsson. I really enjoyed reading it. Since he did so much and lived for so long, the book is quite long. Seeing as Benjamin Franklin was a remarkable man, a true inventor, thinker, tinker and scientist it needed to be so. What baffled me after reading this book was how much he accomplished during his stay on this planet. An interesting thing was that he did not seem to have it all planed out how it would end or how he could affect the ways of the world, he just took the opportunities as they arose. He must have been a very smart man in order to be able to adapt and see possibilities in adversity. What I think was one of the biggest contributing factors to his success was his curiosity in so many and diverse matters. What I will try to apply in my own life is his curiosity for the world and the will to help his fellow man. He is the man that coined sayings such as "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". This saying is often used today when speaking about the big brother/surveillance society of today.
He was also a among the first to argue that one way to prevent a cold was regular exercise. He argued that the best way of measuring exercise was to which degree it heated up the body. Many of his theory's have been shown to hold water even later when we have gotten a better insight to what was actually happening. I really encourage you to read this book, you will probably learn quite a lot.

Are droids taking our jobs?

I have read some of the other blog posts and most of them seems to find mostly negative aspects to the robots taking over and performing mundane jobs. This is what they are most likely to do in the short term. I see it as they are freeing up creative potential. Seeing as processes are mostly done quicker more iterations can be done in a shorter time span. Which will speed up the development process. There just need to be places that take care of that freed up creativity, one such place is Kickstarter. There you can search for funding for almost everything. It also shortens the way from producer to consumer, seeing as the producer can take order directly from the consumer. It also works as a way of getting a feel for the market.

In the long term of course there is a chance that most jobs will be taken by robots. In this day and age a lot of people identifies them self by the position that they have, most likely people did so even more, earlier. But what are we really working for? To have a better life? To have more spare time? If people are afraid that they will not have an income then they might need to try to do something about that now, before it goes away. We are on the verge of the space age. Space - the final frontier. It might affect us as much as the industrialization did, or not. But seeing as there is so much that humans have not yet seen or done it is unlikely that there will be no jobs.

I would assume that a doctors won't be replaced any time soon. There are a lot of tests that can't be done for every one right now seeing as they might be to expensive. I believe in proactive medicine and a lot of sicknesses found in the early stages, might cut pain and expenses dead in its tracks. I like the droids and I can't wait till they are here.

I just red the article Can a city really ban cars from its streets?. It was an interesting article and it felt like something I may have read before on sites like Treehugger and TED. It is although a interesting topic and an important one. Considering that we are each day destroying our environment it would be a good step to at least not destroy it as much. Many of the city's built in the 20th century is not made for walking, unlike Nancy Sinatras boots, but for the cars. The initiative to ban cars is good only if it is followed by other changes to our societies like the ones suggested in Moshe Safdie's TED-talk about reinventing the way we use and build city's. This way of using the buildings concentrates peoples in the city's and by that fault also minimizes the amount of travel a person needs to do in order to get to where "hen" want to go.

There are other city's trying to tackle the problems with cars owning the streets. Bogota for example have a car free week, it came out of a car free day that was introduced in 2000. There are city's that never really had a problem to be car free, like Venice there are lessons to be learned from these city's.

There might be issues with a city going car free. These could be, transportation of merchandise to stores and offices in the city, transporting the elderly and the disabled. These problems are quite quaint and they will happily be taken care of by designers and inventors. People are adaptable and this will not really be a problem once we get there. So to conclude, all major city's should try to make sure that cars stay out of their city.