This is a very compelling and yet disturbing essay: Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain. It made me think, what will happen when robots can drive, flip burgers, clean toilets, etc? What would it be like if the unemployment reaches 30-40%? Will this future automation reduce the cost of goods and services? Or will money become unimportant like it is in Gene Roddenberry’s future vision? What about Moore’s Law that says that CPU power doubles every 18 - 24 months? At this rate robots will have the CPU power to perform more and more human-skilled jobs within the next 20-30 years.

The whole subject of image processing is fascinating and I started thinking about how robots could effect my insurance agency and the insurance industry in general. It is no secret that insurance companies are the second most wealthy business in the country. Next to the US government that prints the money, the second entity to fold would be the insurance companies. While single companies might have financial problems, the industry as a whole is very strong and very financially solid.

With no auto accidents, there would be no need for collision insurance, as that covers collision with cars and objects and robots would prevent this from happening. Comprehensive rates could be lowered as well because robots might be better at avoiding rock chips, and as for vandalism and malicious mischief perhaps better robot security system could record and prosecute the offenders. And as for Liability premiums? If you don’t crash and hurt people or property, there is little need for auto liability coverage. This could be devasting to insurance agents who have huge books of autos and rely on these commissions as bread and butter income.

Life insurance premiums would be affected, but not nearly as dramatically. Travel related accidents only account for a small percentage of death claims. Most deaths are the cause of heart-related conditions and cancer. Perhaps these robots could be used to help monitor and reduce these types of deaths? However, if people lived longer then that means they might just be poor longer. Also, since Life Insurance agents don’t make much commissons after the first 1-3 years (like 1-3% usually) on the premium, robots wouldn’t affect this too much.

Would homeowners insurance still be required by banks if robots monitored all aspects of the home? Would robots be able to prevent fires? What about natural disasters? Somehow I don’t think there would be much affect in the homeowners insurance market unless robots could stop mother nature. This means insurance agents should continue to build on their book of home insurance policies.

Commercial insurance would be affected — especially commercial auto. Robots would be making sure none of those expensive accidents happened.

I sure hope that we think enough so as to not invite a Terminator-type future by using something like Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. Roger Clarke writes an excellent essay using Asimov’s laws of robotics as a basis for reality with robots. 

My thinking is use robots for medicine, for safety, but I’m concerned about 30-40% unemployment and not at all sure about using robots for replacing low level skill jobs. It’s a deep, very pensive subject, but something our children’s children very well will have to deal with.

Good story: Blogs Have a Place on News Sites dealing with how blogs can and probably will play a huge part in news. With camera cell phones becoming more popular and sites like textamerica  evangelizing moblogging which allow easy exchange of pictures taken by these phones, it makes it possible and eaiser for a much larger newsbody to contribute. It’s like having thousands of reporters, and yet none of them are on the payroll. The news organizations just have to learn how best to tap these roaming reporters.

Set your mail filters to ignore: worm/MiMail.A, also known as W32.Mimail.A@mm is out in the internet wild and coming to an email box near you. It is disguising itself as a zip file. Here’s something I started doing many months ago: not opening attachments from anybody unless I know they are coming. Business associates I will write back and ask them what they sent.

Chris Pirillo is quoted in this article as saying: “E-mail is a polluted medium. It’s dead.” This is coming from a guy who grew his business based on email newsletters. Mr. Pirillo raises a good point: email is saturated, there is too much garbage in and garbage out and even folks who want to receive your information and communication are likely having trouble doing so. He is pointing to RSS as the new frontier. I don’t think legislating spammers is going to help much, but I do think that more folks moving to a whitelist, as I have been thinking about quite seriously lately, could be a good move. These confirmation mail services could be an idea as well.

Olema Ranch Campground near San Francisco offers wireless internet access (802.11b): http://www.olemaranch.com/wireless.htm I wonder if Wilderness Areas are next? hmmm… will they be looking at the Bears or the Bares?

The game isn’t over with Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. It’s odd that a sequel would be better than its predecessor, but Spy Kids 3D is like Rocky 3. They are both better than the movies that preceeded them, and yet neither was better than the original.

Young Juni starts out and he is out of the agency, feeling bitter and powerless of the beaurocracy of the agency; odd emotions for a kid who has barely made it through puberty (or has he?). Meanwhile his sister has entered Game Over to try and thwart the Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone). Unfortunately for Juni’s sister, she is trapped in the game (Tron anybody?) and Juni needs to come back to the agency and go into the game to save his sister and stop Toymaker from coming out of the game. The first few minutes of the movie are 3D and then viewers are invited to take off the 3D glasses and put them back on when Juni enters the game which I found kind of a cool, interactive way to get viewers into the film.

<img src=”/images/reviewspykids3d.jpg” border=”0″ align=”right”>The 3D effects are of your usual 3D fare: things popping out at you, floating in mid air, etc. I like the power pill aspect of the game where Juni reaches out and grabs a bonus life seemingly from the corner of your eye. I won’t spoil any other effects, suffice to say, they didn’t waste the 3D capability. 

Stallone is great as the villain in this movie. He should go back to playing the bad guy like he did as Frankenstein in Death Race 2000; he’s good at being the nemesis.

Now for the not so good: this movie is a rehash of other movies, both a cliche of itself and Tron. It has a similar race scene as Tron, and sort of a plot which has “players” trying to get to the master brain (Toymaker), but if you’ve never seen Tron and you enjoy the premise of going inside the game literally, than you will enjoy this movie more. Spy Kids 3D ends on sort of a flat, cheesy note, but it is certainly family friendly and better than some other sequels out there right now (like T3 and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle), so take the kids and get butter on the popcorn. Grade: B-

For those who dislike the French, there just became a new reason: writer Frédéric Beigbeder has written a book called, Windows on the World, that intermingles porn during the 9/11 attack in some of the victim’s final moments. While using 9/11 as a backdrop of a major motion picture with true literary value (Titanic) might someday be coming, for now we have to leave it to this ignorant, compassionless frenchman to hatch an idea for profit (and don’t even tell me it was for artistic reasons) that not even established pornographers would touch. Nice story backdrop, Frédéric. What will you attempt to profit from next: some anal romp during Pearl Harbor? Lest we never forget there was no French sympathy for 9/11, no support in the Iraq war, and now an insensitive French writer trying to make people horny during a horrific terrorist event. Let me be among the first of many to give the one finger salute to Frédéric.

One of the things I’ve always liked about the XBox was how you could burn tracks from CDs to listen to while playing some of the games. Listening to MP3 on your regular stereos is becoming more in vogue. A range of digital music players are springing up that let you listen to songs on a hard drive on a hi-fi.

Michael Jackson isn’t finding the RIAA a thriller, in fact he is: “speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music” You aren’t the only one, Michael, who wishes the RIAA with this sue the customers offensive would just beat it.

Related article:
Will I be sued for downloading?

Related entries:
RIAA on the offensive
Beefing up security during recording process
911+ filesharers targeted so far
RIAA’s real lawsuit numbers

(story: The Salt Lake Tribune — Phone-bill related consumer complaints soar) Here’s some of my long distance phone company complaints:

- they are always trying to switch you to some better plan when you call to complain; why aren’t you on the best plan for being a loyal customer to begin with?
- you have to wait on hold, often in excess of 10 minutes to reach a human being.
- you must navigate a computer menu to get to the right department, and maybe what you think is the right department ends up being the wrong department.
- competing companies (cough mci cough) are always trying to get you to switch to them, even after you ask them not to call you any more and remove you from their lists

I think the world would be a better place with fewer long distance carriers. Hmm

Yesterday, during my weekly radio show, we were discussing camera phones (cell phones with cameras in them, for those who don’t know what they are), and the opinion of many in the room, to my surprise, was that they were a bad idea. One webmaster in attendence was from the Netherlands and she said these phones were being used in a despicable way (which I’m not going to repeat here). So I post this story: CNN.com - Police: Teen abduction foiled by cell phone cam - Aug. 2, 2003 to reinforce what I think will be the strength of these phones. I mentioned the newsworthy aspect of these camera phones. I’m curious what others think: are camera phones a good or bad idea?