“The pace of technological progress is decoupled from the economy,” Jurvetson noted. And the gap between the rich and the poor, he warned, may not grow and shrink in cycles as it has been in the past–it could just continue growing larger. Assuming that every industry will essentially become part of the IT industry, and that robots will take all the unwanted jobs in the world, there will be much less work for humans to do. A small slice of the population could control the information technology that makes it possible for the rest of the world’s work to be automated, he believes.

The venture capitalist invoked the prospect of a future with 80% unemployment–a terrifying, but not entirely unreasonable, thought. What would the future look like if the majority of humanity didn’t need to work because their potential jobs had all been automated? How could that transition happen without leaving humans fearing for their lives?
via Co.Exist

by Dana R Keller via Paleofuture

Griddify, “helps you compose custom grid systems, vertical rhythm, and do a bunch of other stuff with guides in photoshop.”
I installed Griddify and it’s great, but that’s not the only thing blowing my mind. If you watch the video at the link above, look closer. It’s not actually a video at all, but what seems to be an audio track synchronized to a series of clickable elements on the page.
For instance, as the creator is showing a demo of the extension, you can actually click on Photoshop panels (and input fields) in the demo. Again, it’s not a video.
There’s clearly a lot of Javascript trickery going on that’s way over my head. Impressive.

In the world of mobile applications and social networking, a term was coined earlier this year for the splitting up of services into smaller, more focused apps: The Great Unbundling. Foursquare, Google, Facebook and Dropbox are a few of the big dogs who started the trend.
Now it seems we’re seeing something similar happen in the world of television. The Great Un-Cabling, if you will.
HBO is making a handful of its shows available on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service. Netflix is also on a successful roll with 10 new and returning original series in 2014.
Cable companies say they have to bundle everything together to pay for the good stuff like HBO and Showtime, but their business models are becoming less and less relevant.

The art of designing Office for iPad from the Office 365 Team.

via Co.Exist

“I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the Internet with that I get my email on, that I do my taxes on,” he said, trailing off. “And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.”
—George R.R. Martin, creator of Game of Thrones
For those of you bitching you don’t have the latest and greatest [insert tool you use to make your art], keep stories like this in mind.

—Seth Godin in conversation with Debbie Millman, How Design Conference

Google’s ad ambitious may reach further than you think. In a newly revealed letter to the SEC, the company said it could someday be serving ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities,” as part of a larger point about breaking out mobile ad revenue.
—Russell Brandom, The Verge
No fucking way. Not in my house.

Dieter Bohn at the Verge on the Surface 3:

Even with these design improvements, the Surface’s core design is simply physically more complicated than a laptop’s single hinge. You will find yourself mucking about with setting the kickstand in the right place on your knees and dealing with that cover flapping about. Microsoft may have needed two years of design iterations before it could honestly make the case that the Surface can be used on your lap like a, well, a laptop, but it’s finally gotten close enough to make it. It’s just strange to think of so much design effort going into what other companies solve with a hinge. The simplicity of a clamshell is easier, but it’s also not the end-all-be-all of “getting stuff done” computing. If you buy into the benefits of a tablet computer — and there are many — the tradeoff could well be worth it.
Let’s borrow Steve Jobs’ analogy of PCs (including laptops) being “trucks.” In this world this makes tablets small coupes and/or motorcycles. The motorcycle Apple built is the iPad: more fun to use and easier to carry around. It can solve most problems, most of the time.
Microsoft tried to build a motorcycle with sidecar and a roof and small trunk to keep a spare tire. To top it off, they’ve decided they’re not going to race against other motorcycles like the iPad and the Nexus 7, but other cars like Macbook Airs and Lenovo Thinkpads and the more I read about the Surface 3 the more I’m convinced it’s not equipped to race against anyone now.
Microsoft has painted themselves into a flat, Windows 8 tile.
Microsoft wants badly to take down the iPad and they went after laptops. To be clear, this is not a pivot. This can be more accurately described as a retreat.

via Bees & Bombs

Will Oremus at Slate asks us if Microsoft’s new tablet could replace your laptop?
Luckily, he answers it:

It’s hard to know how much of this is my unfamiliarity and how much is Microsoft’s poor design, but this article took me significantly longer to write on the Surface than it would on either my Macbook or my old Windows XP desktop machine. That’s partly because Word crashed and had to restart for no apparent reason, and partly because simple tasks like copying a URL from Internet Explorer and pasting it as a hyperlink in Word took multiple rounds of trial and error.
Sounds pretty awesome.

One of the things that I am most passionate about is showing respect for the ingenuity of others. Working in an ecosystem where I am often competing very closely, it is inevitable that I will be confronted with situations where the easy thing is to match/copy/remix someone else’s ideas into my own app.

What I have found very frustrating is that I haven’t been able to define what is acceptable in a manner that comes anywhere close to the importance I think this topic demands. Too often I am left with just an I’ll know it when I see it definition.

—David Smith provides a great example of the art of remixing

I call it not being a lazy ass and using your brain to make something that resonates with you.