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Do you really WANT these jobs?

December 6, 2014 Writing Comments Off on Do you really WANT these jobs?

 

Over the past few years, I’ve read a few online horror stories about working in the Amazon fulfillment centers.  About how body-breaking those picking jobs can be, how options are limited and the pay is not enough to help pay to fix the physical problems a job like that can generate.

So I’m torn.  These jobs sound wretched.  They sound like sheer torture.  I can easily see how you’d want to develop a mechanized/robotic system to make it cleaner, more efficient and move away from breaking people to get the job done.  Robots can do the kind of scut-work that will put a human in the hospital over time and the people are saved (yay people!)

But on the other hand, as hard and as painful as they may be, those ARE jobs.  They can provide for those people, those families.  So by saving the people, we are, with the same stroke, harming the people by taking away that opportunity.

In the sci-fi/cyberpunk that I write, I haven’t explored this specific human cost (yet), I utilize warehouses full of AI driven robots for some areas of the story, but this has got me thinking about the development of those warehouses, how they came to be as mechanized and what happened to all the people who used to work there.  I have some research to do here, and might have a new story or two to write.

Too big to parse.

December 3, 2014 Writing Comments Off on Too big to parse.

 

The Sony breach is massive.  Terabytes of data were grabbed in this most recently announced hack.  What’s been released so far isn’t the source code for the new FF game, or a 5 year plan for development of a new line of wearables.  What were’s seeing so far is personal, it’s people-stuff, employee stuff.  Letters from doctors justifying medical leave, email conversations between producers, the mundane data that collects during the operation of a business.

The sheer volume of paperwork and information that a small business generates and keeps on file is impressive.  Scale that up to an international corporation on the scope and scale of Sony, where departments are likely segregated and the entire system is assembled, patchwork, from different vendors and datasets and you are looking at a data storage and retrieval nightmare.  And KNOWING everything that got swiped, that’s beyond the scope of any single human brain.  You might know that “all employee records from the NY sat office from 1987 through 2011” were grabbed, but that’s not going to tell you that the hackers got a copy of the letter written by the doctor confirming the guy who manned the front desk needed medical leave to get a tumor removed from his spleen.  And that right there is the bigger issue.  Controlling, encrypting, purging and retrieving all of that information, determining what needs to be saved and what needs to get dumped is becoming critical.

As server space gets cheaper and processing power continues to rise, we have become horaders of data, of information.  There are some things that should be used, noted and discarded, but we don’t.  We save it all.  We save it in case there’s a lawsuit, we save it because we “might need it” someday, we save it because we are simply to lazy to spend the brain-cycles on deciding whether or not to hit the delete key.

Better regulation (not the governmental kind, just the joe-average controlling kind) of data, better ways to track and retrieve data and above all, better ways of internally encrypting data are going to be key issues in development coming up.

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