MSP [] MATTSPLAINED [] MSPx

Biotech conjures images of cloning, lab meat and mind control. But biotechnology has been fuelling humankind’s progress for thousands of years. Today we look past the fear and celebrate the promise. It’s time to Mattsplain. It’s time to Mattsplain.⠀

Excerpt:
Biotech is one of those words that’s often thrown around – like blockchain – but that mean very little to most people.
•That analogy with blockchain is a really good one.
•People often imagine that topics like biotech and block chain are easily definable, like say artificial intelligence or the Internet.
•Biotechnology especially is extremely broad.
•That’s one of the reasons that we don’t talk about it here too often.
•It tends to pop up more often on our geeks squawk show, because there will be a news item about a specific piece of biotech but that technology may not be big enough for us to consider on this show.

Presumably that means that there is some enormous breakthrough in the Biotech sphere did you want to talk about today?
•That would be the way that we normally go about it.
•people seem to respond very well to the hit-and-run format of last week’s show, I thought that today we could try and explain a little about what biotechnology is.
•And then have a look at some of the stories and breakthroughs that we’ve seen in that sector this year.

Just to be clear, we are not going to be talking about really intelligent Machines that start building organic bodies to host their minds while they wipe out humanity?
•No.

Or enhancement technologies that create a race of superhumans who will enslave everyone else?
•No.
•Look, every technology has its Dark side.
•And often when we hear reports about biotechnology, it’s those negative aspects that gets stressed.
•So we’ll hear stories about the dangers of crisper DNA editing.
•Or cloning or stem cell research.
•Or, as we talk about a lot on this show, the gradual convergence of intelligent machines and humans.

You mean where humans have so many mechanical replacement parts and machines have so many organic parts that it’s difficult to tell which is which?
•Yes. Now, I generally take that nightmarish and negative tone because I’m trying to demonstrate how extreme the result of this technology could be if we allow it to spread unchecked.
•It also might be that that is exactly the future that you would choose.
•As we mentioned in a previous show, a billionaire’s nightmare might be a poor person’s paradise.
•So, if I come onto the show and paint a picture of a future of teddy bears, cotton candy and infinite episodes of Star Trek, then people may look at the world and think the future’s going to be great and stop bothering to look around them.
•With biotechnology we so often see the negative portrayal, that the truly incredible advances in this sector get overlooked.

Today we’re going to speed through a bunch of the questions that Matt gets asked most often. What do the Facebook and Twitter share price falls mean? Should I invest in crypto currency? Where’s my ray gun? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Excerpt from Transcript:
Because he’s got a one track mind – a recent show on GPS being a good example – we usually tackle one topic at a time on Mattsplained. That generally means there are more things we can’t cover than we can talk about. Today we’re going speed read our way through some of the topics Kulturpop’s Matt gets asked on a daily basis.

It sounds a little less depressing than what we do most weeks. It’s time to Mattsplain.

Will today be less depressing than what we do most weeks?
•No. Covering more topics means I can scare even more people than usual.
•I’m hoping it’ll be like watching a Tony Robbins lecture backwards.
•You’ll feel a lot more scared and insecure by the end.
•I’m going to jump straight in and ask the first question myself, because I’ve been peppered with it this week.
•Does the recent fire sale on Twitter and Facebook shock pose any great problems?

Does it?
•For investors, yes. They’ve lost money. And while those stocks may not dip too much further – I’m not an analyst, you’ll get better advice from the Morning Run crew than from me on that – I don’t know if they’ll soar again in quite the same way.
•It doesn’t seem to be the start of a tech sector rout. Apple’s quarterly announcement was very strong, indeed. Even if Huawei now makes more phones than Apple.
•But most of us aren’t Facebook or Twitter investors. That’s a really small number of people.
•The majority of us, literally billions of us, as far as the markets are concerned, we’re just losers. I mean users.

What do you think it means for users?
•If you look at it that way round: not very much.
•Our day to day use of these services will continue exactly the same.
•The real question is: what does it mean to the people governing those companies?
•If I was them, I would be scared.

Full transcript at http://www.kulturpop.com/pods/

Bad ideas. Technology creates at least as many of them as it does good ideas. What happens when the bad ideas slip through and the good ones drift away? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Excerpt from this episode:
Problems. The things that science and technology are supposed to solve. That the solutions are themselves problems is not an original thought – which is good, because Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage isn’t very good at originality – but are we slipping into an era of bad ideas with great execution? I don’t know. I’m not sure I care. But someone does and he’s here to Mattsplain.

You’ve been a bit under the weather this week?
•That’s right. Nothing major – bit of a cold.
•But it does mean there’s a couple of small changes to the show.
•Instead of 20 mins of unrelenting misery punctuated by a couple of jokes, this week we just have the misery.
•My SOH is the first thing to go when I’m feeling sick
Play Clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0QWspt6PLE (0m06s to end)
•Well, that’s all the production crew gone.
•Jeff, you still here?

I’ve been doing this for too long to get spooked because you’re feeling grumpy. I believe we’re starting with librarians. Not often we do that on Mattsplained.
•That’s true. People don’t make an obvious link between libraries and technology, so they don’t often come up on this show.
•But they did this week.
•An economist at Long Island University wrote a piece for Forbes that suggested that the US replace its public libraries with Amazon.com run bookshops.
•Before we get to that. Remember how you spent a lot of last show trying to stop me talking about the nitty gritty of positional navigation systems like GPS and LORAN?

This show originally aired on BFM89.9 in Malaysia www.bfm.my

It’s easy to jump on the new tech is better tech bandwagon. But what happens when that new tech is a little bit older and doesn’t perform as well as the technology it replaced? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Excerpt from this episode:
If there’s one thing that we can be sure of on this show, it’s that the future is always better. Every week, Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage pops by to tell us that while the sun may not come up tomorrow, it’ll be back eventually. Even if humankind is dead by then. So, why, you may wonder, is he suddenly declaring that the old is better than the new? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Have you finally turned into that crabby old man obsessed with the good old days?
•Yup. Things were good back then.
•Back then, kids didn’t to go to school.
•There was no point - most of them were dead from disease or stuck in chimneys or looms before they reached their teens.
•You didn’t have to lock your doors because you couldn’t afford anything anyone would want to steal.

Weren’t people more neighbourly then?
•Sure. What’s mine was yours because neither of us had anything.
•We looked out for each other.
•People would make sure you were really dead, or at least heavily sleeping, before they stole your boots.
•And if you couldn’t afford a funeral, the local parish would give you a generous send-off by flinging your body into a midden pit.
•Not like today. Where everyone worries about nutrition and clean drinking water and getting an education.
•Life’s become too complicated. Let’s get back to basics. The important stuff.
•Work. Steal some food. Die young and deformed.

Fun Friday folks. Can we assume from your sarcasm that not everything was better in the past?
•Of course it wasn’t. But sometimes we go too far the other way and get caught up in some shiny new thing rather than sticking with something that’s less exciting but works really well.

This show was originally broadcast BFM89.9 in Malaysia. www.bfm.my

Science. It’s tricky stuff. Just as you think you’ve come to grips with nature’s mysteries, a quantum physicist fires you into another dimension. Should we stop worrying and let Schrödinger’s cat out of the bag? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Is Star Wars undermining the Internet? Has hate speech undermined the mainstream? Could a licence to surf could bring us back from the Dark Side? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Excerpt:
Masculine inferiority. It’s something that Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage has been accused of all his life. But until last week, he thought it was just him. Now, the massed ranks of Star Wars Ultras have broken cover to try and force their views, Empire-like, across the Internet.

Confused? You will be. It’s time to Mattsplain.

The fanboys should be happy today: we’re talking about Star Wars.
•Less happy than you might imagine.
•The fan boys very much in our crosshairs this week, as well as is everyone else who thinks the Internet is the sole preserve of their point of view.
•Everyone knows that the Internet is reserved for my point of view.
•And when that POV is interrupted, I have to conjure up these 20 minutes sermons to bring everyone to heel.

You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you?
•I’m happy to see that your holiday has improved your mood.
•And people call me uncle angry.
•I am full of myself. But that’s not what I’m trying to do here.
•I’m just trying to prove a point. Everyone thinks the Internet is for them and that anyone who dares to disagree with their opinion is attacking them.
•Or rather, threatening that little piece of the Internet they call their own.

And what does Star Wars have to do with any of this?
•I’m not sure if you caught this because you been away.
•And I’m not sure how long this post has been going around.
•It’s a manifesto purporting to be from The fans of Star Wars, asking Disney to stop its campaign of perverting the franchise to further a socio-political agenda of inclusion that promotes masculine inferiority.

Yeah I saw it…
•I’m not quite sure how having strong female characters equates to masculine inferiority.
•Also not quite sure how promoting different sexes genders and races upsets anyone in a fictional universe populated by creatures like Jabba the Hut, a cross between a slug and a lump of faecal matter that somehow manages to be more disgusting and offensive than either.
•I consider myself to be a Star Wars fan, and I happen to like where the franchise is headed.
•Anyone who is flabbergasted by Luke Skywalker’s transition to cantankerous old goat, obviously hasn’t met a lot of old people and thinks that they really are like the old duffers in the Werthers Originals commercials.

You’re definitely going to be like Luke. You don’t even have to get much older.
•Oi. Respect please.
•People might be wondering what relevance this has as a topic for our show.

I think our listeners gave up trying to connect your dots a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
•Bonus Star Wars points.
•We’ve heard a lot of talk of the last few months about how the Internet is being weaponised by countries and companies with an agenda.
•But we can’t blame what’s happening online entirely on external actors and agents.
•You have people like the guys who put together the Star Wars memorandum, and I’m guessing are mainly white males.
•And quick note to those guys: Star Wars is a global franchise, when you look at the population of our planet and I’m guessing the population of the wider universe. The majority of those people aren’t white or male or probably even human.

Does society have the tech visionaries it deserves, or are we looking in all the wrong places? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Is technology already beyond our control? Is Skynet waiting for its opportunity to strike? Is humanity facing techno obsolescence? Only the machines know. It’s time to Mattsplain.

What could be more fun than a pink pineapple? We go inside the weird world of GM superfoods. It’s time to Mattsplain.

Is the world turning its back on technology? If rats can make sleds, why should we throw centuries of progress. Don’t lose hope. It’s time to Mattsplain.