“White-collar service industries are currently witnessing a huge increase in automation. Artificial intelligence, analytics and voice-recognition technologies are taking over more and more tasks employees used to do. Retailing is another example: we’re moving from physical to virtual retailing. Even lawyers, accountants or radiologists are afraid of the prospect of losing their job to a machine or algorithm.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Rethinking How Technology Can Help Students Learn
“We’ve seen that technology can do a lot of stuff to support students, but the real driver is: Do they actually want to learn something? If they do, kids will go through a lot of barriers to learn it. Creating the conditions that turn on that drive has become the major function of our work.”
Controversy Over Twerking Exposes Dance Hierarchy
The whole conversation around twerking unwittingly exposed a dance-world hierarchy, whereby some styles are ignored while others are bestowed with the status of art. “[That debate] raised a question about why some dances become very well-funded, and other dances just remain in the dark.”
Why The Internet Isn’t Going To Solve Our Problems
“Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Should The NYPD Be Deciding When Busking Counts As Art And When As Begging?
“Recently, a busking video went viral. In it a police officer, armed with a gun and club, passed judgment on a busker, who protested by reading out the law covering art in public. He got a loitering charge. Boos are bad, hisses worse and an audience unsatisfied enough to pelt is humiliating. But a criminal record? Does society want such severity?”
Concertgoers Start Yelling At Each Other Over When (Not) To Applaud
“The moment of shame came as the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of the world’s best orchestras, opened the 43rd Hong Kong Arts Festival with a performance of Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen. … But just as the 20-minute masterpiece faded out into intense C minor chords, an audience member began to clap.” And then – well, not all hell, but some hell broke loose.
The Philosophical Anxiety Behind The Arguments Over #TheDress
“What fascinates us about the dress, I think, isn’t its color: it’s the degree to which our perceptions can diverge. How could the same image appear so different to various people? The dress controversy is compelling because it touches, however unsophisticatedly, on some of the oldest and most difficult questions in philosophy of mind.”
Children Are Reading ‘Diary Of A Wimpy Kid’ Instead Of Tolkien – Is That Supposed To Be A Bad Thing?
“Every generation thinks that standards are slipping – in my childhood it was Enid Blyton in the line of fire, for my sister it was the Sweet Valley High series, and today it’s The Hunger Games. All have been roundly condemned for stopping children reading good books. And yet children keep reading. “
Why Can’t Art Just Be Art?
“Cultural institutions once saw it as their priority to cultivate, preserve and display the best of the arts. Their unique contribution was to cultivate culture in the public sphere, for anyone to enjoy, by developing public understanding of the arts and sciences that have shaped the world we live in today. Through providing access to their collections and archives, they offered inspiration to, and sometimes platforms for, writers, painters, dramatists, architects, and many more.
Now they are desperate to be seen as inclusive, non-elitist public spaces.”
Here’s Why American Musical Theatre Has Slipped From The Mainstream
“Now that Broadway-minded songwriters no longer have a universal musical language on which to draw, it isn’t possible to write a show with genuine broad-gauge audience appeal. It says everything about the desperate state of the American musical that the last theatrical song to become an enduringly popular hit, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” was written in 1973.”