@aparrish it's a reasonable entry level of criticism, because it's the first tentative step past "cooool!" to wondering what the secondhand effects will be. For example, spreadsheet transformation is a traditional entry level job in many industries. Learning for mastery requires periods of rote activity. What happens to mastery when robots take over those parts? (I don't know, but I can imagine feelings of doom & gloom about this)

@aparrish
(This isn't a criticism because I think the era of spreadsheets being super important is over, but I find it interesting that spreadsheets used to be super important.)

It's not just that computation starts with spreadsheets. Instead, written language begins with spreadsheets, as does commerce. And, ideas like zero, negative numbers, hedging, insurance, & futures are basically the result of spreadsheet innovation rather than the other way around.

@aparrish
Spreadsheets and gambling, when combined, form a really outsized impact on the world compared to what one would expect. And, so much of modern society is basically defined by people using spreadsheets to gamble (i.e., "modern finance").

@enkiv2 these are all good points! I was sort of just using "spreadsheet" as shorthand for "sequence of numbers/matrix/tensor/whatever"

@aparrish
Yup! I'm just using your toot as an excuse to gush about spreadsheets; I hope you don't mind 😉

@aparrish
Unrelated to spreadsheets: do you know anything about the historical association between magic and gambling?

This is implicit in names like Faust, & there's definitely a set of folk-magic traditions around gambling charms, but I've seen a handful of *hints* about gambling being implicated in the western occult tradition outside of divination & I haven't been able to find anything substantial.

@enkiv2 @aparrish I don't know any scholarly works on the topic, at least not any I would trust, but Tim Powers did some fun things with that in _Last Call_.

@zwol @aparrish
I might check that out.

It really got brought to my consciousness by two things: one is the way that Umineko no Naku Koro Ni uses magic & gambling (essentially, to use chaos magic terminology, the anxiety involved in large bets provides gnosis: it's somewhere inbetween sacrifice and "fortune favors the bold", where risky bets cause themselves to work out by virtue of the risks involved) & that game with the magic squares.

@enkiv2 quinn's "early mormonism and the magic world view" talks about early american scrying/treasure hunting in some detail, which I think is related! but largely no, this hasn't been a focus on my research, though a google scholar search is hell of evocative (incl. this paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361368277900319 not explicitly *about* gambling but written by someone *named* gambling which seems magically serendipitous to me)

@aparrish This is wonderful and I hope in no way a pseudonym!

@aparrish man can we talk about how in some contexts the robot uprising has already happened and it is Not Good?

So much of governing and policy is done by algorithms and those algorithms are racist and classist and they have real effects on real people and generally they are not great. This is ignoring the advertising industry and the effects of algorithmic capitalism and basically I might be a data scientist but that shit scares me.

@aparrish @Elizafox

Tensorflow has been successfully installed on a Raspberry Pi. The Robot Army Approaches.

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