— Bob-a-job-alog-a-roonie

Misgendering is calling someone who changed from a male to a female, “he” – and vice versa.

The fear of upsetting transgender folk is real, and Google has just announced it has removed gender identifying words from their predictive text in Gmail.

Next will be smart assistants like Alexa – they will say they and them instead of he or she.

As we talk to machines more and more, and as the fear of misgendering arises, our language will quickly evolve away from gender-specific terms.

What we are seeing in 2018 is a battle for supremacy between the US government and US corporations. Expect the same to occur soon in other industrialised nations.

• Trump has started a trade war with China, and Wall Street drops by 3%.
• Best Buy have stopped stocking Huawei phones.
• Citibank is enforcing gun policy on their business customers:

The new policy, announced Thursday, prohibits the sale of firearms to customers who have not passed a background check or who are younger than 21. It also bars the sale of bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. It would apply to clients who offer credit cards backed by Citigroup or borrow money, use banking services or raise capital through the company.

The rules, which the company described as “common-sense measures,” echo similar restrictions established by some major retailers, like Walmart.

A combination of business reactions and public sentiment will determine who wins. The process will take decades and will be subtle. But some commentators will start mentioning it as early as this year. Expect the NRA to tell their throng to stop banking with Citibank. Expect more businesses, and even a telco, to stop offering Huawei. Expect Trump to back-pedal on most tariffs.

On two fronts, video games and pop music, it is being proven in Japan that you don’t need real live humans any more. And this is presumably where the rest of the world is heading, to some degree.

Hatsune Miku is a Japanese pop princess with a #1 single and sell-out live shows. But her voice and image are computer-generated, and her “live” shows feature a holograph that the fans seem to enjoy as much as a real performer:

And now video games are providing the same level of soft porn as rap videos. Just watch this and ask yourself why young men will really be buying Dead or Alive: Paradise

I am keen on the Neo Luddite movement, and part of me yearns for a back-to-basics world.

I am also a futurist who works in tech. And I love many of the new gadgets and gizmos that come out.

I don’t mind being a hypocrite – I think it’s almost normal to be a hypocrite. It is commonplace, and overdue to be accepted as a natural trait.

So, as someone with one foot in each camp, I am calling myself a Semi.

Guns are a good analogy. Manual guns are cumbersome. Semi-automatics are efficient. Fully automatic only have bad uses. Semi is the in-between, the ascertained middle ground, the considered sweet spot.

When it comes to technology, much of it is stupid. Recently a colleague showed me how his Samsung phone could measure his pulse. I showed him the old school way (fingers on the wrist or neck) and he was surprised that a non-high-tech method existed.

A 55″ HD TV gives me the same experience as a 70″ curved 3D UHD TV. For 1/7th of the price. (Actually, the lack of enthusiasm for 3D might be seen as a starting point for the Semi movement)

I like electric car windows, but I could easily do without them. I like air-con in a car. I don’t want or need automatic windscreen wipers or heated seats.

I understand that manufacturers need to make improvements to sell more stuff. But sometimes, enough is enough.

When I get home on a scorchingly hot day, and walk into a hot house, it takes 30 seconds for the air-con to kick and for me to start feeling cooler. I don’t need a system to detect that I am 2kms away and turn it on for me.

Our house is locked when we aren’t at home. We use a physical key to unlock it. Works just fine! We don’t need an app to do it for us. On a phone where the battery easily dies.

Some people will embrace every “advance” like good little capitalist citizens. A handful will rebel completely. And a percentage – I’d say between 10% and 50%, mostly older folk, will become Semis like me.

The concept could flow through to businesses. Instead of there being either greedy corporations, or non-profits, I see a place for Semi companies, which take enough profits to satisfy them, and not more. Who only make product changes for the good of all, not for marketing. Who advertise to promote, not to brainwash.

We live in a service economy now, which basically means that many of us have more money than we need, so we pay other people to do things for us that we could/should do ourselves. It began with paying a local kid to mow the lawn. Now we pay people to tell us how we should decorate our homes, what we should eat, how to exercise, which meds to take.

And we get to blame others when things don’t work out. The Uber driver turned up late.

I like mowing the lawn. A lawn is more than something to look at, it should be interactive. I like planting the tree that I could potentially look at every day for the rest of my life. I like walking the dogs, preparing my own dinner, and deciding what temperature to set the air con to today.

Finally, the less self-efficient we become, the less able to cope we will be if something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong.

Minerva Schools at KGI is a bold new concept. The idea of presenting lectures over the Internet is not new, but they way they have designed theirs means students are more involved than if they were in a classroom or lecture hall.

“We know there are tons of biases that affect how professors call on students,” says Kosslyn. “Women students don’t get called on as much as male students.” In each class, students’ faces are displayed as thumbnails across the top of the screen. For them, it’s always in alphabetical order, but “for faculty, we vary the order depending on who needs to be called on based on data we’ve collected before and how much they’ve been talking in class. It’s a decision support tool that helps them overcome the traditional biases in class.”

If students are answering a question, professors can send them silent notes to warn them that they’re veering off course. Passing notes under the table, so to speak, works both ways; students can send professors messages if they don’t feel comfortable asking a question out loud.

Also unusual is that despite not having classrooms, the students are not living at home:

Minerva students spend their first year living together in San Francisco, their second year in Buenos Aires and Berlin, their third in Hong Kong and Mumbai, their fourth in London and New York.

Full story at Newsweek.