Chris Weller

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In 2016, the average branch of the New York Public Library operates as a lightly funded community center, with some classes for kids, a climate-controlled place for seniors to knit and Internet time for anyone who can’t afford their own. Books are largely beside the point, donations of gently used volumes not accepted, and quiet is no longer enforced since reading isn’t the primary function of the institution. It’s more about experience now.

In a really thought-provoking Business Insider piece, David Pecovitz of boing boing tells Chris Weller that experience is also the future of libraries, though he believes it will be of a much more technological kind, virtual as well as actual. He predicts we could wind up with a “library of experiences.” Perhaps, though such tools and access may become decentralized.

An excerpt:

The definition of a library is already changing.

Some libraries have 3D printers and other cutting-edge tools that makes them not just places of learning, but creation. “I think the library as a place of access to materials, physical and virtual, becomes increasingly important,” Pescovitz says. People will come to see libraries as places to create the future, not just learn about the present.

Pescovitz offers the example of genetic engineering, carried out through “an open-source library of genetic parts that can be recombined in various way to make new organisms that don’t exist in nature.”

For instance, people could create their own microbes that are engineered to detect toxins in the water, he says, similar to how people are already meeting up in biology-centered hacker spaces.

Several decades from now, libraries will morph even further.

Pescovitz speculates that humans will have collected so much data that society will move into the realm of downloading sensory data. What we experience could be made available for sharing.

“Right now the world is becoming instrumented with sensors everywhere — sensors in our bodies, sensors in our roads, sensors in our mobile phones, sensors in our buildings — all of which all collecting high-resolution data about the physical world,” he says. “Meanwhile, we’re making leaps in understanding how the brain processes experiences and translates that into what we call reality.”

That could lead to a “library of experiences.”

In such a library, Pescovitz imagines that you could “check out” the experience of going to another planet or inhabiting the mind of the family dog.•

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Historically, the best answer to high unemployment has been to create more jobs. It’s a wonder if that’s still true, including in America, which has seen diminished and less-secure positions created in this very uneven economic recovery.

Utrecht is to experiment with Universal Basic Income on the city level, and now Finland may give it a go nationally. Can this social safety net work in some countries and not others? In all? In none?

From Chris Weller at Tech Insider:

Over the past decade, unemployment has risen drastically in the small Nordic country, home to just 5.4 million people.

In response, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, known as KELA, has proposed an experiment to allot a monthly income of 800 euros (or roughly $881) tax-free. The cash will act as a replacement for other social benefits like housing and income support, but people will get it whether they work or not.

In other words, free money for all.

If approved in 2016, the project would begin with a pilot program in which people receive 550 euros per month and retain their benefits, before the model moves on to the real thing.

In purely democratic countries, like the US, basic income has remained on the fringes for decades. The Nixon administration tested out a form of the basic income model in the 1960s, but was met with little success. 

“The biggest challenge for the basic income movement is convincing the larger public that it makes sense to redistribute economic resources to provide a basic income to all,” Almaz Zelleke, a basic income expert and associate professor at NYU Shanghai, tells Tech Insider. It involves “persuading the public that a basic income should be viewed as a basic democratic right, like the vote.”

In socially democratic countries, like the Netherlands and Finland, that idea has more legs.•

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