This astonishing, haunting video is the work of an extraordinary photographic artist, Adam Magyar. There’s a terrific profile of him by Joshua Hammer on Matter. For this video he persuaded the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of its $16,000, high-performance industrial video cameras—used in crash tests and robotic-arm studies. The Optronis shoots high-resolution images at astonishing speeds: up to 100,000 frames per second, compared to 24 frames per second in a traditional film camera.
Instead of standing on a platform shooting passengers speeding past him, Magyar now positioned himself inside the moving subway car, recording stationary commuters on the platform as train and camera rolled into the station. Again, the ghost of Einstein permeates these images, and again, he was warping time: Magyar shot the footage at 56 times normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of excruciating slowness.
Amazing stuff.
has influenced the way I think about technology and our networked future. This talk by John Hagel presents an insightful gloss on the book’s analysis. Hagel argues that the reason so many modern jobs are so vulnerable to automation is that they have effectively been designed to be vulnerable. They tend to be “tightly scripted,” “highly standardized,” and leave no room for “individual initiative or creativity.” In short, these are the types of jobs that machines can perform much better at than human beings. So what effectively is going on is companies putting “a giant target sign on the backs of American workers”.