We are still deci­ding on some details, but you can use this docu­ment as tem­plate for your short story sub­mis­sions (or just to write your fic­tion). As you’ll see, it’s a fairly sim­ple tem­plate; more often than not our pro­blem with sub­mis­sions is that aut­hors tried to do somet­hing fancy with their for­mat­ting, when that’s abso­lu­tely not nee­ded. I’ve inclu­ded an exam­ple of for­mat­ting for quo­ted style and das­hed style dia­lo­gues —just use the one more com­mon in your language.

Com­men­ted here:

Unfor­tu­na­tely pri­ces aren’t adjus­ted to costs unless there’s pro­per com­pe­ti­tion. If rivals can’t make the upfront invest­ment for all the nee­ded robo­tics, the auto­ma­ted indus­tries will just keep pri­ces at their opti­mal maxi­mum and rack in the pro­fits. It’s not a coin­ci­dence cor­po­ra­tions have more cash than ever right now.

From Jim Wat­ch­man com­ment in this Marketwatch’s story:

This plus they had to prove in court that there was no dis­tin­guis­ha­ble dif­fe­rence from their pro­ducts to Sam­sungs pro­ducts during the lawsuit.…that hurt. Con­su­mers now know by Apples tes­ti­mony there is no advan­tage in paying 4x more for their product.

Pure genius if true.

Anot­her TED Con­ver­sa­tions reply:

Oh, I’m not arguing that there’s a large num­ber (albeit MBTI sur­veys put the num­ber of intro­verts at a few points over 50%), but that for the achie­vers that are, their intro­ver­sion is por­trai­ted posi­ti­vely after it led them to suc­cess in tasks that require a lot of reflec­tion. My ques­tion is if that qua­lity (or at least, the pos­si­bi­lity of having a kind of intro­ver­sion that leads to achie­ve­ments) is recog­ni­zed and valued in peo­ple, at least in an equal level with extro­ver­sion, when they are still every­wo­men and everymen.

Gates’ suc­cess was esta­blis­hed early as a garage entre­pe­neur, the lar­ger the com­pany became the more exe­cu­tive staff he had for Human Resource mana­ge­ment. His posi­tion was to give direc­tion and vision to the com­pany, and there’s only so many key peo­ple he would have nee­ded to acti­vely address for that. Plus, email doesn’t require that much interaction.

There’s intro­ver­ted thin­king, but also intro­ver­ted fee­ling, intro­ver­ted sen­sing, intro­ver­ted jud­ge­ment… the key mea­ning of intro­ver­sion is a per­son that doesn’t become tired of being inside their own head. Intro­ver­ted peo­ple can be per­fectly socia­ble, except it’s an acti­vity that fati­gues them more than usual. Same way that for cer­tain social feats an indi­vi­dual has to be able to endure a lot of inter­ac­tion, for cer­tain crea­tive feats an indi­vi­dual has to be able to endure a lot of deep introspection.

As someone that has taken part in brains­tor­mings for screen­wri­ting, I can assure you, it’s one thing to read other people’s thoughts and add them to one’s reflec­tion, and a very dif­fe­rent one to sit half a dozen peo­ple around a table and ask them to create a supe­rior pro­duct by comi­tee. That belief that two heads are always bet­ter than one could very well exem­plify what I was won­de­ring about, that in some cul­tu­res (not neces­sa­rily country-wide, it could be for exam­ple a cer­tain cor­po­rate cul­ture), achie­ve­ments may be always expec­ted to be done by comi­tee, even while indi­vi­dual feats are admired.

En retros­pec­tiva creo que habría pre­fe­rido plan­tearlo de otro modo; he aquí el debate:

Intro­ver­sion: is it regar­ded as nor­mal in your country/culture?

His­tory offers a rat­her posi­tive view of intro­verts: the lone explo­rers, the poets, the genius scien­tists, the artists, the phi­lo­sop­hers, are often por­trai­ted as powe­red by the par­ti­cu­lar qua­li­ties of intros­pec­tion. But the day to day social reality wit­hin their local tribe may be rat­her dif­fe­rent. Intro­verts may be admi­red from afar, but depen­ding on the cul­ture, not so much in their neighborhood.

This is not a big deal except when new gene­ra­tions are rai­sed with only one role model in mind, and this role being a good mar­ke­ter or short term social achie­ver, while the value of reflec­tion and self exa­mi­na­tion is unde­res­ti­ma­ted –note: not of ‘thin­king’ per se, as that’s not equi­va­lent to ‘introversion’.

My ques­tion is, does your coun­try and cul­ture have a model of intro­ver­ted beha­viour that is per­cei­ved as a nor­mal social iden­tity? If that’s the case, what do you think that dif­fe­ren­tia­tes how young peo­ple is rai­sed in your country/culture, as oppo­sed to those in which intro­ver­sion is not con­si­de­red a nor­mal beha­viour? And the most impor­tant ques­tion, what parts of that edu­ca­tion and envi­ro­ment do you think that could be expor­ted elsewhere?

My reply to this ques­tion.

Honest ques­tion: When we replace more and more jobs with those of robots, what hap­pens to all the peo­ple who are now unem­plo­yed? Do we just keep making more jobs for them?

Theo­re­ti­ca­lly menial jobs that currently are une­co­no­mi­cal and that are still hard to robo­tize will increase their rela­tive value. Maybe nobody would give you more than 2 cents for giving a hug, but when machi­nes make food ridicu­lously cheap, you pro­ba­bly will be able to buy a kilo of oran­ges for 2 cents.

The pro­blem is, current eco­no­mic poli­cies and finan­cial inter­ests don’t allow for such mas­sive deva­lua­tions (see the resis­tance to mark to mar­ket hou­sing pri­ces) nor for mas­sive infla­tion. Every­body will try to pre­vent a kilo of oran­ges to become worth 2 cents, and they will also try to pre­vent sala­ries balloo­ning up until a kilo of oran­ges is rela­ti­vely worth 2 cents. I guess this old fake eco­nomy will shrink as it beco­mes more and more a luxury eco­nomy, and the real eco­nomy, with many “unem­plo­yed” self pro­du­cers and ser­vice sup­pliers, will degrade, as many pro­ducts, ser­vi­ces, infras­truc­tu­res and pro­per­ties are still trap­ped in the older eco­nomy and una­vai­la­ble for the new.

(Dis­clai­mer: I’m not an economist.)