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Building Tomorrow
Canning Spam: Getting Rid of Robocalls
More than 48 billion robocalls bombard American phones each year, taking the ‘phone’ out of ‘smartphone’ for many consumers. Yet while the problem has drastically worsened over the past several years, there may be hope on the horizon. Private, third party companies are giving consumers ways to divert or even combat robocalls. And the FCC has finally cleared up the regulatory confusion that contributed to phone carrier reluctance to directly address the problem themselves. We can hope that in ten years, the robocall scourge will seem as quaint as worries about spam email do today, despite being just as seemingly intractable an issue in the 1990s.
What is spoofing? What is audio fingerprinting? Why don’t cell phone carriers prevent robocalls? How serious is the problem of spam calls? How has email spam become more manageable? How did email change the world?
Further Reading:Why Robocalls Are Even Worse Than You Thought, written by Tim Harper
Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis, written by Tony Romm
RoboKiller App
How to Stop Robocalls— Or At Least Slow Them Down, written by Lily Hay Newman
Related Content:Practical Problems with Regulating Tech in the Public Interest, written by Will Rinehart
The Social Consequences of Multilevel Marketing, written by Pamela J. Hobart
Has Your Phone Hacked Your Brain, Building Tomorrow Podcast
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The Future of Stuff
48:40|Your home is full of technological miracles, devices that your ancestors would have regarded as near magic because of the life of relative ease they provide us with. However, something is changing. In the past, we got richer by owning more stuff; but in the future, we will have more by owning less. In this final episode of Building Tomorrow, Paul talks with Cory Doctorow, Michael Munger, Ruth Cowan, and Chelsea Follett about the past, present, and future of material possession.One Landfill's Trash is the Future's Treasure
43:39|If you're the kind of person who carefully sorts out your recyclables from your trash, cleans it, and puts it out in the blue bin for pickup, you probably don't realize that as much as 90% of that material either just ends up in a landfill or, worse, is dumped into the ocean. Indeed, much of the plastic litter in the Pacific Ocean is the result of our well-intentioned but misplaced efforts at recycling since the 1990s.In this episode, we talk to an environmental economist, landfill scientist, and blockchain engineer about the future of our waste. We can efficiently sort and store our plastics in landfills for future mining operations, incentivizing good behavior via cryptocurrency rewards. We can incinerate our waste in hyper-efficient facilities that power cities and reduce our carbon footprint. Building Tomorrow means building more and better landfills.The Underpopulation Crisis
49:47|People are afraid. Afraid that they are consuming too much, emitting too much, having too many kids, and running the planet into the ground. Eight billion people seems like too many. But a growing number of experts are sounding the alarm that a far worse problem is on the horizon, an underpopulation crisis. People are having fewer kids and countries are aging. For example, by the end of the century Japan will halve its population. Those who remain will be older and poorer. We need more people, not fewer, if we want to find innovative solutions to climate change and resource crunches. For music attributions see: https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/building-tomorrow/underpopulation-crisisData is the New Guano
46:21|What happens when a raw material that is valueless suddenly becomes valuable? If it's bird guano in the 19th century, you mine it and save the agricultural economy. If its data in the late 20th century, you collect it and create a new digital economy. Music attributions can be found here: https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/building-tomorrow/guano.
Building Tomorrow is Back!
03:52|The Building Tomorrow podcast is back in a new format. This season we will be focusing on wanting more. The desire for more embraces a prosperity mindset, the belief that growth and wealth are not a zero-sum game. We will release one in depth episode per month for 6 months. We would love for you to listen along as we long for more immigrants, more data, more houses, more mammoths, and more. Happy listening!
Building Tomorrow: Under Construction
02:00|We have a special announcement about the future of Building Tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Can We Fix U.S. Politics? (with Lee Drutman & Dan Bowen)
49:17|If voting leaves you feeling tired and vaguely dissatisfied, you're not alone. Over 60% of voters aren't happy with the two party duopoly that dominates US politics; others hate the flood of negative campaign ads or feel that politics is too big or too distant to be able to effect via the voting process.But there is hope! This week, Paul talks to two political scientists, Lee Drutman and Daniel Bowen to talk about how ranked choice voting, multi-member legislative districts, and packing the House of Representatives could save our democracy from its dire situation.
The Pandemic Can't Stop, Won't Stop the Techlash
47:51|There are some things that even a pandemic cannot stop. One of those things is political pressure to "do something" about Big Tech. Paul checks in with Matthew Feeney and Will Duffield to get an update on the state of the techlash. Furthermore, this year many of the major social media platforms have ramped up their fact-checking operations in an attempt to combat disinformation about the pandemic and partisan politics, but it is possible that they have opened a Pandora's Box of unintended consequences by doing so.