Last weekend I finally got around to seeing the latest installment of the Terminator series and while it was a so-so film for the franchise, it seemed fitting timing given the number articles of late of how robots are taking over our lives of late.  While we’re not approaching the rise of the machines or anything akin to Asimov’s vision from I, Robot, there were two interesting reads this week, one about the robots coming to Wall Street and another about Ryan Calo, one of the minds behind robotics law in the United States.  To follow on to that is another article from the Times about a new breed of Trader out there: Coders with Ph.Ds.

Would you ever consider asking hackers to take apart your life as an experiment?  Kevin Roose did exactly that and it’s a scary but enlightening read.  Most of us don’t really pay attention to how fluid we are with our personal information with location based services and social media.  We need to be, as evidenced by just this bit from the story: they “began by compiling a dossier on me, using publicly available information like my email address, my employer, and my social media accounts. Most of this was information I’d made available on purpose, but some of it wasn’t. (They found my home address, for example, by enlarging and zooming in on a photo I’d posted to Twitter of my dog, which had the address listed in tiny type on the dog’s tag.)”  They pulled Roose’s mailing address from a social media photo of his dog.  Take a moment to think about all the different services out there that simply ask you for your name, date of birth, and address as their identity confirmation.  Then go re-read Roose’s article again.

strategy+business seems to be a weekly collection that I send out, and with good reason.  This week they had articles about Ten Principles of Organizational Culture, Three Secrets of Organizational Effectiveness, and how dysfunctional momentum impacts a company’s values to name a few, all worth a look.

The Next Web published a dive into what they view are the seven pillars of awesome game design. There are seven aspects of game design that need to be considered when you want to design and develop a successful game. They’ve highlighted some great video games that serve as examples of world, systems, content, game writing, level, user interface and audio design (said pillars).  Even if you aren’t into gaming, it’s interesting to look at those components and understand them from a conceptual standpoint and how they are used to pull players in.

Not to be chicken little, but I think it important that we keep abreast of what is happening in the global markets and some of the bear opinions out there.  One from MarketWatch digs into how the global stock market is wildly overvalued.  But it doesn’t stop there – luxury items as investments have had grossly excessive enthusiasm and other stating how they expect gold to rise to $2000 an ounce as we continue to see commodities and markets correct and then decline into recession territory.  Foreign Affairs dived into Eurasia’s coming anarchy and Citi also has some salient points as to why we might be moving into recession territory.  The good news is that this time around we’ve got eyes wide open going into this crunch so perhaps it can be averted.

Some other interesting articles from the week: Why the Future of Work Is at Home, Facebook Internet Drones Find Where the People Are, What’s Next in Computing?, Who’s reading my iMessages?, and Apple vs. FBI: Here’s everything you need to know (FAQ).