Hasta La Gadget!

Europe may require all manufacturers to use USB-C charging for all phones and electronic devices, according to a new EU Commission ruling proposal. It aims to reduce e-waste and “consumer inconvenience” caused by different and incompatible chargers still in use. The Commission also wants manufacturers to unbundle the sale of chargers with electronic devices. 

“With today’s proposal… USB-C will become the standard port for all smartphones, tablets, cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld videogame consoles,” according to the report. 

The EU said its work with industry has managed to reduce the number of mobile phone chargers from 30 to 3 over the last decade. One of those three is Apple’s Lightning port used by around 20 percent of devices sold in Europe. The EU hopes to change that situation, according to a statement by executive VP Margrethe Vestager:

European consumers were frustrated long enough about incompatible chargers piling up in their drawers. We gave industry plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, now time is ripe for legislative action for a common charger. This is an important win for our consumers and environment and in line with our green and digital ambitions.

When a common charger was first voted on by the EU last year, Apple issued a statement saying that the proposal would “stifle innovation,” and its position has not changed. “We remain concerned that strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, which in turn will harm consumers in Europe and around the world,” an Apple spokesperson told the BBC. 

Since the launch of the iPhone 12, however, Apple has stopped including chargers in the box, something it said would save 861,000 tons of copper, zinc and tin. Apple itself now uses USB-C charging on its latest Mac laptops and certain iPad models, since that standard supports higher voltage charging required for larger devices.

Nearly all Android smartphones now use USB-C charging, and many models from Samsung and others are sold with charging/data cables but not chargers. It total, around 420 million mobile phones and other portable electronic devices sold in Europe just in the last year.

The EU throws away 12,000 tons of chargers each year, some unused, according to Bloomberg. At the same time, consumers spend around 2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) on standalone chargers not included with devices. The law is still in the proposal stages and needs to be passed by EU lawmakers and governments, so it could come into force around two years after that. 

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“These men reduced me to an outdated, incorrect stereotype, as if I was only there to perform a specific task.”

This post contains major spoilers for season two, episode seven of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

Artificial intelligence has been baked into the Star Trek universe since the original series. Kirk and his crew occasionally faced off against computers gone amok, including Nomad, Landru and the M-5. The only way to defeat these digital villains was to outwit them using logic, which caused them to self-destruct. But in The Next Generation, the franchise became more interested in exploring the personhood of artificial beings like Data and hisfamily, Voyager’s holographic doctor or the exocomps. This week, Lower Decks dredges up the old-style megalomaniacal AI and asks, are you really sure about those rights?

The USS Cerritos is once more called upon to help out a civilization enslaved by an evil computer, this one called Agimus (voiced by long-time Trek actor Jeffrey Combs). Disconnected from his network of drones, he’s actually pretty pathetic, desperately begging the organic beings around him to just hook him up to a computer. All that’s left for Starfleet to do is to drop him off at the Daystrom Institute, which isn’t the most glamorous of jobs, so of course Beckett Mariner and Bradward Boimler end up on this particular babysitting gig.

CBS

A gravimetric shear complicates things for the pair, forcing their shuttle to crash on a barren world with only the pleading voice of Agimus to keep them company. The computer uses this opportunity to pit the two against each other, continuing a plot thread that we thought had been settled two episodes ago. Beckett still doesn’t trust Brad’s abilities despite all they’vebeen through. It feels like a regression or perhaps even a mis-scheduled episode, except that we the audience still see his growth while his supposed best friend doubts him. It’s a plot line unlikely to go away after a few episodes, reaffirming this show’s commitment to character-driven storytelling.

However, that breadth of characterization doesn’t really apply to Agimus. He’s really just… kind of a jerk, and he doesn’t have the ability to directly influence anything due to his lack of arms and legs. Boimler and Mariner spend the entire episode lugging his box around: a sentient MacGuffin. If you’re not familiar with that term, it means an item (or person) that moves the plot forward and motivates the characters, but is not actually important in itself. With Agimus’s reign over, he really just serves here to get Mariner and Boimler at each other’s throats.

CBS

His status as a sentient being is never in question, but the problem of what to do with him as his behavior worsens goes in directions that would never come up for an organic individual. Mariner suggests burying him, a suggestion turned down by Boimler because he’s a sentient being and that’s not what Starfleet does. So it seems we have made some progress from the ol’ “destroy them with their own logic” days of TOS. But then the two ensigns end up burying him anyway, while Agamus protests that “he has rights!”

And yet Star Trek has always been a bit sketchy about what those rights are. While episodes like “The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring” have reaffirmed Data’s humanity, it’s been contradicted since by events on Voyager and Picard. The Doctor asserted his authorial rights to a holonovel he created and won, but wasn’t actually recognized as a person. The question remained unanswered nearly 20 years later on Picard, with us only being shown holograms of limited capabilities, or those based on the personalities of other sentient beings (Rios’ crew). And fully synthetic beings like Data, ones with brains and bodies, were illegal after the attack on Mars.

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Lower Decks takes place a mere year after the end of Voyager, so it’s free to pick up and explore some of those plot threads without that later baggage. But without a synthetic crew member on the USS Cerritos it can only glance off the subject. Agamus is dumped in a storage facility as just another “self-aware megalomaniacal computer,” not too dissimilar from the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is dumped at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is it a prison? Did he get a trial? Are he and the other computers just going to sit there until the end of the Federation? From an ethical perspective it isn’t great, but it’s unlikely to ever be fully addressed, because who in Starfleet is really going to fight for the personhood of a computerized fascist dictator?

AB 701 is meant to protect workers from being penalized for taking breaks or using the bathroom.