Category: ideas

Marketing – and the history of war. “Most Americans now know Ferrero Rocher by way of Nutella, but long before the hazelnut cocoa spread became an ingredient seemingly found in every trendy dessert recipe, the gifting and receiving of a Ferrero Rocher chocolate box (48 pieces if you were lucky) was a secret, universal language shared by immigrants in the ’80s and ’90s. It was a truth acknowledged amongst the hospitality-ladened cultures of their families: You never showed up to someone’s house — whether they were strangers or family — without a gift. And if the gift turned out to Ferrero Rocher, it was a surefire way to know you had almost literally struck gold with your hosts.”

Intelligence has to be defined relative to goals and the knowledge needed to attain them. In any case the argument against the doomsday fear-mongering of existing AI extends to more powerful systems: any system that monomaniacally pursued one goal (such as making paperclips) while being oblivious to every other goal (such as not turning human beings into paperclips) is not artificially intelligent: it’s artificially stupid, and unlike anything a technologically sophisticated society would ever invent and empower. And scenarios in which the systems take over themselves commit the fallacy that intelligence implies a will to power, which comes from confusing two traits that just happened to come bundled in Homo sapiens because we are products of Darwinian natural selection.

Research on failure as a motivator is limited, though the evidence that does exist suggests that students can grow both from learning about the failures of other successful people and from experiencing failure themselves. Crucially, for failure to “work,” research indicates that educators and parents need to encourage students to figure out what went wrong and try to improve. “Failure needs to give people a chance to regroup and rewind the clock,” Xiaodong Lin-Siegler explained. Her main goal, she said, is to help students realize that failure is a normal part of the process of learning.

“Philosophers ponder the meaning of life. At least, that is the stereotype. … In fact, professional philosophers rarely ask the question and, when they do, they often dismiss it as nonsense. … If they go on to talk about meaning in life, they have in mind the meaning of individual lives, the question of whether this life or that life is meaningful for the person who is living it. But the meaning of life is not an individual possession. If life has meaning, it has a meaning that applies to us all.”

Bulgarian engineers and cyberneticians, champions of this new technology, increasingly worried about what this meant. In the ivory towers of places such as the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics in Sofia, they wrote detailed papers on robotic movement, image recognition, planning algorithms. They ran experiments and built labs to test how to perfect Man-Machine Interfaces – from the design of the perfect office that would minimise an office worker’s eye-strain to the future melding of human and machine vision.

It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson’s dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.

“A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt.”

For more than two decades, geographers and sociologists have debated the character and role of cities in globalisation. Historians have been a step behind, producing less and more cautious work on cities and globalisation, and struggling to find readers. The relative silence is notable.

I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

“In the 1660s, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal speculated, ‘the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’ Pascal surely knew it was harder than it sounds. But in modern times, the problem seems to have gotten exponentially worse.” What’s more, writes professor Matthew Jordan, “legislating against noisemakers rarely satisfied our growing desire for quietness, so products and technologies emerged to meet the demand of increasingly sensitive consumers.”