“One thing I try to argue is that it’s not just about bigger machines to crunch more data, and it’s not even about pattern recognition. It’s about frameworks of recognition; how you choose to look, rather than what you’re trying to see.”
Category: ideas
When People Were Scared Of Computers
“In the early 1980s, the age of the personal computer had arrived and ‘computerphobia’ was suddenly everywhere. … [The subject] came up in magazines, newspapers, computer training manuals, psychology studies, and advertising copy.”
When The Medieval World Had Robots
“Throughout the Latin Middle Ages we find references to many apparent anachronisms, many confounding examples of mechanical art. Musical fountains. Robotic servants. Mechanical beasts and artificial songbirds. Most were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”
The Coloring Book For Adults That’s Sweeping The World
“Fan mail poured in from busy professionals and parents who confided to Ms. Basford that they found coloring in her books relaxing. More accolades flowed on social media, as people posted images from their coloring books.”
Would A Telepathy Machine Help Us – Or Should We Work On Empathy Instead?
“A telepathy machine, if it could ever be built, would undoubtedly have wonderful applications. It could allow people who are immobilised by a stroke or neurological disease to communicate, or create incredible opportunities for artists to collaborate. But it seems unlikely that it could broadcast world peace.”
The London Skyline Campaign Is Trying To Save The Wrong Thing
“The look of these buildings matters as does the way they fit into existing surroundings, as does their impact on the street environment. But the height of them isn’t what matters most. It’s whether they provide the homes, offices and shops that the city and its people need.”
How Tech Criticism Is Failing Us
“That radical critique of technology in America has come to a halt is in no way surprising: it could only be as strong as the emancipatory political vision to which it is attached. No vision, no critique. Lacking any idea of how sensors, algorithms, and databanks could be deployed to serve a non-neoliberal agenda, radical technology critics face an unenviable choice.”
When Memory Stops Functioning, Where Does A Person’s Identity Reside?
“Dementia undermines all of our philosophical assumptions about the coherence of the self. … Everyone touched by the disease goes through a crash-course in the philosophy of mind. … If someone cannot remember not just where the milk bottle goes, but what a milk bottle is for, then the shared pre-suppositions on which communication, meaning and identity depend become badly strained.”
A More Complicated View Of What Makes Us Intelligent
“Increasingly, it makes less sense to think of genes and environments as independent causes,” writes a research team led by Penn State sociologist David Baker. Its examination of likely reasons for the gradual rise in IQ scores over the 20th century suggest more challenging curriculums, to a significant degree, create smarter students.
People Are Fighting Over Sand (And There’s A Shortage)
“Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like any other. The worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing—is devouring unprecedented quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have exhausted all the nearby sources. Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.”