Category: ideas

“We are deeply conflicted when it comes to human enhancement technologies.”

“One might object that MOOCs are no different from textbooks. What is a textbook, really, but a programmed course template, a whole course in a box? Have popular textbooks destroyed local learning communities and entrenched established hierarchies? No. … But maybe the comparison with textbooks breaks down.”

“It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive – an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making – emerges untutored universally in healthy children.”

“This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence.”

“The implication that he was a musician dramatically increased the actor’s appeal. When he was carrying the guitar case, 31 percent of the women gave him their number. This compares with nine percent when he was carrying the sports bag, and 14 percent when he was carrying nothing.”

“Why do we lie to ourselves? That’s what evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has spent 30 years trying to figure out.” He’s finally settled on an explanation – one that’s perhaps a bit depressing.

“Whenever Amazon uses our customer history to make a sale or whenever OkCupid matches a couple based on our dating history, we should get a cut — a “nanopayment.” As Google Translate gets smarter while we translate rap lyrics from Maltese to Latin, shouldn’t we get something? Perhaps — let’s just wait for Google Translate to earn Google some money first.”

“While miniature war-gaming has never been able to claim a place in the mainstream, it has influenced almost everything we think of as gaming today. By the middle of the 20th century, war-gaming had not only added new sets of rules for armies of many periods, but it had inspired a new kind of richly complex board game.”

“This was supposed to be the age of the mobile (a k a nonexistent) office, with ‘solopreneurs’ telecommuting from home or the beach in elastic-waist pants. But many who work independently are discovering alienation lurking behind the home-office fantasy.”

“We don’t understand what we’re doing, what we’re writing about, our own creation has surpassed the methods of reductionism we used to create it. Isn’t it more honest and true to write about it with a kind of vetted mythology?”