Category: ideas

The platforms are under no legal obligation to proactively seek out infringement and remove it, nor – most annoyingly of all – do they ever have to permanently remove an infringing work. “Notice and takedown” does not mean “notice and stay-down,” which results in an ongoing game of Whack-A-Mole for copyright owners who get a work removed, only to see it pop up again somewhere else on the internet… again, and again, and again…  – Creative Future

Here’s the 20,000 foot summary: Your brain’s most important job is not thinking or feeling or even seeing, but keeping your body alive and well so that you survive and thrive (and eventually reproduce). How is your brain to do this? Like a sophisticated fortune-teller, your brain constantly predicts. Its predictions ultimately become the emotions you experience and the expressions you perceive in other people. – Nautilus

The day is coming when practically anything that a human can do—at least anything that the labor market is willing to pay a human being a decent wage to do—will soon be doable more efficiently and cost effectively by some AI-driven automated device. If and when that day does arrive, those who own the means of production will feel ever increasing pressure to discard human workers in favor of an artificially intelligent work force. They are likely to do so as unhesitatingly as they have always set aside outmoded technology in the past. – Boston Review

The First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to eat steak; nothing in the Bill of Rights prohibits a quarantine. Whatever discomfort or vexation arises from these restrictions should hardly be classed as a violation of liberty. Yet that’s not quite right. Very few of us care so much about our rights of speech or conscience to test their constitutional boundaries. There’s a reason people got so angry when Mayor Michel Bloomberg tried to ban the sale of large-size soft drinks; they were defending a right they actually cared about. – The New York Times

In the span of a single decade, we basically let a computer-centric mindset around planned obsolescence threaten to ruin the long-term usability of entire categories of products unnecessarily. – Vice

Recent advances in computational methods and data science push us into rethinking science and engineering. Computers increasingly become principal actors in leveraging data to formulate questions, which requires radically new ways of reasoning. Therefore, a new discipline blending computer science, programming, statistics and machine learning should be added to the traditional foundational topics of mathematics and physics. These three pillars would allow you to keep learning complex technical subjects all your life because numeracy is the foundation upon which everything else is eventually built. – Aeon

In the mid 1960s, researchers found that murmurating birds, particularly starlings, interact—not always, but often—with six or seven of their closest neighbors, who interact with six or seven of their closest neighbors. In recent years, studies posit that a network with seven neighbors optimizes the trade-off between “group cohesion and individual effort.” One theory among researchers, in the context of predation, is that starlings are “managing uncertainty while maintaining consensus.” – Nautilus

Basically, access to tech could become more equitable if the conferences go online. “There are developers across the U.S. and around the world who get shut out when the conferences get sold out. Even more of them simply can’t afford the admission fee (last year’s WWDC was $1,599) and travel expenses required to spend time in the Bay Area or Seattle.” – Fast Company

This is the paradox of authenticity: In order to reap the many of the benefits of feeling authentic, you may have to betray your true nature. – Scientific American

Superman and his contemporaries launched a fascination with technological superism that continues today. Here were individuals whose bodies and their capacities were somehow warped through being exposed to technology (the Flash); augmented by technology (Batman); or transported from one environment to another by technology (Superman). There is an underlying narrative in all their stories that treats technology as a source of powers that would traditionally have been described as divine. But, like Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods, this has often been seen as a double-edged desire, seductive yet dangerous for humans. – Aeon