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...the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies. Hence, the moniker “skill-biased technical change,” or SBTC. There are two distinct components to recent SBTC. Technologies like robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized…
We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. … Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We…
Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one’s avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy’s lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of…
He tapped the papers; the advice had been coming down since early winter. He remembered when Amdijefri had brought in the first pages, pages of numerical tables, of directions and diagrams, all drawn in neat but childish style. Steel and the Fragment had spent days trying to understand. Some of the references were…
Ravna had known that “jumpstarting” technology must be a topic in the ship’s library. It turned out the subject was a major academic specialty. Besides ten thousand case studies, there were customizing programs and lots of very dull-looking theory. Though the “rediscovery problem” was trivial in the Beyond, down in…
And so it went. Tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of points of view. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
Tines. I like it. If that was the alien’s image, then it was the right name for his race. His pitiful advisors—and sometimes even the Flenser Fragment—were still intimidated by the ship from the stars. No question, there was power in that ship beyond anything in the world. But after the first panic, Steel understood…
“I have a suggestion,” said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the effort of concentrating over Scrupilo’s thoughts. “When you touch the four/three square and say”—he made the alien sounds; they were all very easy to do—“the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match the squares. I think we … we are…
During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the…
The sense-represent-plan-act picture is a heroic one, but it is biologically implausible. I don't need to memorize the layout of the physical environment around me — this desk, this room, this city, this country. After all, the desk, room, city are there before me and we are built — through evolution — to have ready…
As a society, we walk a tightrope between limbo and extinction. We’re on a threshold of survival, in a society threatened as never before to find the way, with less and less margin for error. The decades ahead to the year 2000 and beyond, as were the decades just past, can be either interrogative, presumptuous, or…
The main thing, it seems to me, is to remember that technology manufactures not gadgets, but social change. Once the first tool was picked up and used, that was the end of cyclical anything. The tool made a new world, the next one changed that world, the one after that changed it again, and so on. Each time the change…
Change is one of mankind’s most mysterious creations. The factors that operate to cause it came into play when man produced his first tool. With it he changed the world forever, and bound himself to the artifacts he would create in order, always, to make tomorrow better than today. But how does change operate? What…
Thomas Jefferson was a scientist. That's how he described himself. When you visit his home at Monticello, Virginia, the moment you enter its portals you find ample evidence of his scientific interests - not just in his immense and varied library, but in copying machines, automatic doors, telescopes and other…
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of…
The intellectual shortcomings of past and present newspapers are, however, beside the point, because the real difference between today's video and yesterday's print is not content but context--a context in which the proliferating visual images and noises of the video/digital age permeate the minute-by-minute…
Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming aware of the fact that life online…
I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling…