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The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and…
Unfortunately for posterity, and for those who purchased and interacted with Moonmist when it was first released, Infocom chose not to include the descriptions of the world in the software at all. In order to figure out what the player character's surroundings are like, the interactor has to consult the manual, which…
Gathering treasure is an important part of Zork II, but assembling the booty in a trophy case is not the ultimate goal. In order to win, the interactor must have the player character supply these treasures to a powerful demon. This demon (like the robot) will do the adventurer a critical service-after he is…
The third level continues. Games have storylines like the historical novel, which arc from beginning to end. Games have cinematic cut scenes, pure montages of attraction. Games subsume the lines of television just as television subsumed cinema and cinema the novel. But they are something else as well. They are not…
Individuals become immersed in the beauty and coherency of simulation; indeed simulations are built to capture us in exactly this way. A thirteen- year- old caught up in SimCity, a game which asks its users to play the role of urban developers, told me that among her "Top Ten Rules of Sim" was rule number 6: "Raising…
There are two categories of true believers, in my mind. There are those who, for example, are building a new decentralized user-empowering financial system. And to them, history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized. In fact, the entire history of the computer industry was…
A new series release means more than just updated graphics or different character costumes; sequels can have new rules, or introduce entirely new systems, so everyone was starting more-or-less fresh. Experience and knowledge of previous games in the series help to some extent, but you're still learning the new rules…
Most technologies in the Star Wars universe that don’t have some capability of being used in war… well, they kinda just suck. There are so many areas where it seems like average Star Wars tech should outdo itself given how advanced the military-grade technology is, but in practice it doesn’t appear to make much…
A few of my favorites, not found in the linked article: "There are two ways of constructing software. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. The other is to make it so complex that there are no obvious deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare "The purpose of software engineering is to control…
Homo Laborans sails in the sea of “making things” where work is an end in itself, and is dictated by the needs imposed by technology. Subjected to technology or pleasantly attracted by it, we are ‘Animal laborans’, as Arendt would say, being enslaved to the tasks we are immersed in by the will of technology. Our doing…
Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and…
Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first…
The problem with social media isn't that we aren't sure how much privacy we want to have or how long the things we say should stick around. The problem is that social media is a gamification of social interaction, and it causes us to behave in ways that we normally wouldn't. In normal life, people don't take turns…
As James explains, you can read everything you want about waking up earlier—from sleep habits to the Circadian rhythm—but when the alarm goes off, the only thing that matters are the strategies you’ve actually tried. “The biggest issue around the myth of ‘I need to learn more’ is that somehow learning and doing are…
Running programs is the whole point of programming, of course, but there is more to it. The ability to execute code makes programming a tool for thinking and exploring. When we express ideas as programs, we make them testable; when we debug programs, we are also debugging our brains.
Ivanka contrasts “proactive” people, who are “passionate and productive,” with “negative people,” those who are “swayed by the external and are frequently the victim of circumstance.” Her worldview, it turns out, is not so different from her father’s. Both see society through the lens of quasi-mystical corporate…
It's not surprising that gamespace has become a workplace for hundreds of thousands of "gold famers" who undertake dreary, repetitive labor to produce virtual wealth that's sold to players with more money and less patience than them. The structural differences between in-game play and in-game work are mostly…
pplapi.com (pronounced “people API”) is a web-based data service that provides access to a synthetic world population, n = 7, 171, 922, 938. Researchers can submit queries to pplapi.com using its Application Programming Interface (API) to obtain samples consisting of synthetic agents drawn from this population…
Good software is not copy-protected. That's a somewhat controversial position on a highly controversial subject. Many manufacturers try to discourage "piracy" (wholesale copying) of their software by various protective devices. Fine. The problem is, if the users can't copy all or parts of the program easily within…
Acquire as little software as you can get by with, and stick with it. That's hardware critic Richard Dalton's advice. It's easy to get so caught up in the constant onrush of improvements and "next generations" in the software market that you wind up forever getting ready to work instead of working. You can buy last…