Outboard Brain

Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention spans. They can't remember their own phone numbers. They spend more time on social media than they did with their friends irl (that's "in real life," my daughter tells me). They...

 Knowledge Work

The growing importance of knowledge as an economic resource reflects the fact that, as economies and production technologies develop, they become ever more complex and specialized, leading to increasing coordination costs. In the language of information economics, the organizational or informational task of coordinating the diverse steps in the productive chain grows, as the number of transactions within and among productive units increases (Joncher, 1983). Logically, the increasingly complex...

 Argonauts: Charter on Scientific Responsibility

CHARTER ON SCIENTIFIC RESPONSIBILITY Abuse of science and technology is a major threat to the existence of humankind. Our era has seen destructive climate change, tactical use of nuclear weapons, famine, public health crises, and now, the militarization of space. Our corporate stakeholders and the governments representing them have made inhuman, unwise decisions, and show little sign of changing their behavior. Scientists, technologists, and mathematicians can be an effective voice for resp...

 Technology is Information

The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. And its mobility is still increasing. The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered ...

 Astrochicken

The basic idea of Astrochicken is that the spacecraft will be small and quick. I do not believe that a fruitful future for space science lies along the path we are now following, with space missions growing larger and larger and fewer and fewer and slower and slower as the decades go by. I propose a radical step in the direction of smallness and quickness. Astrochicken will weigh a kilogram instead of Voyager's ton, and it will travel from Earth into orbit around Uranus in two years instead ...

 Does the Future Need Us?

While we now know that Turing was too optimistic on the timeline, AI's inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was right when he wrote in 1956 "machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do." I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do. Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to...

 Los Angeles's Air Quality Regulations

Los Angeles air quality has improved in recent years because of new regulations on automobile and plant emissions, but the American Lung Association still ranks the Los Angeles area as the metropolitan region in America most polluted by year-round particles, short-term particles, and ozone. This persistent ranking contrasts with other data on Los Angeles's environmental progress. For example, the number of "exceedance" days in the Los Angeles / Long Beach area of southern California (days tha...

 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Press Release

MAINTAIN A CONSTRUCTIVE CLIMATE FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS BY A CIVILIZED COLLABORATION BETWEEN GROUPS UNREALISTICALLY DEVELOPING IN ISOLATION. ELIMINATE THE SEPARATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL FROM TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND EXPAND AND ENRICH TECHNOLOGY TO GIVE THE INDIVIDUAL VARIETY, PLEASURE AND AVENUES FOR EXPLORATION AND INVOLVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE. ENCOURAGE INDUSTRIAL INITIATIVE IN GENERATING ORIGINAL FORETHOUGHT, INSTEAD OF A COMPROMISE IN AFTERMATH, AND PRECIP...