16 DEC 2021 by ideonexus
Principles of Technorealism
1. Technologies are not neutral.
A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...28 FEB 2021 by ideonexus
Play Has Become More Personal and More Intense Through Te...
A similar trend is the rise of personal vacations and separate activities on family vacations. Children’s street games (such as marbles, Hopscotch, and hide-and-go-seek) have been replaced with video games. Face-to-face encounters have been transformed by e-mails, electronic chat groups, and web sur'ng. Revolutionary as all this may be, it represents the clear culmination of a century of developments in media technology.
Twentieth-century technology privatized and homogenized play, but it ...Folksonomies: recreation play
Folksonomies: recreation play
28 JAN 2021 by ideonexus
Computing is Pop Culture without History
Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their work.
Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field.
Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture.
Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music ba...Folksonomies: computer science computing
Folksonomies: computer science computing
09 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
A Quantum Game
Bell came up with “nonlocal” games, which require players to be at a distance from each other with no way to communicate. Each player answers a question. The players win or lose based on the compatibility of their answers.
One such game is the magic square game. There are two players, Alice and Bob, each with a 3-by-3 grid. A referee tells Alice to fill out one particular row in the grid — say the second row — by putting either a 1 or a 0 in each box, such that the sum of the number...07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
The Effort in Keeping the Internet Clean
Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines.
So much of the internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many work hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. F...10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Being Against Technological Progress if Futile
Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of hu¬ man knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don't work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where p...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Cultural Change in Technology
As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has unleashed. For someone like me who saw the power of connection build a vibrant, technologically meshed ecosystem distinguished by peace, love, and understanding, the polarization and h...31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus
Homo Laborans and Homo Faber
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 is comparable to the manual work of past industrial revolutions. Think, for example, of the smartest machines, which can alert their human handlers when they will need m...Folksonomies: two cultures
Folksonomies: two cultures
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Shannon's Learning Mouse Theseus
Theseus was propelled by a pair of magnets, one embedded in its hollow core, and one moving freely beneath the maze. The mouse would begin its course, bump into a wall, sense that it had hit an obstacle with its “whiskers,” activate the right relay to attempt a new path, and then repeat the process until it hit its goal, a metallic piece of cheese. The relays stored the directions of the right path in “memory”: once the mouse had successfully navigated the maze by trial and error, it ...27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus