A feature story for this week’s New York Times Magazine is titled The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t. In the article, writer Steven Johnson concludes that neither the economic nor the cultural losses in the creative industries, which were predicted to result from the digital revolution, have come to pass. Just as lesser pundits have previously declared in blogs and industry PR ...
Over this past weekend, it seems The New York Times Editorial Board got together, drank a little Googley Kool-Aid, and then wrote this Op-Ed provocatively titled Keep the Internet Free of Borders. It is dismaying that, under the imprimatur of a respected name, an OpEd is published that succeeds in drawing such a typically blunt conclusion about an otherwise complex ...
Once again, computer scientist, author, and musician Jaron Lanier passionately addresses ways in which digital age toys and apps offer illusions of empowerment and greater freedom while in fact limiting both. This article was shared by reader Mike Katell, who also offered a thoughtful comment in response to my post as to why I’m not losing sleep over the revelations ...
Okay, it’s not often (see never), you’ll find me quoting Julian Assange other than with an inebriated smirk. Although erudite, I think of the man as kind of a digital-age Abbie Hoffman whose primary cause is to increase the relative importance of himself. And we haven’t heard much from Assange lately, holed up as he is in the Ecuadoran Embassy ...
John Markoff, writing for The New York Times, reports on the discovery of a long lost paper by M.I.T mathematician Norbert Wiener. Written more than sixty years ago, the final paragraphs of the paper resonate loud and clear as we now flirt with the realities of artificial intelligence and, one hopes, consider carefully what it is we wish for from ...
