The Expansion of Ignorance (26)
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The fastest growing entity today is information. Information is expanding ten times faster than the growth of any other manufactured or natural product on this planet. According to a calculation Hal Varian, an economist at Google, and I made, world-wide information has been increasing at the rate of 66% per year for many decades. Compare that explosion to the rate of increase in even the most prolific manufactured stuff – like concrete, or paper -- ...
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C.M said:
In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
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Jon said:
So if information discovery leads to greater ignorance, and ignorance is bad, I suppose we should stop discovering
Thinkism (21)
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Here is why you don't have to worry about the Singularity in your lifetime: thinkism doesn't work. First, some definitions. According to Wikipedia, the Singularity is "a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence." According to Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, a smarter than human artificial intelligence will bring about yet smarter intelligence, which in turn will rapidly solve related scientific ...
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davemac said:
A fairly convincing argument against the Singularity happening in 2050
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Jordan T-H said:
This pretty well summarizes how I feel about the singularity.
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MiramarMike said:
Nice argument about a cool as subject ... I for one will welcome our Singularity Overlords
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium (4)
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A wise society would take the long view. When accessing its environment, for instance, a smart culture might ask itself what consequences would alterations in genetic sequences of wild or domesticated organisms, or introduced species, have in one thousand years? What happens to spent nuclear fuel over 1,000 years? But 1,000 years is too distant and remote to even contemplate, particularly for busy contemporary folk like us who have trouble making next summer’s vacation plans. ...
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Stéfano said:
O_O Holy fuck... Technium goes Guia do Mochileiro das galáxias e abre muito a cabeça
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Mahesh CR said:
Such delightful ruminations on human generations. Especially liked the bit about requiring just 13 human generations holding hands across time to span out for a 1000 years.
Where Attention Flows, Money Follows - The Technium (29)
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The new rules for the new economy can be summarized as: Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Almost anything else except attention can be manufactured as a commodity. Luxury goods are only luxuries temporarily. They quickly are counterfeited and commodified. Premium brands are only premium because they garner a surplus of attention. Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow. That is really all you need to know. Thankfully there are a ...
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Atle said:
I just don't get the attention economy folks. It's just a bad re-hash of "the audience as a commodity" thesis.
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jasonb said:
"The challenge is maintaining a flow of attention in an environment where you are surrounded by millions of similar things that are good and useful."
Are We Duped By the Technium? (6)
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If technology is so bad for our spirits, why do we consume it? For all the benefits technology has brought us, the costs of those benefits often glare too obvious, and for many of us, seem too dear. We definitely have More – more stuff, more knowledge, and more choices – but strangely according to newspaper polls we seem to be less equipped, less wise, less happy. What progress means for some people is that ...
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jchris said:
Praxis
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Umang Saini said:
Pertinent - "The costs of technology are not easily visible, and should be more articulated, more accurate, and better considered."There's no spell.
Looking For Ugly (11)
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Preventing errors within extremely complicated technological systems is often elusive. The more complex the system, the more complex the pattern of error. But a curious thing happens in systems that are kept relatively error free: as major errors are prevented, it gets more difficult to forecast future major errors -- because so few happen! In these kind of mission-critical systems the genesis profile of a major failure may be unknown because major failures are so ...
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Andrey Petrov said:
Also a good preemptive approach in imperfect software systems. I'm distracted by ugly code, so the first thing I do when I need to debug someone else's code is clean up the relevant parts. The bug usually reveals itself within minutes.
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Andrew Louis said:
freakonomics meets engineering
Everything, Too Cheaply Metered (18)
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3 weeks, 5 days
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While researching the consequences of economic abundance, Chris Anderson revisted the oft maligned quote of Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954: "Someday nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter." As with most popular quotes, there's an untold story behind it. As Anderson investigates the context and history of the "too cheap to meter" quote he is reminded that "too cheap to meter" does not mean electricity was supposed to be ...
The Landscape of Possible Intelligences (13)
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In A Taxonomy of Minds I explore the varieties of intelligence which a greater-than-human intelligence might take. We could meet greater-than-human intelligences in an alien ET, or we can make synthetic ones. The one foundational assumption behind our making new minds ourselves is that we assume our mind is intelligent enough to make a new and different mind. Just because we are conscious does not mean we have the smarts to make consciousness ourselves. Whether ...
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Jake said:
Emptiness in computers bothers me.
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium (3)
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Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius." Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by ...
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J.C. Hutchins said:
Folks participating in podcasting -- podiobooks, specifically -- should totally grok this concept.
Turing'd (1)
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Over the years I've had many opportunities to work with professionals from various fields. In every endeavor, computer technology is utterly transformative. But not every field gets this. Some scientists, licensed experts, and professionals are allergic to new technology. I had an epiphany recently on why some varieties of professionals are more welcoming of disruptive technology than others. I realized the types of pros who are most eager to employ the latest technology are those ...
Another One for the Machine (18)
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Computers have mastered chess and checkers, beating the best human players. Nowadays cheap computerized or even online players can beat most ordinary humans. The ancient game of Go, however, has long resisted the efforts by engineers to construct a Go-computer than can beat a human Go master. Some Go fans believed computers would never be able to beat a Go master. The vast combinatorial sums of possible moves are much greater in Go than chess, ...
A Trillion Hours (17)
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The web is pretty big. Researchers at Google won't say how many pages Google indexes, but they recently said that their inspection of the web reveals that it has more than one trillion unique urls. It's difficult to know what to count as a unique page, because as they explain, some sites such as a web calendar page can generate an infinite number of pages if you click on the "next day" link. The very ...
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ali1k said:
One trillion hours equals 114 million years. If there was only one person working on the web, he or she would have had to begun back in the Cretaceous Age to get where we are today.
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MiramarMike said:
6,000 days - different counting than Miraz but hey still a great companion article
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Chris said:
Mind-blowing numbers.
Literature-Space Vs. Cyberspace (7)
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This post is yet another response in the debate over reading on the web. In addition to the forum bubbling on the Edge and Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times chimed in with a long piece on what it means to read online. I find this question to be a good canary for the many other questions about new technology: is this stuff really new, and if it is, in what way is it different? ...
People Want To Pay (26)
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Yes, everything will be free, but in my experience people want to pay. They really do! People, mobs of them, will grab stuff that is free. They will try stuff for free that they would never touch if they had to pay. They will always gravitate, on average, to the lowest price, and what is lower than free? But, but, if people have resources they prefer to pay the creators of products and services they ...
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Seth said:
I have to agree.
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Steve said:
I don't mind paying for good stuff as long as the artist benefits
Fate of the Book (17)
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Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long stream in an unordered distributed debate. It may not make much sense unless you've read the discussion that is taking place on various websites indicated in the following paragraphs. There are many strands in the conversation. The one I am following here is about whether books will be dethroned from their centrality in culture. Nick Carr is the current smart critic of the new. He is articulate and ...
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Nick said:
spark, id love to read a book with your notes on it. digital wins!
Wagging the Long Tail of Love (3)
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[Translations: Dutch] Seth Godin has been exploring Chris Anderson's idea of the The Long Tail. As usual Seth brings clarity and illumination to this often misunderstood notion. He recently posted a dissection of the three "profit pockets" within the Long Tail, which he illustrated like this: There's a blatant switcheroo that Seth (and almost everyone else) makes when explaining the Long Tail. In pocket #1 of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator ...
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Jen Dodd said:
Speaking of the Long Tail: "the long tail niche creation operates perfectly well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm, obsession, curiosity, peerage, love, and the gift economy"
The Reality of Depending on True Fans (5)
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[Translations: Japanese] I have been researching new business models for artists working in the low end of the long tail. How can one make a living in a micro-niche? Is it even possible, particularly in this realm of no-cost copies? I proposed the idea of artists directly cultivating 1000 True Fans, which I wrote up in a previous post. It was a nice thesis that got a lot of blog-attention, but it was short on ...
Civilizations Are Creatures (1)
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Civilizations are creatures. They are organisms that live very long and that spread very wide over the surface of the earth. Civilizations are beings that consume energy and produce ideas. These ideas materialize as cities, institutions, laws, art, books, and...
