Category Archives: things about which I am ambivalent

Some support for Schumpeter

The last book I read was Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Social, and Democracy, a book famous for coining the phrase “creative destruction” as a description of the process inherent to capitalism whereby old methods of production and commodities are incessantly obsolesced and replaced–an insight drawn, I believe, from Marx’s talk about capitalism constantly revolutionizing the means [...]

Pascal vs. Callwood

If Callwood and Pascal had been pre-socratics, all would be either hate or love (respectively)

Ray Kurzweil on the Future of GNR

Minority Report + Jaxon X + Skynet = bad news?

Is HD a Schlimmbesserung?

At least for action movies, movies in HD is a step backwards in the viewing experience.

As the web gets smarter, will our anonymity evaporate?

One of the most exciting things going on in webland today, I think, is the myriad of technologies, user experiences, and computer-to-computer interactions that typically pass under the monikers of “Web 3.0” or “the semantic web.” There isn’t a lot of general agreement on what precisely these terms mean (though I think the latter is [...]

If it can’t be shared, it doesn’t count

Kevin Kelly on the future of the web, which he sees basically in terms of a movement towards the semantic web, or a web of linked data.
Kelly unfortunatley comes across a bit naive, as he discusses our inevitable dependance upon, and surrendering to, the envisioned “web 10.0″ without any critical hesitation or indication of cause [...]

Bot-mediated reality

Having just spent upwards of 25 hours in a car driving between Peterborough, Toronto, and Pukaskwa National Park, one of the ways we passed the time was listening to a variety of podcasts, including Philosophy Bites, CBC Ideas, and the Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long Term Thinking (SALT).
While SALT has hosted a bevy of [...]

Creepy female robot

I had to put this one in “robots doing good” and “robots doing evil” because she’s helping sell sunscreen, which is good, but she’s really disturbing, which is bad.