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 [...]
Category Archives: things about which I am ambivalent
Pascal vs. Callwood
June 15, 2009 – 10:22 pm
If Callwood and Pascal had been pre-socratics, all would be either hate or love (respectively)
Ray Kurzweil on the Future of GNR
April 29, 2009 – 5:20 pm
Minority Report + Jaxon X + Skynet = bad news?
Is HD a Schlimmbesserung?
February 9, 2009 – 12:16 am
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?
January 18, 2009 – 1:25 pm
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
November 15, 2008 – 9:23 pm
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
October 20, 2008 – 10:24 pm
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
July 31, 2008 – 9:02 pm
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.