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Category Archives: Machines / gadgets / technology / games
Artificial Einstein
There is a set of interesting discussions posted on Scott Aaronson’s blog among Aaronson, Steven Pinker, and others on whether recent text generators like GPT-3 indicate that artificial intelligence is upon us. The discussion is informed, sensible, and well-mannered: these … Continue reading
IAI: The self in the cloud
…But these scientists and philosophers are forgetting about locks. Just as keys have the shapes they have because of the locks they fit, people have the selves they have because of the lives they fit. My memories and beliefs are … Continue reading
The Age of Moonshot Ideals?
It is hopeless to try to guess at how the future will judge us. We are in the thick of things, and we don’t know what will emerge as important or significant over time. Events that seem to us exciting … Continue reading
Achieving Star Trek
Culture is an engine that transforms food into ideas. Individual bodies are responsible for turning food into energy, but it takes a mind to create ideas, and a mind is possible only in a community. Just as a body requires … Continue reading
Being obducted into other worlds
I have been sucked into the latest game made by the Myst people, Obduction. I’m about a third of the way through, but the premise seems to be that there are four or five worlds existing in the same space … Continue reading
Brave New World
Reading Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Viking, 2016). Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired, and this book is about the promise of emerging technologies to, well, shape our … Continue reading
Energy, culture, and Civilization
I only recently came across the ideas of Leslie White (1900-1975). White was an American anthropologist who developed a mathematical model for civilization. Civilization, or Culture, according to White, is a product of Energy and Technology (C = E x … Continue reading
Brainwashing, the Red Scare, and the Turing Test
I just came across this brilliant lecture, “Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines,” given recently by Simon Schaffer. I’ve noted Schaffer’s work before on early automata. Here he extends his interest in our fascination with automata to post-WWII paranoia. … Continue reading
Star Wars awakens
(No spoilers) Star Wars came out in 1977, and I was 12 years old, which means it hit me the way a T-16 can bull’s-eye womp rats (at least with the right pilot). I remember Nixon resigning, and I remember … Continue reading
The Cyborg of Practical Wisdom
The biggest struggle my fellow modern-day cyborgs and I face is to create a virtual reality that connects more wholesomely with the human part of our nature. The artificial reality we currently plug into is a Terry Gilliam nightmare. Too … Continue reading
What they needed
Then – without warning, without prelude, without even a minute to try to wrap a terrestrial head around the idea – Earth found itself in the middle of a galactic war. It was like neanderthals finding themselves on the beach at Normandy. … Continue reading
The Magical Dimensions of the Globe
There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write … Continue reading
Multitasking and multipurposing
The other day was entirely typical, but I paused to consider the wonder of it all. I was trading moves back and forth with a friend playing Civilization. I was the American civilization under Roosevelt, and because of some luck … Continue reading
Huenemanniac 