Just noticed there’s a new documentary about Ray Kurzweil and his big ideas (transhumanism, artificial intelligence, technological singularity, etc.). The movie’s called Transcendent Man: … offering [Kurzweil's] vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent…all within the next thirty years. I saw him talk [...]
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The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
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Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
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There are some valuable lessons in Andrew Potter’s Authenticity Hoax — lessons most people probably don’t want and won’t accept. Here’s some of the synopsis from the AuthHoax blog (I don’t see the need to rewrite it): For many, the search for the authentic is a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, fostering [...]
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Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.” The dispute comes [...]
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Eric Schmidt shared this video via Twitter, depicting the gist of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: I feel like it shouldn’t be such a big surprise. Maybe I’m an extreme case, but most rewards seem offensive to me — like bribes — or condescending: “Hey boy, go fetch!” They have [...]
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My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.” Description: Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address [...]
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Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms. He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate [...]
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Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic. There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: If it persists much longer, this [...]
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Literally! Out of all the things buzzing in my head for a “new decade” post, the idea I want to highlight most is the increasing importance of making stuff. It’s been germinating in my mind via MakerCulture in the Making by UWO + Ryerson’s online journalism classes. Last week it was crystalized by Umair Haque’s “Builders’ Manifesto” [...]
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