Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 11

Reality as a service

I’ve always seen reality as mixed, so when I heard today that Microsoft is about to launch a line of Windows Mixed Reality Headsets, I was chuffed. Everyone who dons the eyewear, I assumed, would see the world exactly as I do. It was a dream come true. Subjectivity would finally be resolved, and in my favor. Here at last was a gizmo — from Microsoft, no less — that I could get behind.

Then I read that Microsoft “defines Mixed Reality as anything that includes or falls between Virtual Reality...

AI’s game

The following review of Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins appeared originally in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Chess is the game not just of kings but of geniuses. For hundreds of years, it has served as standard and symbol for the pinnacles of human intelligence. Staring at the pieces, lost to the world, the chess master seems a figure of pure thought: brain without body. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that when computer scie...

The robot paradox, continued

You can see the robot age everywhere but in the labor statistics, I wrote a few months ago, channeling Robert Solow. The popular and often alarming predictions of a looming unemployment crisis, one that would stem from rapid advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and other computer automation technologies, have become increasingly hard to square with the economy’s rebound to near full employment. If computers were going to devastate jobs on a broad scale, one would think there’d be s...

The virtual postman never stops ringing

In the latest issue of New Philosopher, I have an essay, “Speaking Through Computers,” that looks at how the form and content of our speech have been shaped by communications networks, from the postal system to social media. It begins:

Much modern technology has its origins in war, or the anticipation of war, and that’s the case with Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and all the other networks that stream data through our phones and lives. The Big Bang of digital communication came on the morning...

The soft tyranny of the rating system

In his darkly comic 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart imagines a Yelpified America in which people are judged not by the content of their character but by their streamed credit scores and crowdsourced “hotness” points. Social relations of even the most intimate variety are governed by online rating systems.

A sanitized if more insidious version of Shteyngart’s big-data dystopia is taking shape in China today. At its core is the government’s “Social Credit System,” a centr...

On Robert Pollard: “Chicken Blows”

[No. 04 in a Series]

Take one of those short Beatles songs from the medley that closes Abbey Road, turn it inside out, fill it with nitrous oxide, and let a kindergarten class use it as a ball during recess. That’s “Chicken Blows.” A seeming throwaway that arrives near the end of the nearly endless Alien Lanes, the song reveals itself as a miniature pop masterpiece only after many listens: the exquisitely frayed melody, the trembling vocal, the aching background harmonies, all washing across...

Smarter living through neurosis

Found on the front page of today’s New York Times website:

Coming next week: “Smiling May Harm Your Jaw” and “Did You Take Too Many Steps Today?”

The master and the machine: on AI and chess

“A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind,” my review of Garry Kasparov’s new book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, appears today in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here’s a bit:

The contingency of human intelligence, the way it shifts with health, mood, and circumstance, is at the center of Kasparov’s account of his historic duel with Deep Blue. Having beaten the machine in a celebrated match a year earlier, the champion enters the 199...

Should Uber’s next CEO be a robot?

A little more than two years ago, I suggested in a post that “the killer business app for artificial intelligence may turn out to be the algorithmic CEO.” I was picking up on a point that Frank Pasquale had made in a review of The Second Machine Age:

Thiel Fellow and computer programming prodigy Vitaly Bukherin has stated that automation of the top management functions at firms like Uber and AirBnB would be “trivially easy.” Automating the automators may sound like a fantasy, but it is a natu...

The robot paradox

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” remarked MIT economist Robert Solow in a 1987 book review. The quip became famous. It crystallized what had come to be called the productivity paradox — the mysterious softness in industrial productivity despite years of big corporate investments in putatively labor-saving information technology.

I think the time has come to start talking about the robot paradox. So let me offer a new twist on Solow’s words:

You ca...