Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 16

The green light

Gatsby’s real name, you’ll recall, was Gatz, so I guess it’s no surprise that The Great Gatsbyis Bill Gates’s favorite novel:

The novel that I reread the most.Melinda and I love one line so much that we had it painted on a wall in our house: “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”

Is it there as a warning, I wonder, or an inspiration?

Are maps necessary?

If you own a smartphone, you havea detailed, up-to-dateatlas on your person at all times. This is something new in the world. As the cartographer Justin O’Beirne wrote last year:

An unprecedented level of detail is now available to the average person, for little or no cost.The same [digital] map literally shows every human settlement in the world at every scale, from the world’s largest cities to its tiniest neighborhoods and hamlets. Every country. Every city. Every road. All mapped in exqui...

The enigma of the robot-batted shuttlecock

From “Robots Must Do More Than Just Playing Sports,” an article in today’s China Daily:

Premier Li Keqiang visited a town in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China’s Sichuan province, on Monday, during which he played badminton with a robot.

Yang Feng, an associate professor on automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University, commented: “In order to play badminton, a droid needs high-accuracy vision and image processing, as well as precise motion control. It has to recognize the shuttleco...

147 easy pieces

The advance review copies have arrived:

Seventy-nineof the best posts from a decade of Rough Type.

Sixteen collected articlesand reviews.

Fifty tweetforms.

Two new essays: “Silicon Valley Days” and “The Daedalus Mission.”

Emojis out the wazoo.

Utopia is creepy.

The leap

Reading that new Playboy interview with Ray Kurzweil sent me back to the notoriousinterview Playboy didwith Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004. (The interview nearly torpedoed Google’s IPO, you’ll recall.) Page and Brin’s anticipation of a grand computer-human mind-meld neatly prefigures Kurzweil’s speculations:

PAGE: The more information you have, the better.

PLAYBOY: Yet more isn’t necessarily better.

BRIN: Exactly. This is why it’s a complex problem we’re solving. You want access to as mu...

Gigantic, a big big brain

Ten years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn’t stop talkingabout their excitement at the prospect of extending or replacing the human brain with computers. For the last several years, they’ve been much quieter about their mind-disruption project. I sense that a soldierin Google’s flak army warnedthem that in voicing their fantasies they riskedweirding people out. Renovating the species is a job best done on the sly.

Still, we’llalways have Ray Kurzweil. (I mean that literally.) When, in 2...

Context collapse and context restoration

Facebook has a problem. Its members aren’t sharing as much as they used to. At least they’re not sharing first-hand the way they used to. Instead of posting notices about what they’re doing or thinking, or where theyare, or whom they’re hanging out with, they’re just recyclingsecond-handstuff — news stories, songs, other people’s photos or tweets, YouTube videos, etc. Thenature of what they share on the network is changingfrom the personal to the impersonal, from the informal to the formal,...

The internet of watchful things

Twenty years ago, as the commercial internet took form, the web’s default setting was switched to “surveillance” when it might have been switched to “privacy.” As is often the case with defaults, no one much noticed at the time. Today, with the Silicon Valley surveillance complex set to expand furtherthroughthe Internet of Things, we have another opportunityto think carefully about digital surveillance and itsconsequences for how we live. That opportunity, as I argue in a Los Angeles Times o...

HQ California

Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.

Who would have guessed that the Eagles would proveour most reliable prophets?

NikilSaval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,traces the planned new headquarters of Google and Apple — Googledome (above) and MothershipApple (below) — to their origins in what’s been called Hippie Modernism. The aggressive futurism of the two campuses “is in fact rooted in the past,” Saval writes. “It comes, transfigured, from the wrecked dreams...

Memories aren’t made of this

I have a review of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Will Shape Our Future, Abby Smith Rumsey’s meditation on the fragility of cultural memory, in the Washington Post. It begins:

In the spring of 1997, the Library of Congress opened an ambitious exhibit featuring several hundred of the most historically significant items in its collection. One of the more striking of the artifacts was the “rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence. Over Thomas Jefferson’s original, neatly penne...