Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 17
March 25, 2016
Peak robot?
Given our current obsessionwith the possibility of an economic or even existential robot apocalypse, the news this week that Google is backing away from its aggressive robotics program has received surprisingly little attention.I’m wondering if Google’s retreat might be a signal that, for the time being, we’ve hit peak robot.
Google, according to press reports, is eagerly seeking a buyer for Boston Dynamics, the most vauntedof the robotics companies that it purchased in a wild buying spree a...
March 11, 2016
The real New Economy?
“The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying,” writesHarvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff in an incisive, disquieting essay in Frankfurter Allgemeine. We’re seeing the rise, she argues, of “a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I callsurveillance capitalism.”
Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary m...
March 9, 2016
The internet of things to stick up your butt
I apologize for that headline, but you can only be so delicate in discussinga rectal thermometer with a Bluetooth transmitter. Along with a speedy network connection, the Vicks SmartTempWireless Thermometer comes with a smartphone appthatallows you to trackyour or your child’s body-temperature stream, share the datawith Apple Health and other commercial services, and upload the readingsto the cloud for safekeeping and corporate scanning. I sense the devicehas a rich symbolic meaning, but I f...
March 7, 2016
The people’s campaign
The funny thing about gatekeepers is that you never appreciate their value until they’re gone.
How do you fight millions of dollars of fraudulent commercials pushing for crooked politicians? I will be using Facebook & Twitter. Watch!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2016
March 4, 2016
For David Bowie, belatedly
From Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer:
Looking into any portion of the interior of a rocket was like looking into the abdominal cavity of a submarine or a whale. Green metal walls, green and blue tanks, pipes and proliferations of pipes, black blocks of electrical boxes and gray blocks of such boxes gave an offering of those zones of silence which reside at the center of machines, a hint of that ancient dark beneath the hatch in the hold of the bow — such zones of silence came over him...
March 3, 2016
The new politics
Imagine that you lived in a highly segregated neighborhood, segregated according to political and cultural sensibility, and it was campaign season, and all your neighbors had political signs out in front of their houses, and all the signs were identical, and you, too, had the same sign out in front of your house, and whenever you looked at the sign you felt good about yourself, because you knew you were doing your part, you knew you were taking a stand, you knew it was the right stand, and yo...
March 2, 2016
Will we compile?
Getting machines to understand, and speak, the language used by people — natural language processing — has long been a central goal of artificial intelligence research. In a provocativenew interview at Edge, Stephen Wolfram turns that goal on its head. The real challenge, he suggests, is getting people to understand, and speak, the language used by machines. In a future world in which we rely on computers to fulfill our desires, we’re going to need to be able to express those desires in a wa...
February 29, 2016
Announcing “Utopia Is Creepy”
“It was a scene out of an Ambien nightmare: A jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not asleep. The vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s announcement — this was in the spring of 2011 — that ‘the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.’ Zuckerberg had begun his new ‘personal challenge,’ he told Fortune magazine, by boiling a lobster alive. Then he dispatched a chicken. Contin...
January 7, 2016
Fun fun fun ’til her daddy takes the iPhone away
“A smartphone can get you a ride but a car can’t get you a date,” blogged venture capitalist Fred Wilson, revealing a remarkable ignorance of the entire modern history of youth culture. “The smartphone wins.”
Wilson’swords were inspired by a November 2013 interview with another prominent VC, Marc Andreessen. America’s love affair with the automobile isover, Andreessendeclared. As evidence he pointed to a putative sea change in young people’s attitudes toward cars: “Today, ask kids if they’d...
