Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 25

The needle and the damage done

“Who cares about science? This is music. We’re talking about how you feel.” So said Neil Young in introducing his high-resolution Pono player. Good luck, Neil, but you’re a little downstream. In the end it’s more about the recordingthanthe playback. This is from Tom Whitwell’s article “Why Do All Records Sound the Same?”:

What makes working with Pro Tools really different from tape is that editing is absurdly easy. Most bands record to a click track, so the tempo is locked. If a guitarist play...

Vehicular homicide

I amobsessed by the ugliness of the self-driving concept car that Mercedes showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week:

Its design seems to have been inspired bythe head ofthe monster from the movieAlien.The car’s official name is theF015 Luxury in Motion. But I have nicknamed it The Silver Turd.

The ugliness is more than skin deep. The tiny, mirrored windows reflect the carmaker’s vision of the car as a sybariticisolation chamber, a stately pleasure-dome that shieldsits...

Screening the future

In “HAL, Mother, and Father,” an essay in the Paris Review, Jason Resnikoff remembers how his father, a computer scientist, reacted to the visions of the future presented in science fiction movies of the Sixties and Seventies. First came2001:

My father was so buried in computers that when he saw2001he very muchlikedHAL, the spaceshipDiscovery’s villainous central computer. To this day, he enjoys quoting the part of the movie where HAL tries to explain away his own mistake — the supposed fault...

The picture of ourselves

From “Among the Disrupted,” a new essay by Leon Wieseltier:

All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing...

The politics of programming

For the last post of the year, I give youa short excerpt from The Glass Cage.

It’s commonly assumed that any technology that comes to be broadly adopted in a field, and hence gains momentum, must be the best one for the job. Progress, in this view, is a quasi-Darwinian process. Many different technologies are invented, they compete for users and buyers, and after a period of rigorous testing and comparison the marketplace chooses the best of the bunch. Only the fittest tools survive. Society c...

The singularity is always near

I’ve been at least vaguely aware of Samuel Butler’s 1865 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” for a long time (mainly through quotations in George Dyson’s excellent book of the same title), but I hadn’t read it in full until I stumbled on a copy online a couple of days ago. It’s a strange and remarkable piece of work, and one that echoes loudlytoday. In fact, given the dire new predictions about humankind’s coming servitude to machines with artificial intelligence,the essay’s resonance may be gr...

MOOCs and the distance-learning mirage

“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.” –Sebastian Thrun, 2012

Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, I think the time has come to update my previously published surveyof the history of hype that has for more than a century surrounded distance-learning technologies. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be...

Facebook’s automated conscience

Last week, Wired‘s Cade Metz gave us a peek into the Facebook BehaviorModification Laboratory, which is more popularlyknown as the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Laboratory. Run by Yann LeCun, an NYU datascientist, the lab is developinga digital assistant that will act as yourartificial conscience and censor. Perched on your shoulder like one of those cartoon angels, it will whispertsk tsk into your earwhen your online behavior threatens to step beyond the bounds of propriet...

Oh no! Robots! Yay!

“This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” –Hannah Arendt, 1958

“Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.” –Günther Anders, 1956

Now that we’ve branded everyconsumer goodwith a computer chip “smart,” the inevitable next...

A.I. and the new deskilling wave

I have an essay in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journalin which Iexaminehow an overdependence on software issapping the talents of professionals and argue for a more humanisticapproach to programming and automation. The piece begins:

Artificial intelligence has arrived. Today’s computers are discerning and sharp. They can sense the environment, untangle knotty problems, make subtle judgments and learn from experience. They don’t think the way we think—they’re still as mindless as toothpicks—but they...