Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 28

The Uncaged Tour

I like it when bands name their tours, like Dylan’s Why Do You Look At Me So Strangely Tour in 1992, or They Might Be Giants’ Don’t Tread on the Cut-up Snake World Tour, also in 1992, orGuided by Voices’ Insects of Rock Tour in 1994.* So I’ve decided to give a name to my upcoming book tour. It’s going to be called The Uncaged Tour. (Actually, the full, official title is The Uncaged Tour of the Americas 2014.)

Here are the dates so far, with links to more information:

Sept. 30: New York: The Gla...

The unbearable unlightness of AI

There is a continuing assumption — a faith, really — that at somefuture moment, perhaps only a decade or two away, perhaps even nearer than that, artificial intelligence will, by means yet unknown, achieve consciousness. A window will open on the computer’s black box, and light will stream in. The universe will take a new turn, as the inanimate becomes, for a second time, animate.

George Lakoff, the linguist who cowroteMetaphors We Live By, says it ain’t going to happen. In a fascinating artic...

The manipulators

In “The Manipulators,” a new essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I explore two much-discussed documents published earlier this year: “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” by Adam Kramer et al. and “Judgment in Case C-131/12: Google Spain SL, Google Inc v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeja Gonzalez” by the Court of Justice of the European Union.The latter, I argue, helps us make sense of the former. Both challenge us to t...

Students and their devices

“The practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time,” writes Clay Shirky in explaining why he’s decided to ban laptops, smartphones, and tablets from the classes he teaches at NYU. “The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity an...

Speak, algorithm

Lost in yesterday’scoverage of the Apple Watch was a small software feature that, when demonstrated on the stage of the Flint Center, earned brief but vigorous applause from the audience. It was the watch’s ability to scanincoming messages and suggest possible responses. The Verge’s live-blogging crew were wowed:

The example Apple presented was pretty rudimentary. The incoming message included the question“Are you going with Love Shack or Wild Thing?” To which the watch suggested three possibl...

Apple’s small big thing

Over at the Time site, I have a short commentary on the Apple Watch. It begins:

Many of us already feel as if we’re handcuffed to our computers. With its new smartwatch, unveiled today in California, Apple is hoping to turn that figure of speech into a literal truth.

Apple has a lot riding on the diminutive gadget. It’s the first major piece of hardware the company has rolled out since the iPad made its debut fouryears ago. It’s the first new product to be designed under the purview of fledglin...

There will always be spare change

“There will always be change,” wrote Thomas Friedman in his 2012 column “Average Is Over.”“But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average.”

Economics professor and blogger Tyler Cowen borrowed Friedman’s title for his most recent book, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, but his emphasis, in surveying...

Big Internet

We talk about Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Ag. Maybe it’s time we started talking about Big Internet.

That thought crossed my mind after reading a couple of recent posts. One was Scott Rosenberg’s piece about a renaissance in the ancient art of blogging. I hadn’t even realized that blogs were a thing again,but Rosenberg delivers the evidence. Jason Kottke, too, says that blogging is once again the geist in ourzeit. Welcome back, world.

The other piece was Alan Jacobs’s goodbye to Twitter. Jac...

The Glass Cage: early reviews

I’ve been encouraged bythe comments on The Glass Cage that have been coming in from early readers and reviewers. Here’s a roundup:

“Nicholas Carr is among the most lucid, thoughtful, and necessary thinkers alive. He’s also terrific company.The Glass Cageshould be required reading for everyone with a phone.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, author ofEverything Is IlluminatedandExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Written with restrained objectivity,The Glass Cageis nevertheless scary as any sci-fi thrille...

Playtators and their fans

“Man’s failure is yet more intense in the face of the triumph of ineffable things than in the face of heavy things.” —Roland Barthes, What Is Sport?

The videogamer has always been at once player and spectator, in the action and yet removed from it. Watcher and watched, entertainer and entertainee, warriorand couch potato,the videogamerwas fated to become the broadcaster of his own amusements, and thatmakes Twitch and its success — Amazon is buying the game-streaming juggernautfor a billion dol...