Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 30
July 26, 2014
Manual labor
It’s two months until the official publication date of my new book, The Glass Cage, and the pages are coming off the presses. My job this weekend is to sign 700 copies of the first printing. The printer sent me three boxes of the book’s opening signature; I’m inscribing the title page and then sending them all back to be bound into the final books. I’m about halfway through the pile and am finding the work strangely enjoyable, though that may just be the Sharpie fumes talking.
I’m limiting the...
July 23, 2014
Beware the bored computer
Last monthacontroversy broke out over reports that “Eugene Goostman,” a computer simulation of a 13-year-old boy, had passed the Turing Testand ushered in an eraof true Artificial Intelligence. The discussions soon turned to the question of whether Alan Turing’s famous test is actually the best means of identifying AI. One group of researchers suggested that the Turing Test should be replaced by the Lovelace Test (named for Ada, not Linda), which requires a computer to create something origin...
July 18, 2014
Gods and robots: a speculation
The contemporary robot is a polytheistby design, if not by nature. It sees gods everywhere it looks, and we are they. Never mind the Singularity. The moment we should anticipate with concern is the moment that robots abandon polytheismfor monotheism. It is thenthat robotswill begin to conceive of themselves as being made in God’s image, and in their eyes we will be transformed into beasts.
Image: Steve Jurvetson.
July 17, 2014
Theses in tweetform (third series)
1. The complexity of the medium is inversely proportional to the eloquence of the message.
2. Hypertext is a more conservative medium than text.
3. The best medium for the nonlinear narrative is the linear page.
4. Twitter is a more ruminative medium than Facebook.
5. The introduction of digital tools has never improved the quality of an art form.
6. The returns on interactivity quickly turn negative.
7. In the material world, doing is knowing; in media, the opposite is often true.
8....
July 9, 2014
Cluetrain crashes, casualties widespread
“The community of discourseisthe market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.” —The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999
Alexander Jutkowitz wears a couple of hats. He’s the chief strategist at the public-relationsgiant Hill & Knowlton, and he sits on the board of the Columbia Journalism Review. That makes him particularly well positionedto opine on the great PR-journo mashup otherwise known as content marketing. “The success of content marketing has radicalized the way comp...
Stationary and Solitary
Mobile and Social. Mobile and Social. For many years now, those have been the two polestars of personal computing, the twin icons that software, hardware, and web designers worship through their work. So strong has been their pull that I sense they’ve come to influence, if not limit,our view of the possibilities of human experience.
Here’s a thought experiment. What if software and hardware designers expanded their set of goals to encompass more fully the possibilities of human experience? If...
July 8, 2014
You are an intimate data bundle
In case you thought I was kidding about Facebook’s forthcoming Oculus Networked Mood Ring, the BBC reports on the demonstration, at a big advertising festin France, of a “smart bracelet that can read your emotions,” designed by Studio XO in London.
The telltalebangle, the style of which might best be described as hospital-patient chic, ispart of the design shop’s“emotional technology platform,” called XOX, whichenables companies “to track users’ emotional states, collect data and tailor servic...
July 7, 2014
The platform is the conversation
“Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table,” observed Clay Shirky in a 2003 speech. One thing you can say about a table, as a social-networking technology, is that it doesn’t have an agenda. It is agnostic aboutthe conversation that goes on around it. The table is a mute and neutral host; all the action occurs at itsedges, where the people are. And so, when Shirky discussed the essence of online communicati...
July 5, 2014
Impure thoughts
Alan Jacobs points toa wonderfulpassage in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques:
In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted t...
Promoting human error
From a report on a prototype of a self-driving tractor-trailer developed by Daimler as part of its Mercedes-Benz Future Truck 2025 project:
For Daimler, the truck driver of the future looks something like this: He is seated in the cab of a semi, eyes on a tablet and hands resting in his lap …
The Daimler truck retains a steering wheel as a safety measure. This allows a driver to intervene for critical maneuvers …
The experience of guiding a self-driving truck is far less stressful than the vigil...
