To celebrate the semester’s end, I often like to teach Machiavelli’s The Prince, and this semester is no exception. I thought it would be fun to measure my level of Machiavellianism, or “Mach Level,” this year to see how cynical, or observant, I’ve become. I found this test at Salon on which I scored a [...]
Archive | April, 2005
The Artilect War
I was recently contacted by one of my former students and a regular commenter on this blog, Sebastian Wolfe, about Hugo de Garis’ work on technoculture, along the lines of Kurzweil and Joy. In his The Artilect War, De Garis’ postulates the the production of “artilects,” or autonomous artificial intelligences whose intellects far exceed their [...]
Star Trek: 1966-2005
Today’s Op-Ed section of the NYTimes prints the obituary of our long-beloved Star Trek. Since the Times only has its articles available for a short time, I’ll reprint the whole thing here: By the middle of May, the “Star Trek” franchise will be no more, having died a death as long and lingering as — [...]
