In the preface to his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Raymond Kurzweil suggests that the most important question that we will face this century is how we define the “human.”
Tag Archives: bruce sterling
Developments
OK, I have been busier than a busy thing. This fact might be obvious, since I haven’t posted a thing here in over a month. Oops. Since then, Blogger has finally allowed me to switch over to my Google login to manage my blog. Just the ability to add tags is reason enough to celebrate. [...]
Sterling on the Internet
In Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling writes about the Internet: Consider the Internet. It is the ne plus ultra of creative destruction, the fastest technological transformation in human history. Even its double-digit growth rates had double-digit growth rates. It falls down quickly and destroys huge fortunes overnight. The Internet is not an information superhighway. Superhighways are [...]
Question 3
Is moral panic is the signature political motif of the information age?
Kurzweil’s Consciousness
In rereading Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines again, aspects of his argument have become more obvious to me. I’m interested, this time, in the implications that his definitions have on how we define “human.” Indeed, he states in the prologue that “the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be [...]
New Media Architecture
Bruce Sterling, with his typical enthusiasm for green and quirky construction, reports on the french architect François Roche and his firm R&Sie, pronounced “heresy.” Sterling writes: Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes. A viab would produce structures that [...]
Sterling on the World
Bruce Sterling’s State of the World address contains some good biographical information on Sterling, but few questions so far. Classic Sterling: I believe “Internet of Things” is a somewhat better way to put [ubiquitous computing], because here we get to think with some proper wariness of a phenomenon that’s hugely powerful and transformative, but also [...]
