Tag: technology

  • Framework for Creator’s Outputs

    Creation takes many forms. Being able to see those forms accurately and arrange them in a way that makes it clear is important. Mechanization didn’t make this less important, but it did integrate better into the world because what it created it remained atoms. Computation does not integrate into the world because what it creates…

  • the eight factories every city needs to build before it’s too late

    When we talk about climate, collapse, or resilience, we usually end up in the same cul-de-sac: we need better leaders, better policies, better apps. But we don’t. What we urgently need is physical infrastructure that lasts. Infrastructure we can control, repair, and replicate. Not another app. Not another subsidy. Not another committee hearing on “resilience.”…

  • Governing AI Is the Least of Our Problems

    This week I attended the Seattle University Ethics & Tech Conference; a half-day affair with a focus on “the legal and political frameworks shaping AI governance”. Just the kind of boundary spanning problem that I love to sink my teeth into. Easily the best conference of the year you didn’t attend. For me, it felt…

  • The mobile internet that fits my notion of that the mobile internet is

    The Mobile Internet is just The Internet. The Internet is just the Network of Networks. Networks are just “computers connected to one another so they can send messages to one another”. “Computers connected to one another …” is just Ethernet. The Mobile Internet I want is just Ethernet. Like WiFi. Like WiFi but with long-distance…

  • chores

    AI+robotics should make everyone’s life easier by doing the things in our lives that are necessary, time consuming, and annoying; basically, as the saying goes, they should be doing our chores so we can have more time to enjoy our hobbies. Chore is one of those odd words who’s meaning emerges from some kind of…

  • when open doors let in all the wrong people

    Bots use up more CPU cycles on the average Web site than humans, and bots are increasingly not there to help. Where in days gone by, a bot might be indexing for a search engine to help people you don’t know find your site, today the mostly exist to feed giant statistical machines that calculate…

  • private data, public data, public information

    If you have a pile of data, you have three choices:

  • too abstract

    Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of…

  • humans interacting with computers

    I was first introduced to the concept of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the spring of 2002 while working on a system that would ostensibly tell Congress where the money they allocated to the Intelligence community in the “black budget” was going and whether or not it was producing valuable returns. This, of course, was never…

  • Dragons

    The Internet and the World Wide Web represent what happens when you build a system that structurally subverts the mechanisms of constraint that allow a government to regulate the behavior of community members. Typically, this has been seen as a good thing because it was initially done by benevolent tinkerers and lots of people benefited…