Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, is a smart man. Larry Ellison knows databases. Larry Ellison knows how to sell databases. Larry Ellison built Oracle into an $450 billion company. Larry Ellison is an idiot. Larry Ellison said he wants AI to be our policeman. Well, that’s not exactly what he said.…
Climate change deniers are missing a key piece of the puzzle. Same with those among us who, though they acknowledge the rising tide, don’t want to change the status quo. If we do nothing, the status quo isn’t even an option. But the changes necessary to hold onto a chance at maintaining our 21st century…
Like most of the world that cares about these things, I haven’t thought much of Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion dollar effort to build a Metaverse. It’s a potentially infinite universe (and thus a potentially infinite ad space) most have shown no interest in visiting. Its most striking design feature seems to lurk in Zuckerberg’s blind spot,…
Mark Zuckerberg recently took his metaverse playground to the next level. Sort of. Futurism nicely summarizes why the slick metamorphosis of his avatar, from a legless Lego-knockoff to a photorealistic rendering, was much closer to a one-off than a peek into the product’s future. There’s little chance, for example, that your webcam will produce anything…
We’re going back in time, over twenty years, to revisit a previously unpublished essay written in Dawang, a “town” of, at the time, ~110,000, located in the Shandong countryside, China. Dawang, 2002 On my desk I have a dragonfly. It is about 2.5 inches from head to tail. Its eyes and thorax are the color…
In an essay I wrote six years ago(!), I highlighted Jeremy Rifkin’s idea that our empathic drives – sociability, attachment, companionship, affection, and belonging – help us deal with the reality we all face: life is short, fragile, and unique. Then, and since, I wondered how technology can and should help us boost and evolve…
Facebook has never had a shortage of critics. Its faults are in its DNA by design, its seeming missteps made on purpose. But the detractors of the ad-hawking, privacy-invading, responsibility-shirking, misinformation-disseminating business are getting louder and more powerful. They include governments who want to split up the company. Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic is not…
To some, GPT-3 is a marvel. To others, it’s a faceplant. What’s the big deal? GPT-3 is an AI system that has ingested 45 terabytes of English text and, from that, “learned” to read and write. It’s the creation of OpenAI, an AI lab dedicated to making sure “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”.…
It’s the “attention economy” someone somewhere told us. Silicon Valley sure got the message. But more and more the major technology mavericks-turned-behemoths are buying into and growing the “distraction economy”. Google is the latest. On Tuesday this week the company that once preached “Don’t be evil” embraced “Just chill” when it revealed its gaming platform…
An audiophile and a cinephile could surely make the case that some of the best music and movies came from the 1970s. No need to get started on the lists. But the decade is rarely considered an acme of innovation. For good reason. It wasn’t. And yet, the anniversary of the Voyager I and Voyager II…
The idea that technology = progress continues to catch hold. Another recent example comes from Tyler Cowen, who suggests that the time is right to replace teachers with robots. Why robots and not an Echo or an app, he doesn’t say. He has a few flimsy reasons why we owe ourselves and our children such…
Another AI breakthrough from Google. According to The Next Web, Google’s “Machine Perception researchers have trained a deep-learning system to identify objectively fine landscape panorama photos from Google Street View, and then artistically crop and edit them like a human photographer would.” Every human with a smartphone already has too many photos not worth looking…
There must be a term for it, for accepting a solution to a problem you deny exists. Ah yes, today it is climate engineering, another cop-out solution to the climate destruction produced by humans. Greed and laziness have put scales over our eyes. Even as humans gobble up the oceans, poison the air, suck rivers and…
Fake news, so much in the news, is a matter of semantics, ideology, deceit, power, money, and, increasingly, technology. Tech has a role creating, disseminating, sharing, detecting, exposing, debunking, and correcting fake news. And not surprisingly the technology is getting more sophisticated. Probably most people whose technology is used to create fake news didn’t get…
We’re nearly at the 17th anniversary of Bill Joy’s warning that “the future doesn’t need us.” On April 1st, 2000, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems warned us that if we remained on our then-current innovation path, moving forever forward but seemingly without a driver, our technology could endanger our existence. The warnings since haven’t ceased, and…
According to Bloomberg, Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane. Before we dig into this, the headline deserves an aside. Because does author Deena Shanker mean that Americans are in the process of going insane, thereby implying that they weren’t already? Or — keeping in mind who millions of Americans recently voted for — does she take…
We love our gadgets, apps, and Internet. We use them, they rule us. This isn’t an alternative fact, and your skepticism won’t save you. Director James Cameron, discussing the relevance of The Terminator stories, in which technology evolves to the point of logically concluding humans must die, said recently: “if Terminator was about the war between the…
Facebook just might be laying the groundwork for mind-reading technology that would let you order from Amazon, search the Web, and play video games just by thinking ‘it’. Forget for a moment the hurdles the company has to overcome for this to work. Why does the vision of this future resemble a nightmare? Think viruses and ransomware…
Darwin's Gong Show