Videos by topic: TECHNOLOGY
DOES TECHNOLOGY EVOLVE?
"The two legs of the Theory of Evolution that are in technology, are not at all Darwinian. They are quite different. They are that certain existing building blocks are combined and re-combined to form new building-block technologies; and every so often technologies get used to capture novel, newly discovered phenomena, and encapsulate those and get further building blocks. As with Darwin, most new technologies that come into being are only useful for their own purpose and don't form other building blocks, but occasionally some do."
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WE ARE AS GODS AND HAVE TO GET GOOD AT IT
Stewart Brand Talks About His Ecopragmatist Manifesto
[8.18.09]
"What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective. It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that."
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LORD OF THE CLOUD
"The central idea we were working on was this idea of de-localized information — information for which I didn't care what computer it was stored on. It didn't depend on any particular computer. I didn't know the identities of other computers in the ensemble that I was working on. I just knew myself and the cybersphere, or sometimes we called it the tuplesphere, or just a bunch of information floating around. We used the analogy — we talked about helium balloons. We used a million ways to try and explain this idea."
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BIG DATA COMMERCE VS BIG DATA SCIENCE
"What I would like to argue for is to stop using the idea of big data as this big rubric to cover all these practices within businesses, like Google, that don't really have the structure to close the empirical loop to determine what part of their success is based on scientifically replicable and testable analytic results versus science, where that's really all we care about. Science is never, in my opinion, going to just get automatic, and it's very rarely easy."
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THE NEXT RENAISSANCE
"Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.
But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog."
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PERSONAL FABRICATION
"We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing, logic, actuation, and displays."
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10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SECURITY, PRIVACY AND ENCRYPTION
"Until the '60s, governments were not really involved in car design. Then people like Ralph Nader started noticing that a lot of people were being killed in cars and made it clear why this was happening. We have spent the last 35 years or so designing safety into cars, and it's had a pretty dramatic effect. . . We're in that same era now with security on computer systems. We know we have a problem and now we need to focus on design."
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BEYOND COMPUTATION
"Maybe there's something beyond computation in the sense that we don't understand and we can't describe what's going on inside living systems using computation only. When we build computational models of living systems—such as a self-evolving system or an artificial immunology system—they're not as robust or rich as real living systems. Maybe we're missing something, but what could that something be?"
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SOFTWARE, PROPERTY & HUMAN CIVILIZATION
"It seems to me that what we're seeing in the software area, and this is the scary part for human society, is the beginning of a kind of dispossession. People are talking about this as dispossession that only comes from piracy, like Napster and Gnutella where the rights of artists are being violated by people sharing their work. But there's another kind of dispossession, which is the inability to actually buy a product. The idea is here: you couldn't buy this piece of software, you could only licence it on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis; As this idea spreads from software to music, films, books, human civilization based on property fundamentally changes."
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THE CENTRAL METAPHOR OF EVERYTHING?
"One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moore's law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. It's as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems."
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