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The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.

At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).

Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.

My father would have been unable to “teach to the test.” He once complained about errors in a sixth-grade math textbook, so he had the class learn math by designing a spaceship. My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to. And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

The printing press, the assembly line, and recently the genetic engineering have all brought along with them protest and outrage from a populace sure that these advances will bring about the end of the human species.

“These robots are able to hide and evade in ways that other robots simply have not been able to do. That indicates that such behaviour is not overly complicated and well within the reach of modern robots.”

Dr. Edward Webb

Google said collecting the additional data was a mistake resulting from a piece of computer code from an experimental project that was accidentally included.

Google has acknowledged a fleet of cars, equipped with wireless equipment, inadvertently collected emails and passwords of computer users in various countries, and said it was changing its privacy practices. The company said it wants to delete the data as soon as possible. Google announced the data collection in May, but said at the time the information it collected was typically limited to "fragments" of data because the cars were always moving. Since then, regulators in several of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated have inspected the data. "It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," said Google's vice-president of engineering and research, Alan Eustace, in a post on Google's blog.

Warren

The Caryatids

Neuromancer

This is the great unspeakable fact of American politics: it doesn't matter all that much who wins.

Democratic politics is to a great extent a war of coalitions over what the great political economist James M. Buchanan called "the fiscal commons". Think of government as a huge pool of money. Control of government means control over that pool of money. Parties gain control by putting together winning coalitions of interest groups. When a party has control, its coalition's interest groups get more from the pool and the losing coalition's interest groups get less. So, yeah, it matters who wins. When Democrats are in charge, that's great news for public-employees unions and General Electric's alternative energy division. When the Republicans are in charge, that's great news for rich people and Raytheon.

I think you'll find that political parties tend to reliably support policies that have nice distributional consequences for the interest groups that support them. And I think you'll find politicians and court intellectuals brilliant at framing pay-offs to party stalwarts as policies absolutely necessary to the common weal.

After being awarded a grant, Aralia Systems teamed up with Machine Vision Lab in what seems like a massive invasion of your privacy beyond "in the name of security." Building on existing cinema anti-piracy technology, these companies plan to add the ability to harvest your emotions. This is the part where it seems that filmgoers should be eligible to charge movie theater owners. At the very least, shouldn't it result in a significantly discounted movie ticket?  Machine Vision Lab's Dr Abdul Farooq told PhysOrg, "We plan to build on the capabilities of current technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras. We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement. ... It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays."  

The 3D camera data will "capture the audience as a whole as a texture."

the technology will enable companies to cash in on your emotions and sell that personal information as marketing data

If you’re born now, your native culture is global, to an increasing extent. There are things that are unknowable for futurists of any stripe, be they science-fiction writing charlatans like myself or anthropologists in the employ of large automobile companies who are paid to figure out what people might want in ten years. One of the things that’s unknowable is how humanity will use any new technology. No one imagines that we’d wind up with a world that looks like this on the basis of the technology that’s emerged in the last hundred years. Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were. I’m sitting here at age 52 with almost all of my own teeth. That didn’t used to happen. I’m a cyborg. I’m immune to any number of lethal diseases by virtue of technology. I’m sitting on top of this enormous pyramid of technology that starts with flint hand-axes and finds me in a hotel in Austin, Texas, talking to someone thousands of miles away on a telephone and that’s just what we do. At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.

You’ve taken to Twitter (GreatDismal). I have indeed. I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

One problem with being a long-term reader of science fiction and fantasy is that you get blase about science itself because you have seen it all before. My sense of wonder was overloaded by the time I was 16; I am never going to get that rush again. Even major breakthroughs make me go 'Whatever!'.Partly that's because, despite all our advances, we still haven't got time travel, reptilian visitors from the Galactic Federation, or telepathy. Instead, we get the depressing environmental disasters that JG Ballard described, and crazed grinning fundamentalist politicians straight out of Philip K Dick. (I'm sure that if I went through all his Ace doubles from the early 1960s, I would find Sarah Palin somewhere.) We don't get the stories where someone smart gets to fix the problem with a bent paperclip; we get the grim logical stories where we are all going to die.

One of the reasons why Dick and Ballard speak to our condition so well is that they saw the future and it was pretty rubbish.

It is almost a cliché that most sci fi is a way of looking sideways at the time in which it was written – the reason why William Gibson's Neuromancer felt so relevant in the 1980s was simply that it was a book whose imagined technology was mostly just around the corner, and whose doomed hipster technobandits were already walking down mean streets in cities near us. It's significant that Gibson has moved to writing contemporary fiction with hardly a change of register.

UCLA economists Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn analyzed the impact of an energy-conservation program in California that informed households about how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. While the program succeeded in encouraging Democrats and environmentalists to lower their consumption, Republicans had the opposite reaction. When told of their relative thrift, they started cranking up the thermostat and leaving the lights on more often.

Why would some energy-conscious Republicans all of a sudden become power hogs? One explanation is that many conservatives don't believe that burning energy harms the planet, so when they learn that they're better than average, they become less vigilant about turning the lights off. That is, they're simply moving closer to what they now know is the norm (what psychologists call the boomerang effect). Costa and Kahn also look for guidance from the patron saint of right-wing fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh, who encouraged his listeners to turn on all their lights during Earth Hour. Costa and Kahn suggest that ardently right-wing electricity customers might respond to paternalistic nudges by burning more energy, just to thumb their noses at Big Brother.

That some groups respond in unexpected ways to well-meaning nudges is a lesson that the architects of "behaviorally informed" policy and regulation should keep in mind in drafting their messages. Costa and Kahn's findings suggest that you shouldn't try to prod Republicans into conserving energy through this type of social pressure. But perhaps there is a nudge that would resonate with Opower's conservative customers—maybe one that stresses savings over environmentalism. Future messages could be tailored to the market—what works in San Francisco might backfire in San Diego—or even to individual households based on their political leanings, ties to environmental organizations, or enrollment in renewable-energy programs. But this starts to sound an awful lot like fine-tuned social engineering

The assumption that one is not being recorded in any real way, a standard in civilization for more or less all of history, is being overturned.

CEOs have become slaves to the PR department in a bizarre inversion of internal corporate checks and balances

“Your word against mine” can be a serious and drawn-out dispute, subject to all kinds of subjective judgments, loyalties, rights, and arguments; “Your word against my high-definition video” gives citizens and the vulnerable a bit more leverage.

I'll press your buttons here by positing that if "we" (humankind) are too dumb to self-regulate our own childbirth output, too dim to recognize that we are polluting ourselves and neighbors out of sustainable existence, we are, in fact, a ridiculous parasite on this Earth and that the planet on which we live will simply slough us off—as it well should—and will bounce back without evidence of we even being here, come two or three thousand years. Your thoughts (in as much detail as you wish)?I would recommend reading my "the next 50 years" piece here. Basically I think that
 climate change, which in this case genuinely is caused mostly by humanity, 
is just one part of the environmental problem. Overfishing, toxification of 
the seas, pesticide use, weedkillers, prescription drugs in water,
 fracking, continued air pollution, toxicity in food, destruction of animal
 habitat, attrition on bee colonies—all this is converging. And we'll be 
facing the consequences for several hundred years.

I believe humanity will
 survive, and it won't be surviving like Road Warrior or the Morlocks from The Time Machine, but I think we'll have some cruelly ugly social consequences. We'll have famines the like of which we've never seen before, along with higher risk of wars—I do predict a third world war in the second half of this century but I don't think it will be a nuclear war—and I think we'll suffer so hugely we'll be forced to have a change in consciousness to adapt. 

the media won’t give the same time of day or coverage to communities who are being targeted by hate violence. They are spending so much time humanizing white nationalists and humanizing white supremacy that in many ways the news media  routinely ignore the ubiquitous and every day hate that communities of color and other diverse communities experience in this country

a majority of white Americans feel they are victims of discrimination. What these white Americans have to do is unpack their own anxiety, discuss this rage, and understand that the project of civil rights, human rights, equality under the law are not an assault on their racial identity. I think for some white voters it is probably about what they perceive as waning demographic and economic power

The good news is I learned from my travels around the country that the survivors of hate, people who have lost so much, are not only rebuilding but they are coming forward and they are reclaiming their lives. These survivors are working with allies to stop the hatred, building community defense programs and are willing to engage in difficult conversations with people who see the world differently from them. And I think that is something to really admire. Given what’s transpired survivors of hate have every reason to turn their backs on this country.

New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.

“It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”

For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood

In 1919, a British writer named Rose Macaulay published What Not, a novel about a dystopian future—a brave new world if you will—where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state.You’ve probably never heard of Macaulay or What Not. However, Aldous Huxley, author of the science fiction classic Brave New World, hung out in the same London literary circles as her and his 1932 book contains many concepts that Macaulay first introduced in her work. In 2019, you’ll be able to read Macaulay’s book yourself and compare the texts as the British publisher Handheld Press is planning to re- release the forgotten novel in March. It’s been out of print since the year it was first released.

The resurfacing of What Not also makes this a prime time to consider another work that influenced Huxley’s Brave New World, the 1923 novel We by Yvgeny Zamyatin. What Not and We are lost classics about a future that foreshadows our present. Notably, they are also hidden influences on some of the most significant works of 20th century fiction, Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

In Macaulay’s book—which is a hoot and well worth reading—a democratically elected British government has been replaced with a “United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that,” as she put it. Huxley’s Brave New World is run by a similarly small group of elites known as “World Controllers.”