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"We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware." And also: "We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling." An interesting and beautiful post, but then again, I'm not entirely convinced, more specifically about the implicit conceptualization of our own Paleo-past. I think our ancestors and many animals had something called consciousness, while all those fascinating machines and networks of today don't have any consciousness at all. The fact that we add cameras and sensors to the networks does not yet mean these networks acquire something like a body. It would be interesting to study how the proponents of cyborg-thinking conceptualize the relationship between mind, body and consciousness. Or am I mistaken here? 

I'd always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn't really know how. The original title of the talk was "The Robot-Readable World", but this didn't really sit right with me; it's one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

"By way of introduction, we turn to Vivek Wadhwa over at Forbes last month. The technology entrepreneur explained eloquently why China stands to lose so much more than anyone else if automation keeps advancing. Indeed, forget about real estate bubbles and mis-allocated capital, the rise of automation could be the greatest Chinese black swan of all."

Yet 3D printing is just one of many production technologies and trends which are transforming the way companies will be able to make things in the future. The old rules of manufacturing, such as "you must seek economies of scale" and "you must reduce unit-labour costs", are being cast aside. New machines can print every item differently. More flexible robots are getting cheaper and better at doing all the boring and dirty stuff.

"WHAT could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things-one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing."

It was the talk of Davos, grabbing the imagination of a forum otherwise shrouded in gloom: a miracle machine that cracks the code of life within hours and could revolutionise healthcare.

Two economists offer opposite explanations about why job growth in the United States and other developed economies remains extremely weak.

"While MOOCs are incorporating adaptive learning routines into their software, their ambitions for data mining go well beyond tutoring. Thrun says that we've only seen "the tip of the iceberg." What particularly excites him and other computer scientists about free online classes is that thanks to their unprecedented scale, they can generate the immense quantities of data required for effective machine learning. "

L et's first take a step back and see where these new American exports will be coming from. At least three forces are likely to combine to make the United States an export powerhouse.

Joseph Stiglitz explains how the Great Depression is caused by the revolution in agriculture. We're facing a similar shift now in the "real" economy.