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roland legrand

Becoming a Cyborg should be taken gently: Of Modern Bio-Paleo-Machines » Cybo... - 0 views

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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? 
roland legrand

Three questions to Judy Klein | Institute for New Economic Thinking - 0 views

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    how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that mathematics.
roland legrand

Content vs. service in media & education - BuzzMachine - 0 views

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    "I ask us - in journalism and in education (and in journalism education) - to aspire to being services. That requires us to start by thinking of the ends." This is so right. Aspire being services, in education as in journalism, as both activities have so much in common. 
roland legrand

Do you believe in the Exodus Recession? - 0 views

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    " Since 1800, technological advance has been associated with economic growth. The new stuff being built saved labor input, which was then put into the construction of other things. However, the most recent technological advances may not be growth-inducing. As Samuelson puts it, "Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets as tilted toward entertainment, not labor-saving."" Professor Edward Castronova, who once wrote a book about the exodus to virtual worlds, sees some more evidence of an exodus recession.  He's not just talking about virtual worlds however, but also about your average digital stuff such as tablets and smartphones. It makes us want less 'real' things and so it makes it harder for the economy to grow. One might say, let's measure growth in a different way, taking into account this digital shift. But then again, our social security for instance depends on the economy and the money which is actually earned there.  So will we all hide into virtual worlds to forget the misery of the recession-ridden 'real world'? Or is this speculation very wrong, as the digital evolution is now affecting the 'world of the atoms' in a radical way (think 3D printers, hardware and bio-hacking). 
roland legrand

Vision | Fluid Interfaces - 0 views

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    "Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people's lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. " Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating projects here, often making me think 'why isn't this ubiquitous right now already?' One of the reasons might be 'the economy, stupid' - like the idea of being able to swipe a file from one mobile app to another, seamlessly.  But eventually we'll get there. The future is fluid. 
roland legrand

'We live in a culture of real virtuality' - 0 views

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    The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 
roland legrand

Do we get more happiness from virtual worlds than from real good news? - 0 views

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    An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.
roland legrand

The Future of the U.S. Economy: Apple, Exxon, and Robots - Megan McArdle - Business - T... - 0 views

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    Tyler Cowen has a nice essay up at The American Interest on an Export-Oriented America. He offers us three reasons to be optimistic about the US export future: artificial intelligence, shale oil and gas, and a rising Asian Middle Class. I think he more or less nails the last two, what I refer as the Exxon and Apple economies, respectively.
roland legrand

Why The Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think - Forbes - 0 views

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    We humans are naturally inclined to fear the worst. Peter H. Diamandis tries to ignore that tendency and looks at the future. 
roland legrand

Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    But we idealize America's present culture of innovation too much. In fact, our trailblazing digital firms may not be the hothouse environments for creativity we might think. 
roland legrand

The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready? - Forbes - 0 views

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    "Along with the rise of the connected consumer - a subject that has no shortage of consultants, writers and public speakers ready to tell your company what to do - shouldn't we also be thinking of the rise of empowered employee, the people in the most advantageous position today and tomorrow to fill those job shortages? "
roland legrand

UK to ease rules for tech share listings | Reuters - 0 views

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    "Britain plans to make it easier for technology firms to list their shares in London, the government said on Thursday, in an attempt to stem the flow of high-growth companies heading across the Atlantic in search of capital." Interesting. Countries in a competition to keep their tech wizards at home. But how important are stock markets for innovation? And nation-states? Don't think too fast stocks and nation-states are something of the past... 
roland legrand

How artificial intelligence is changing our lives - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

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    "The idea that AI must mimic the thinking process of humans has dropped away. "Creating artificial intelligences that are like humans is, at the end of the day, paving the cow paths," Mr. Saffo argues. "It's using the new technology to imitate some old thing.""
roland legrand

Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming's Turing test - tech - 25 September 2012 - New Sc... - 0 views

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    "The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner." Okay, the bots are not 'really' intelligent and language is much harder to crack. But still, it's a nice result, this  human thinks.  
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