Facebook's Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search | Wired Business. Beast had a birthday last week. The First Dog of social networking — live-in companion to Mark Zuckerberg and his bride, Priscilla Chan — turned two. The proud owners baked a cake for the Hungarian sheepdog and decided to throw an impromptu party.
Naturally, when it came time to compile the guest list, the couple turned to Facebook, the $67 billion company that Zuckerberg founded in his dorm room nine years ago. To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Zuckerberg was testing a major new feature that Facebook would announce on Jan. 15 — one that promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists. It’s called Graph Search, and it will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends. Technology. Apple Maps, Android Jabs, and More: Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaks. Eric Schmidt's book on the future to be released April 23 | Internet & Media.
Eric Schmidt's treatise on the future will soon be hitting bookshelves. Alfred A. Knopf said today that the book by Google's executive chairman and his co-author, Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, will be published on April 23. The book, which aims to walk readers through the ways technology is changing the future, will be called "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. " The title suggests a slightly broader scope than did the working title of the book: "Empire of the Mind: The Dawn of the Techno-Political Age. " Knopf said the book will trace how ubiquitous Internet access will change society. "As this space grows larger," the authors write, according to a short excerpt, "our understanding of nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutia of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our own security.
" "These platforms constitute a true paradigm shift," the authors write. Watch Dave the Mind Reader Prove Just How Vulnerable You Are. Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government. Love, Yiddish, and the Problem of Bioethics. Darren J. Beattie A mother and her son were traveling on a bus in Israel. The child chattered away in Hebrew while the mother admonished, “Yiddish, Yiddish, speak Yiddish!”
The son continued to talk in Hebrew while the mother kept insisting that the child speak Yiddish. “I don’t want him to forget that he’s Jewish,” answered mama. To think about ethics necessarily involves thinking about where lines should be drawn — which actions are right and which are wrong. Of course, separating scientific theorizing from experimentation is hardly simple. Bioethics at its best is not, in any event, concerned primarily with actions themselves, but rather with the meaning of actions — that is, with the kind of thinking about the world that actions both reflect and reinforce.
While ethics typically focuses on conduct, it follows that bioethics, and scientific ethics more broadly, must especially be concerned with thoughts and ideas — in a word, philosophy. A Curious Creature Fruit of Forbidding. Psychotherapy and the Pursuit of Happiness. Ronald W. Dworkin Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud’s newly anointed practitioners.
Psychotherapists occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional “caring,” it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship — what we might call “artificial friendship” — for lonely people in a lonely age. To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, we must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. Machine Morality and Human Responsibility. The essays in this symposium were first delivered at the second conference in the series “Stuck with Virtue.”
Sponsored by the University of Chicago’s New Science of Virtues project, this conference examined the various Cartesian, Lockean, and Darwinian premises that help shape and inform the ethics and ethos of modern technological democracy. Held in April 2011 at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, the conference featured four main speakers: Ronald Bailey, Charles T. Rubin (below), Patrick J. Deneen, and Robert P. Kraynak, with responses to Mr. See also the response to this essay, “The Problem with ‘Friendly’ Artificial Intelligence,”by Adam Keiper and Ari N. Charles T. This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the first performance of the play from which we get the term “robot.” Today, some futurists are attempting to take seriously the question of how to avoid a robot apocalypse.
Moral Machines Today Note the implicit Millsian libertarianism of Yudkowsky’s “intuition.”