"Metaphors of Code"-presentation at ITK-conference 2015 — This Page Has Some Issues. Hungary is no longer a democracy. It is now a fact: Hungary is no longer a democracy.
President János Áder has just signed the implementation decrees for new constitutional reforms that wipe out what was left of opposition forces against the government. More particularly, the Constitutional Court is no longer allowed to give its opinion about the content of laws and to refer to its own case-law – which results in the loss of almost all monitoring power on the legislature and the executive. This meticulous destruction of democracy and its values – whose starting point was the landslide election of Fidesz in 2010 – has taken place over months and months, under everybody's eyes. This political degradation gives us a gruesome historical and political lesson. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Open Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff - Projet Gutenberg. Jaron Lanier / You Are Not A Gadget. LifeIncTheMovie. Turing's Enduring Importance. When Alan Turing was born 100 years ago, on June 23, 1912, a computer was not a thing—it was a person.
Computers, most of whom were women, were hired to perform repetitive calculations for hours on end. The practice dated back to the 1750s, when Alexis-Claude Clairaut recruited two fellow astronomers to help him plot the orbit of Halley’s comet. Clairaut’s approach was to slice time into segments and, using Newton’s laws, calculate the changes to the comet’s position as it passed Jupiter and Saturn. The team worked for five months, repeating the process again and again as they slowly plotted the course of the celestial bodies.
Today we call this process dynamic simulation; Clairaut’s contemporaries called it an abomination. By the time Turing entered King’s College in 1931, human computers had been employed for a wide variety of purposes—and often they were assisted by calculating machines. All these machines were fundamentally limited. Things Reviewed: Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn't Near. Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities.
They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they’ll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered.
Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It’s heady stuff. Alain Giffard. Nicholas G. Carr. Nicholas G.
Carr (born 1959) is an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture. His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.[1] Career[edit] Nicholas Carr originally came to prominence with the 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" and the 2004 book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business School Press). Carr's second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published in January 2008 by W. In the summer of 2008, The Atlantic published Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid? " Carr's 2010 book, The Shallows, develops this argument further.
Through his blog "Rough Type," Carr has been a critic of technological utopianism and in particular the populist claims made for online social production. See also[edit] Books[edit] Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Bio Nicholas Carr A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture.
His intriguing 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter," was an instant sensation, setting the stage for the global debate on the strategic value of information technology in business. His 2004 book, Does IT Matter? The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.