Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

Well Worth Repeating

Posted in Education, Environment, Philosophy, Politics, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2026| Leave a Comment »

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries;  agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment;  and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology.  We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.  This is a prescription for disaster.  We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
    —    Carl Sagan
[Yes, I’ve used this quote before.  Somehow, it just feels like an appropriate time to repeat it…   —    kmab]
.
Click here (12 May) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

One More Blind Alley

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , on March 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that’s what it is.  Blind alley, though.  If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name.  You haven’t solved anything.
    —     Robert M. Pirsig
From: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values“
.
Click here (1 March) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Let’s Try, Anyway

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , on August 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it.  Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.
    —     Stephen Hawking
.
Click here (7 August) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

A Clear Prescription

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , on June 4, 2023| 2 Comments »

We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.  That’s a clear prescription for disaster.
    —    Carl Sagan
.
Click here (4 June) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Discomfort

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

A lot of things still matter in this world – touch and relationships and real conversation and discomfort.  Technology is designed toward convenience.  It’s designed to make things easier, to make life a bit more comfortable.  But we need discomfort.  We need discomfort in order to grow.
    —    Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Quoted by:  Justin Parham
In his interview article:  “Matrix Revolutionary“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  Dec. 2021
.
Click here (2 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Completely Reasonable To Worry

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , on March 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »

What I’m suggesting is that there’s a self-fulfilling element to conversations about automation.  It’s not so much that machines are relieving us of activities that are intrinsically rote and mechanical;  it’s more that a skill comes to seem rote and mechanical when a machine learns to do it.  An ability only begins to appear “worthless,” as you put it, when it can be executed by highly profitable technologies.  At the moment, our talents and aptitudes are being made obsolete at such a rate that many people, like you, are uneasy about where this trajectory might end.
…
We consumers are not asked to vote or weigh in on the new devices, features, and apps that will inevitably shape our lives.  It’s completely reasonable to worry that you might look up at some point and find yourself at a historical destination that you never consciously chose.
All of which is to say, you’re right to pause and question this technology.  Given how quick we are to adapt to and assimilate novel forms of automation, it’s doubly important to consider whether a given skill is something you’re willing to relinquish.  In that spirit, I’m going to avoid prescribing anything concrete (what is advice but one more automated solution?) and instead encourage you to continue thinking about what you are prepared to give up.  Are there certain boundaries that you’re not willing to cross?  Or is your humanity just a moving target, its definition staked on whatever remains after the rest has been offloaded onto devices?  The willingness to think through these questions, consider their consequences, and commit to a course of — literal — action is itself virtuous and worthwhile.  It’s one thing, at least for the time being, that we alone can do.
    —   Meghan O’Gieblyn
From her “advice” column:  “Dear Cloud Support: My Car Is Making Me Feel Useless!“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  May 2021
.
Click here (29 March) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

One Hour Per Year

Posted in Education, Environment, Philosophy, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , on March 27, 2022| Leave a Comment »

If we’re going to live together, the [tech] giants and me, I’d like to ask them something.  Humbly. If you’re a product manager working on a feed or search interface inside of a giant tech company, you have access to hundreds of billions of hours of human attention.  Could you help your users spend one hour a year learning about what’s coming for the world, climate-wise, with a small dose of civics to go with it?
Because, if you did, that would be 2 or 3 billion hours of shared experience.  Two to 3 billion hours of people learning how important it is that we come together calmly.  And that is a beautiful canvas of time upon which to paint a future.  It would be one hell of a product.  We’re counting on you.
We have no choice.  You won.
Billions of us need help making millions, billions of decisions.  Decisions about whether to upgrade HVAC systems, or how to fuel our shipping, or what to plant in the backyard.  Sometimes it feels like the paradigm has inverted.  Technology was the mold growing across human systems.  Software was eating the world.  Now it feels like humans are the mold growing on technology.
I said that there’s no next big thing.  But deep in my soft, uncynical heart, where I keep my most embarrassing predictions, I do know what it is.  The next big thing is us.  Just plain old people.  Humans using language.  Humans accepting limits.  I can’t help you turn it into Q4 results.  I don’t know how to invest in it, nor who should run the conference series.  Nor could I tell you who should host the podcast.
I just know that it’s got to be our turn.  I love technology, but this is faith.
    —     Paul Ford
From his article:  “The Great Unbundling“
Appearing in:  Wired Magzine;  dtd:  May 2021
.
Click here (27 March) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Are We Getting Close To Uncertainty?

Posted in Environment, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , on June 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.
    —    Carl Sagan
.
Click here (6 June) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

I Like Curves More, Too

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Generations imply some giant disruption in the universe.  I like curves more.  Moore’s law (always more transistors), Metcalfe’s law (bigger networks are more valuable), experience curves (making things gets cheaper when you learn by doing), and so forth.  I like these thumbnail rules because they encapsulate the Great Muchness more than some theory of intergenerational strife.  It’s terrible that we’re headed into global climate catastrophe, but then again, we’re only facing doom because for 75 years no one started a nuclear war.
…
So our sleep will be transcribed and robots will deliver our sneakers, which will themselves be computers.  Technology will not solve bad marriages, bad eating, or racist thoughts, nor stop DisneyWarnerNetflixQuibiPlus from making superhero movies.  I find it profoundly helpful, then, to not just reject the concept of generations but to invert it:  The immense changes in technology show us, again and again, year after year, that we are basically the same as ever, just reacting to our place along curves of life well out of our control.  One can get very mixed up about what makes us human.  And it would, in fact, behoove all of us on the grayer side to get to know and love our peculiar youths, so that they might speak well of us when we do not matter anymore.
    —    Paul Ford
From his article:  “Generation Vexed“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine, dtd:  March 2020
Online the article is titled:  “How Technology Explodes the Concept of ‘Generations’“
The link is:  https://www.wired.com/story/millennials-genx-technology-explodes-generations/
(You may have to go through a “pay-wall” to view the article.)
.
Click here (26 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Our Fate Is Up To Us

Posted in Environment, Faith, History, Philosophy, Politics, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Since this series’ maiden voyage, the impossible has come to pass:  Mighty walls that maintained insuperable ideological differences have come tumbling down;  deadly enemies have embraced and begun to work together.  The imperative to cherish the Earth and protect the global environment that sustains all of us has become widely accepted, and we’ve begun, finally, the process of reducing the obscene number of weapons of mass destruction.  Perhaps we have, after all, decided to choose life.  But we still have light years to go to ensure that choice.  Even after the summits and the ceremonies and the treaties, there are still some 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world — and it would require the detonation of only a tiny fraction of them to produce a nuclear winter, the predicted global climatic catastrophe that would result from the smoke and the dust lifted into the atmosphere by burning cities and petroleum facilities.
The world scientific community has begun to sound the alarm about the grave dangers posed by depleting the protective ozone shield and by greenhouse warming, and again we’re taking some mitigating steps, but again those steps are too small and too slow.  The discovery that such a thing as nuclear winter was really possible evolved out of the studies of Martian dust storms.  The surface of Mars, fried by ultraviolet light, is also a reminder of why it’s important to keep our ozone layer intact.  The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus is a valuable reminder that we must take the increasing greenhouse effect on Earth seriously.
Important lessons about our environment have come from spacecraft missions to the planets.  By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one.  By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds.  It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.
Our science and our technology have posed us a profound question.  Will we learn to use these tools with wisdom and foresight before it’s too late?  Will we see our species safely through this difficult passage so that our children and grandchildren will continue the great journey of discovery still deeper into the mysteries of the Cosmos?  That same rocket and nuclear and computer technology that sends our ships past the farthest known planet can also be used to destroy our global civilization.  Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil.  It is as if there were a God who said to us, “I set before you two ways:  You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars.  It’s up to you.”
   —    Carl Sagan
.
Click here (4 January) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

A Better Synthesis

Posted in Economics, Environment, Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , on June 2, 2020| 4 Comments »

There is nothing wrong with, and much to be gained by, using our mind analytically, but to use it almost exclusively in this way is unbalanced and has a not insignificant responsibility for the perilous state of affairs on our planet.  Though the odds against it happening seem to be mounting, perhaps a more intuitive way of thinking about he world might help us to recognize and reduce in time our overdevelopment of and overdependence on the ever-growing machinery that is supposed to make our lives easier and better.  We are swept along by technological development so that in our urban environment, many of us interact increasingly with electronic devices and less with other human beings.  In addition, our culture is gradually losing our knowledge of and our direct connection with the natural or unprocessed things of the earth.  With a more intuitive way of thinking about our lives could come the realization that our very survival may depend on the other forms of life our present political and economic systems are destroying.  At the least, a better synthesis than we have now between the analytical and the intuitive, in which the intuitive gets equal attention, seems necessary to our longer-term welfare.
    —   Herman Kauz
From his book:  “Push-Hands: The Handbook For Non-Competitive Tai Chi Practice With A Partner“
.
Click here (2 June) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Fun Fog

Posted in Education, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , on April 29, 2020| 2 Comments »

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology.  The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
    —    Daniel J. Boorstin
.
Click here (29 April) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Facing The Truth

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 14, 2020| 7 Comments »

I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress.  Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species besides.  Progress is cheerfully facing the truth, whether flooding coastlines or falling teen pregnancy rates, and thinking of ways to preserve the processes that work and mitigate the risks.  Progress is seeing calmly, accepting, and thinking of others.
    —    Paul Ford
From his article:  “Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  May 2019
.
Click here (14 April) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Sometimes Human Nature Stays The Same

Posted in History, Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Perhaps the most telling email is a message from a then executive named Sam Lessin to Zuckerberg that epitomizes Facebook’s penchant for self-justification.  The company, Lessin wrote, could be ruthless and committed to social good at the same time, because they are essentially the same thing:  “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected and the only way we can do that is with the best people and the best infrastructure, which requires that we make a lot of money / be very profitable.”
The message also highlighted another of the company’s original sins:  its assertion that if you just give people better tools for sharing, the world will be a better place.  That’s just false.  Sometimes Facebook makes the world more open and connected;  sometimes it makes it more closed and disaffected.  Despots and demagogues have proven to be just as adept at using Facebook as democrats and dreamers.  Like the communications innovations before it — the printing press, the telephone, the internet itself — Facebook is a revolutionary tool.  But human nature has stayed the same.
    —    Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein
From their article:  “15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  May 2019
Online at:  https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-15-months-of-fresh-hell/
.
Click here (4 March) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

The Butterflies Are In Trouble

Posted in Environment, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , , on February 23, 2020| 4 Comments »

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
    —    Carl Sagan
.
Click here (23 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started