It could almost have been written yesterday… Sir — There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the… Read More »Darwin among the machines: Samuel Butler (1863) on the mechanical master race
Such stuff as dreams are made on I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking… Read More »Kevin Kelly: AI dreamin’
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit… Read More »Alfred North Whitehead on abstraction and civilisation
You may be convinced we somehow assembled the original cast of The Matrix along side the ghost of Wilford Brimley to record one of the… Read More »Eye on AI: Ice Ice Matrix; ABBAtars
With apologies for the hastily taken snap, and the fluff. There are two cup holders, both wide enough for a large mug or bottle and… Read More »Design matters (20): Ford Focus cup holder(s)
Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can… Read More »Brad DeLong on Proudhon, property and coercion, and the Royal Society’s cornucopia
This excerpt is from DeLong’s interview on Conversations with Tyler. It’s a great discussion – highly recommended. COWEN: If we’re trying to think about the… Read More »Brad DeLong on technological growth and economic change 1870-2010
The proponents of this unrealistic scenario [of reduction in global demand for goods] allow merely a factor-of-two increase across all modes of mobility during the… Read More »Not long ago; or, Little by little (9): Car ownership in China 1999-2019
An arbitrary list, mostly of things I don’t usually think of as labour-saving devices: … and as with all devices, their value is multiplied because… Read More »Labour saving devices
These extracts are from Craig Mod’s excellent essay Let’s Talk about Margins, one of the many things worth reading at craigmod.com. Recommended. I saw a… Read More »Design Matters (19): Craig Mod on margins and attention to detail