René Descartes, Digital Ghosts and a Wind-up Shitting Duck Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To […]
When I finished school, I took a gap year before going to university to study English Language and Literature. That spring I travelled to a small town in the South of France to stay for a couple of months with a childhood friend of my father’s and his family. I loved that trip to Provence; […]
MAPS, MODELS AND SYNTHETIC WORLDS Researchers will first design new types of agents along with the DNA and memory these types of agents will have using the design interfaces of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The design interfaces also allow the DNA and memory of existing agent types to be modified. After creating new agent […]
“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me — into us — clearly or darkly? I hope it does, […]
“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. […]
∆ Before Buaphan saw that Starlink satellite train silently crossing the pre-dawn sky, I’d never taken much interest in Elon Musk. Now, I’ve been catching up. Spacing out on Starlink. Trying get my head around Neuralink. Is Musk a genius? Well, if a genius is someone who doesn’t just master his or her field but […]
“You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios … Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it arpanet, the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after […]
∆ In 1998, Bill Joy, the founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, co-author of Java script and chair of a presidential commission on the future of IT research, was invited to speak at a tech conference. The title of the conference was ‘Telecosm: the World after Bandwidth Abundance’. “From the moment I became involved in […]
∆ On November 4th, 2018, after more than six years holed up inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and eight under arbitrary detention, Julian Assange gave what would turn out to be his last video conference before all communications were cut. Six months later, he was dragged out of the embassy by British police and […]
The technological leaps forward represented by Starlink sound fantastically impressive… the re-usable Falcon 9 rockets… the krypton ion thrusters and control momentum gyroscopes… attitudinal positioning systems and autonomous debris avoidance… silicon carbide lasers… light-pulse data transmission… I can’t even pretend to understand any of it on a technical level. In any case I’m more interested […]
