ASSANGE’S WARNING, STEALTH TECHNOLOGIES and the STATE OF THE ART in BRAIN / CLOUD INTERFACE I suppose you would have to define robots, now — and the new generation of autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving cars, ships or any other transport — as the visible expression of an invisible system: an intelligence moving […]
Doppelgänger stories came into fashion during the Industrial Revolution, as an archetype in Gothic horror. The term was coined by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkäs in 1796, and came of age in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Doppelgänger (1821). Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson was published in 1839. Later, in 1886, we get Dr Jekyll and Mr […]
MAPS, MODELS AND SYNTHETIC WORLDS ∆ It was 2551 BE (2008 in the Western calendar), and I was teaching at a school in Bangkok. I wasn’t enjoying it much. A top-dollar international school, but behind the slick PR it was an educational mess. Eight forty-minute periods in a day, and class sizes way too big. […]
“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 a field but changes it […]
∆ 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… propulsion landings… 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 pretend to understand much of it on a technical level. In any case I’m more interested in the impacts — technological, […]
As Buaphan stood there, pan in hand, staring at the strange trail of lights crossing the pre-dawn sky, the ‘pandemic’ was already on the horizon, a couple of thousand kilometres to the north in Wuhan, China. Two and a half months later, the lockdowns would come down like a great suffocating blanket across the planet, […]
My good friend Aaron the Seneca is sceptical. ‘Who would have thought I was so important?’ he asks, with gentle irony. ‘I know, right?’ I say. I know what he means. He’s not talking about himself: he means all of us.
Who would want to spy on nobodies like us?