定时器到期后

hobbles

tongue-in-cheek

tossed shoes in the garbage

Jumbo’s Ghost Elephants and Machines in Motion

How to Write Software With Mathematical PerfectionBy Sheon HanMay 17, 2022

LP Letter Excerpt — July 20th, 2022

Reinventing explanation

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LEFT IN SCIENCE: Radical Associations in Britain in the 30's and the U.S.A. in the 60's

Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?

That’s a lot of match! The match expression is very useful but also very much a primitive.

crafted specification

failed spectacularly

joint research

integral

presume

partial dot-addresses ("127.0")

accept backslashes instead of slashes

Ken: What does long-term mean for Stripe? How far out are you looking?Michael: We talk a lot about building multi-decade abstractions. I personally like to think 10 to 30 years to get out of the three- to five-year mode, but generally here people do say “multi-decade” a lot. Patrick and John and the entire leadership team are clear that this is a long-term bet and that we’re still very early. That long time horizon comes from the top, and it’s in the culture. And my sense is it’s been like that at Stripe since day one.

But focusing on the risks within the game obscures a much bigger problem: The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything: Stable jobs, affordable homes, education that lasts a lifetime, and worry-free retirement are no longer an option. Even money itself ain’t what it used to be. It loses value by simply sitting in the bank.

A.) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. B.) Two similar structures have similar ‘logical’ characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory. C.) A map is not the actual territory. D.) An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, etc., endlessly…We may call this characteristic self-reflexiveness.

If you want to change how a system works, and move the system into a new steady state that’s closer to your goal, sequential effort won’t do much. What you need is parallel effort: you need several different things to happen, all at the same time, for the system to actually move in the direction that you want and stay there. 

Vibes were made for the Internet not just because they’re audiovisual but because, like all memes, they are participatory. Anyone can assemble her own version. They’re not scarce or limited-edition.

We know the meaning of the word “vibe,” of course. It’s a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down—an ambience (“a laid-back vibe”). It’s the reason that you like or dislike something or someone (good vibes vs. bad). It’s an intuition with no obvious explanation (“just a vibe I get”). Many vibes don’t have specific names, but some do.

use company revenue to fund a Universal Creative Income program for emerging creators on the platform. For instance, companies like Facebook or YouTube could carve out a fund to support creators on the platform and send them a monthly check to cover basic living expenses, regardless of skill, training, or background. UCI differs from most prevailing platform creator funds in terms of consistency of payments, transparency of eligibility criteria, and focus on smaller emerging creators. To the last point: we believe focusing on creators who are in the greatest financial need would create the largest impact on participation in the creator economy.

The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out – without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there. 

Part of the appeal of miracles was stated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “Of Miracles”: “The passion of surprise and wonder arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived.” In their book Wonders and the Order of Nature, the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park document humankind’s enchantment with wonders and oddities. Things that don’t fit. Surprises and peculiarities. Miracles. Marco Polo enthuses over finding completely black lions in the Indian Kingdom of Quilon. Other travelers excitedly record gourds with little lamblike animals inside, beasts with the faces of humans and the tails of scorpions, unicorns, and people who vomit worms.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

Marcus du Sautoy, a general question to start with: What is creativity – and who is creative?    Creativity is a word that is hard to pin down, just like consciousness, which is interesting as the two are closely linked. My hypothesis is that as a species, our creativity emerged about the same time as our consciousness because, as psychologist Carl Rogers put it, creativity became our tool for exploring this strange inner world. With regards to creativity, I quite like cognitive scientist Margaret Boden’s definition as something that is a) new b) surprising and c) has value. Creativity means novelty, because if you create something, it has not been there before. But novelty alone is not enough, it also needs to move us and to make us look at things in a new way. And value is an important factor because you don’t want your creation to just be surprising, but also to resonate and change things.

The termites’ abilities in self-organisation speak to humanity’s growing awareness that people can sometimes solve their own problems from the bottom-up. The prolific science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, writing about the future fall of the Galactic Empire, patterned on the ancient Roman empire, makes this point: suffice to say, the Galactic Empire’s central-control strategy doesn’t end well. The empire collapses from over-reliance on outer planets and the complexity of ruling from afar. At a smaller scale, examples of communities who self-organise to manage their own forests, fisheries and other affairs better than distant authorities issuing commands illustrate the power of nature’s experience. Analogies between human societies and termite colonies have their limits. Ideas, morals and learning, rather than instincts and pheromones, shape human civilisation. But nature’s strategies that counterbalance the ricocheting hazards of a complex adaptive system – where diseases can spread, unreliable partners can bring down a network and an unexpected collision or volcano can wipe out previously successful life forms – should give us some pointers. Civilisations throughout history, from the Indus Valley to ancient Rome to the Anasazi of the American Southwest had similar conundrums. They relied on vast networks and dependencies for trade and, similar to a termite queen, rulers couldn’t simply command and control over distant lands. Like the interacting biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and solid Earth, all of which keep our planet habitable, human societies fit the definition of complex adaptive systems.

Ad Astra (now known as AstraNova) uses simulations, case studies, fabrication and design projects, labs, and corporate collaboratives to develop students that are enthralled by complexity and solving for the unknown.

These examples have several things in common. For one, they were highly collaborative. Two, they pushed a new technology beyond what anyone imagined possible into something dramatic, whole, and full of promise. Three, they were - fundamentally - not works, but tools. "Space War" was a game, nothing without players, and never the same from game to game. The Aspen Movie Map was not a tour of Aspen; it was Aspen. The tour was what you did with it.

(1) the effort toward developing the innovations in the individual's way of doing things that are expected to make him more effective (we call this our Synthesis function); (2) the effort toward developing measurement and analysis techniques by which we can study and evaluate the human activity that we wish to make more effective (our Analysis function); (3) the effort to develop testing facilities that provide support for, and common grounds for interaction between, Synthesis and Analysis (we are thinking of a computer and special testing laboratory); and (4) the forward and outward looking efforts that provide scouting, guiding, and coordination for the other effort (our search effort).

(1) to find the factors that limit the effectiveness of the human individual's basic informationhandling capabilities in meeting the various needs of society for problem solving in its most general sense; and (2) to develop new techniques, procedures, or systems that will better match these basic capabilities to the needs or problems of society.

“Biology is the most interesting and powerful technology platform anyone’s ever seen,” he said. “It’s already taken over the world with reproducing machines. You can kind of imagine that you should be able to program it with DNA.”

IGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

How can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

“Basically, the project involves creating graph-like models of many possible universes, as defined by rules that determine how the model evolves. As the graphs become more complex — really more complex — they generate phenomena that’s worthy of study in themselves. If the rules are right, one can “discover” in them the real physics that govern our universe — everything from E=mc2 to the law of gravity.”

“It’s unexpected, surprising — and for me incredibly exciting. To be fair, at some level I’ve been working towards this for nearly 50 years. But it’s just in the last few months that it’s finally come together. And it’s much more wonderful, and beautiful, than I’d ever imagined.”

His software package Mathematica is in its 12th edition. His 1197 page book “A New Kind of Science” was a best-seller, reaching #1 on Amazon when it was published in 2002.

The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.

For Dorsey, it’s all one big integrated system. Transactions are like traffic. Traffic flows over the beautiful bridge. The bridge is a point on the map. The map is an expression of the scheme, the stream, the grand flow of interactions. And he’s been thinking about this stuff since he was eight.

“Payment is another form of communication,” he says, “but it’s never been treated as such. It’s never been designed. It’s never felt magical. About 90 percent of Americans carry cards, but almost nobody can accept them. We want to balance that out and just make payments feel amazing.”

n We Are As Gods, Brand emerges as one of the signature players of the technological age, in and out of the most important rooms at just the right moments in history. Most casual followers of his will know the rough trajectory. What they might not know are the tools of Brand’s farsightedness. Drugs, for starters. Also a gift for harnessing boredom. Finally, expert networking. Through the catalog, Brand linked up with Doug Engelbart, from whom he learned the potential of networked communication, which got him thinking about early social media, and so on. “The intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture,” someone calls him, seeding the land with thought-trends. Slightly in awe of their subject, the filmmakers, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, portray Brand as that rare kind of tech prophet, a man who never looks back. A true, uncompromising futurist.

Jon: What was your favorite experience in People’s Computer Company? Bob: We became a focus for a lot of activity during these early days of computers in education. Then, of course, I loved traveling all over California and teaching weekend courses. We typically get around 30 teachers to attend the courses. These courses were called “Computers in the Classroom 1 and 2”. Two different courses two credits from the University of California extension. Teachers could use these credits to lobby for pay raises, and the other courses were called “Games Computers Play 1 and 2”. Whenever we went to teach somewhere we ran all four concurrently, so if you have taken Computers in the Classroom 1, you can sign up for 2. If you have taken Games Computers Play 1, then you can sign up for Games Computers Play 2. There was virtually no structure, the instructors, usually two of us, would wander around and help people play games or if they wanted to learn to program we would give them teach yourself set up materials so they can start teaching themselves how to program. Sometimes we would wander around and say: “For all of you people who crave structure we will be in the lunchroom at 1:00 for an hour to have a seminar if you want to come.” And a few people would come and some wouldn’t. Some would just continue working away. We also asked these teachers to grade themselves because I was not a classroom teacher in a normal sense. A lot of teachers intensely resisted grading themselves and practically begged us to give them a grade. So I have no idea of how many of these we did, but it was a lot of them. We taught a few at Lawrence Hall of Science (UC Berkeley), UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbra, UC Davis, and we even ran one course at the airport in San Mateo. We traveled to almost all of the campuses of the University of California extension and ran these courses. Well, all of this happened because I began teaching kids how to program, and I liked doing that so much that it sort of just took over my life. Almost everything that was going on was related in some way to helping kids teach themselves. I don’t like to say that we are teaching, I like to set up environments in which people can teach themselves with a little help. That is why I write ‘teach yourself’ instruction materials. I wrote teach yourself books so that people who did not have access to a computer teacher could use these books as an alternative; so all they need is access to a computer that ran BASIC and they could teach themselves how to program. It was really fun. I loved Wednesday evenings because all of these interesting people would come in and they would play computer games; especially when the computer center was set up next door. So, we had these two places; we had so many things going on at the same time.

First, the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet. Sounds prosaic but I think still underestimated. Several billion people recently immigrated to the world's most vibrant city and the system hasn't yet equilibrated. When you think about how YouTube is accelerating the dissemination of tacit knowledge, or the number of creative outsiders who can now deploy their talents productively, or the number of brilliant 18 year-olds who can now start companies from their bedrooms, or all the instances of improbable scenius that are springing up... in the landscape of the global commons, the internet is nitrogen fertilizer, and we still have a long way to go -- economically, culturally, scientifically, technologically, socially, and everything in between.

California shifted mid century from being the US's fastest-growing state -- 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 -- to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking. This is, obviously, mostly because of the regulations the state's inhabitants put in place that block the housing that's required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the "technology" of being able to affordably house its inhabitants. In these ways and many others, technology is both advancing rapidly and yet often receding in the state.

The period of the early twentieth century was an era of building in the broadest sense, from universities to government agencies to cities to highways. The byproduct of this period of building is maintenance and we haven't figured out how to meta-maintain -- that is, how to avoid emergent sclerosis in the stuff we build. I see the exact same thing in financial services, by the way. Nobody in financial services thinks that real-time settlement is a bad idea. Cryptocurrencies show that it is a quite tractable problem. The "enemy", such as it is, is the calcification that follows from an existing install base. And all cultural questions aside, the US simply has a very large existing install base of aged institutions and systems.

Everyone is an allocator of something. Investing is an opportunity to evaluate what you believe. To gain conviction. And then to act on that conviction. 

When growth requires bits instead of atoms, there is no such ceiling. Demand can scale very fast, but supply can also scale in lock step, and those two conditions working in concert is what allows certain businesses grow so fast and become so valuable.

All mathematical and scientific work is determined by social and political factors, from the point of research to the point at which a “discovery” is shaped into narrative.

So this model you’re describing, where you basically connect people from one income level to another higher one via various different processes. I’m curious what other connections you can imagine existing. The way to answer that is to see where all the shortages are, where are people trying to hire and those people don’t exist? Tech is an obvious one, but it’s all over the place in healthcare and the skilled trades. You can actually get a data dump from the Department of Labor that says here are all the roles that we’re unable to fill with the existing talent pools. To start with you just plug those up. Over time you get more fancy and optimize for what level of programmer and other specifics, but right now if you're a long-haul truck driver you’re hired instantly. You can be a felon coming out of prison and you can make $90k, with like three weeks of training, and most people don't even know that that's an option. That may not be a career in 20 years, who knows what happens with self-driving vehicles, and we should probably also have a solution for when that's true.

Engelbart’s strategic vision began with the recognition of a major reason why some large-scale problems continue to elude humankind’s best efforts. His radical scale change principle asserts that as a complex system increases in scale, it changes not only in size but also in its qualities. This principle, in fact one of the three basic laws of Hegelian dialectic, seems at odds with the common-sense view that large-scale systems are reducible to smaller-scale parts without loss of qualities. Even if Engelbart knew that the computer was just another artifact at a time when more engineering was not necessarily the solution, he also knew that this specific language artifact was offering unusual characteristics. He understood that the computer was opening the cognitive realm to more dimensions than the usual three, allowing non-linear thinking. But, most importantly, it was extremely fast; it could calculate, display and help organize ideas at a blazing speed. He realized that the introduction of the computer, as a powerful auxiliary to human intellect, could turn a quantitative change into a qualitative change. Facing numerous too urgent and complex problems, the little inelastic mind of the human being could, with the augmentation of the computer, become up to the challenge. Most importantly, this basic tenet of his philosophy ended up playing as important of part in the human system as in the tool system.

In a 1995 interview for JCN Profiles entitled “Visionary Leaders of the Information Age,” Engelbart argues that, while tech (which he calls “the tool system”) has advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, “the human system” continues to lag. He explains: The scale of change [on the tool side was] going to increase by huge factors in the coming decades. It became apparent to me then that this human system side was in for massive, massive changes. […] Are we ready for viewing the scale of change on this [human] side that it will take in order to really, really harness what’s over here [tool side]? […] We better start learning and being explicit about this change in the human system rather than just letting the product people throw new stuff at us.

When I look at what the connected world has become, I can’t help but feel that Mike Daisey was right: “We were hopelessly naïve.” And the more I learn about Douglas Engelbart, the earliest days of the personal computer, and the internet, the more I believe that the technology that currently shapes our experience of the world is designed based on unquestioned assumptions and ideologies. By questioning them now, perhaps we can change the future.

From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the “old” future as being “about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!” With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, “there’s a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.” But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

Mark O’Connell’s open-minded new book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death offers an update on the desires, dreams, and delusions of late 20th- and early 21st-century technological optimists. With a practiced journalist’s sense of engagement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O’Connell describes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifters, and con artists orbiting techno-optimist communities over the past half century. Hoping to become rich, famous, and/or immortal, this population encompasses a seemingly dizzying array of types and propositions that can, I’d argue, be cleaved into three basic camps.

From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the “old” future as being “about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!” With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, “there’s a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.” But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

“NO MORE SEX!” was the unexpected news that London’s Daily Herald brought its readers in February 1929. Those intrigued enough to continue reading found yet more startling information on “WHAT HUMANS MAY BE LIKE ANOTHER DAY” — such as “MEN WITH EARS UNDER LUNGS” — by the same scientifically pedigreed author. The source: John Desmond Bernal, a young Irishman whose daring new book, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, offered a “PEEP INTO THE FUTURE.”

Zuckerberg says hardware changes are a major focus for avatar-building. In VR, “the biggest things that we’re very focused on now are, how do you pack basically more sensors to create a better social experience into the device,” he says. “When I think about where you’re at with VR today, you go into the experience — there are some pretty good games and different experiences. But I’d love to get to the point where you have realistic avatars of yourself, where you can make real authentic eye contact with someone and have real expressions that get reflected on your avatar.”

The creator of the work was a brilliant art director named Craig Tanimoto. Craig had worked with me for many years (mainly on the Nissan business), and he virtually always had a unique way of looking at things. When I started my own ad agency a few years later, Craig was one of the first creative people I hired. Craig’s Apple campaign seemed big and fresh in a room that was filled with classic computer shots and stereotypical celebrity photos. I loved it. But at the same time, the work seemed in need of explanation. I asked Craig what it all meant, and he said, “IBM has a campaign out that says "Think IBM" (it was a campaign for their ThinkPad), and I feel Apple is very different from IBM, so I felt “Think Different” was interesting. I then thought it would be cool to attach those words to some of the world’s most different-thinking people.”

We will tame the computer’s appealing transcendental charm and restrain it from serving established power. This stance is the way to solve complicated problems in the machine society. We do not praise machine civilization, nor do we criticise it. By a strategic collaboration with artists, scientists and other creative people from a wide variety of backgrounds, we will deliberate carefully [sic] the relationships between human beings and machines, and how we should live in the computer age.

There is something important to be claimed – or reclaimed – from those Macys conversations, for while there was a great deal of interest in how the mind works, there was also a clear and deliberate examination of the role of technology in our lives. In the fading shadows of World War II, it was clear computers would have a profound impact on our futures, and Mead and her contemporaries fretted about how to theorise a cybernetic system in such a way that it could accommodate humans and culture, and even the environment. The atomic bomb was a graphic reminder of the power of technology to profoundly reconfigure the natural world. Participants at the Macy Conferences wanted a different kind of technological future – something far less destructive, although they clearly did not yet grasp the energy needs of the computing systems they were building, and their ultimate cost.

In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever “electronic person.” This creature, called Shakey, was a six-foot-tall robot on wheels, and it looked like a filing cabinet carrying around an elaborate video camera. It was an early experiment in artificial intelligence, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA—the technological research arm of the Pentagon—and conceived by the Canadian applied physicist Charles Rosen. It was the first robot designed to be entirely autonomous, to reason and make decisions based on information about its environment. Shakey was intended as a prototype for more advanced automatons that would eventually replace human beings in dangerous and hostile territories, and its makers saw it as the advance guard of a near future in which humans would be emulated, and eventually replaced, by intelligent machines. Shakey’s degree of autonomy was much more limited than that suggested by Life’s Promethean claims; its movements were slow and halting, and its battery tended to die after a few minutes of juddering operation. But many of the project’s innovations eventually entered the bloodstream of modern technology: the mapping software in your smartphone, for instance, was first used in Shakey, and Siri’s voice-command technology is a successor of a speech-control mechanism that was pioneered for the project.

Christoph Grienberger oversaw all mathematical works written by Jesuit authors, a role akin to an editor at a modern scientific journal. He was modest and productive, and could not resist solving problems. He reasoned that since a 1:10 gear could allow one person to lift 10 times as much as one unassisted, if one had 24 gears linked to a treadmill then one could lift the Earth… very slowly.

In his book The Mysterious Flame (1999), the British philosopher Colin McGinn argues that it is impossible to understand the phenomenon of consciousness because we cannot get outside of our minds to discuss it. We are inescapably trapped within the network of neurons whose mysterious experience we are attempting to analyze. Likewise, I would argue that we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. But just the simple, particular meaning of everyday events, fleeting events like the momentary play of light on a lake, or the birth of a child. For better or for worse, meaning is part of the way we exist in the world.

An article in the New York Times from 1966 called the Ball Chair the most antisocial, leave-me-alone-chair in Europe, fascinating more to men than women. The design was described as the ideal chair for the businessman who wants to seclude himself from all the noise at home and get some peace to read the newspaper.

By suggesting that her readers (the general public) need to learn to think clearly, and helping to provide the means, Stebbing was adding herself to a long line of philosophers known as ‘freethinkers’. ‘Freethinking’ dates back to the European Enlightenment and originally involved rejecting religious authority and academic dogma in the light of new developments in science. Essentially, freethinkers pushed for a democratisation of knowledge and believed we should follow our own reason over the Bible or ancient philosophical texts. The frontispiece to Thinking to Some Purpose even includes a quotation from the 18th-century philosopher Anthony Collins, who literally wrote the textbook on freethinking. The quotation, which is from Collins’s A Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), reads: if we have a right to know any Truth whatsoever, we have a right to think freely … there is no other way to discover the Truth.

‘There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in the Penguin ‘Pelican’ books series, with that familiar blue-and-white cover. This little book, which could easily be slipped into a pocket and read on the train, in a lunch hour, or at a bus stop, was pitched at the intelligent general reader. In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe.

Open data — A world in which vital and useful data is shared between all parties and made open for anyone to utilise, rather like a commons.Privacy First — digital platforms should minimise the data created about users and personal data should remain private and under individual control by default. Sharing data should happen only in the most necessary circumstances and everything should be encrypted.Data ownership — People should be able to take control of the data they generate through the framework of ownership and it should be within their right to license the use of that data to whomever they choose.

In part, Swash acts as a basic enough tool to allow people to have a genuine say over what data from their browser they’d like to share (and monetise) and what they would prefer to remain private. It turns out that, given the chance at reclaiming some of their power or imagining an alternative to data tyranny, consumer indifference fades away.

Although Andreessen has been a board member of Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, he doesn’t take many board seats in a16z’s portfolio companies, preferring to train his eyes on the horizon. Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibson’s observation “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still can’t buy them at Target. To smooth out such lumps in distribution, Andreessen disseminates his views via every available podcast and panel discussion and CNN interview slot: he’s a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will come—a glorious revenge. He told me, “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group you’re a part of.” The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.

Today, most of us accept that the Internet is important, but this is a recent phenomenon. As late as 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote an article for Newsweek, entitled “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” which includes this unfortunate analysis: Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: Salespeople.

In 1837, Charles Babbage set out to build something he called The Analytical Engine — the world’s first general-purpose computer, that could be described in modern times as Turing-complete. In other words, given enough resources the machine that Babbage was building could compute anything that the most powerful computer in the world today can compute. The computation might be slower and the computer might take up more space (okay, amazingly slow and incredibly huge), but his design matched today’s computational power.

Singer’s demo caused quite the stir and for good reason: tools such as this will continue to improve, and we all know it. It signals a future where many of the tasks we perform now will be automated or at least aided by AI. Technology that has the potential to eliminate tasks, and by extension the potential to eliminate jobs, will invariably elicit some fear. This is especially true in an industry that already has a firm grasp on how technology can disrupt entire industries. While AI will no doubt eliminate the need to manually perform many tasks, its benefits will also open up opportunities and help to automate menial tasks which will free us up to focus on the more meaningful work that provides additional value. The question becomes: how might we leverage AI and the benefits it brings to help in the design process? Additionally, how might things go wrong when leveraging AI in the design process?

Benedict Evans, the tech analyst, argues “when software becomes part of society, all of society’s problems get expressed in software”. But innovation, while a force for good, is also reshaping our lives. Businesses, communications, cities, even political systems are being altered and destabilised in ways beyond the control of nations.

Danny Hillis, my mentor as we were working at Thinking Machines in the early 1980s, often said, “We want to build a machine that will be proud of us.” We were bringing up the next generation. In my conversations with Carl Feynman at that time, we thought if we were going to be bringing up our new overlords, they should at least read good books. While not of the Internet yet, the computer we were building did share the recognition of the importance of the network, of the interconnections of the links. The machine we were building was called the “Connection Machine,” where the connections between the processors were seen as important as the tens of thousands of processors themselves. The difference between this machine and the Internet was that these processors were not yet spread around the world.This imagining of a machine’s view of us, a machine that is distinct from us, a machine that has evolved beyond us, brings me around to my original ill-formed vision in 1980 of what I could help make the Internet become: a network of people, the library, and machines. I did not see it in a light that was either glorifying or terrifying, but rather as a major inevitable project that could be built well or badly, and I could help build it well. In that way it could be a major positive step forward.

Timekeeping devices have trans­formed civiliza­tions more than once. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern indus­trial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is trans­forming our civiliza­tion: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age. And this clock is Bitcoin.

BLVR: How important is reading to your work? TC: I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but I’ll say this. This has to do with the question of genre, which is often defined in terms of a certain set of tropes or a formula. But there’s this other definition of genre that I find speaks more to me, which is to think of genre as an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I’ve read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction. 

BLVR: How important would you say the Clarion Workshop was to your development as a writer?  TC: Clarion was a life-changing event not just because of what I learned about writing, but because it made me believe that I could be a writer. Prior to attending Clarion, I’d been working in complete isolation. I didn’t know anyone else who was trying to write science fiction—I knew barely anyone who read science fiction. So I had no one to really talk to about what felt like the central passion of my life. I’d gotten only form-letter rejections; I didn’t know if I was cut out to be a writer. At Clarion people told me that my stuff was good; that was the first time I had gotten positive reinforcement. But it was also the first time that I found other people who shared my passion. A lot of people say that going to Clarion is like meeting a family you didn’t know you had, and to me it definitely felt that way. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had read the books I had read and understood the things I was interested in and were trying to do the things I was trying to do. I remember, on maybe the first or second night at Clarion, one of my classmates mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis3 and then started to explain what it was, and I said, “Oh, I know what that is.” And he said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s heard of that before.” That sort of thing happened to us constantly. Going to Clarion was how I found there was a community for writers out there that I could fit into. 

It didn’t take long for the founding duo to ship v1. Written in Graham’s beloved Lisp, the site served as a fairly straightforward link aggregator that allowed for upvoting and downvoting. The first 100 accounts on the site were created by either Ohanian or Huffman to give the appearance of activity. A snapshot from the site from that period (thank you WayBackMachine) illustrates just how much of the culture was baked in early on, featuring conspiracy theories, wonkish dev chat, strong opinions, and “spez,” Huffman’s username.

This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on October 29, 1969—only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). To Kline and his co-conspirator, Bill Duvall, it was no big deal. “It was just engineers working,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneer of computer networking and a leader of the project.

Li: Yeah. So in terms of where I’m focused on these days, as an investor, I’m focused on backing new platforms that are empowering people to have happier work lives and to do work that they find meaningful where they have more ownership and autonomy and feel more motivated and fulfills in doing that type of work. So it’s really an antidote, I think, to a lot of the gig models of the past, where people were totally alienated from whatever they were creating, didn’t have any sort of ownership or agency to even dictate the terms of their labor. And instead I’m backing new platforms where people are given the tools to be able to monetize their creativity. So, that’s where I’m focused on these days. And that’s where I have the most optimism around technology. Like when I was growing up, there was no path that I could see or that my parents could see for me to monetize a lot of my creative interests.

I’m also not surprised that social features, users to users interacting with each other, are working. So it is an interesting space, and it’s definitely something that we’re keeping an eye on. Long-term, though, I think the broader shift that has been true with the internet has been most of the hours of consumption, we believe, will be moving from linear to on-demand. Meaning consumers should be able to consume whatever content that they want on their terms and not necessarily be beholden to someone else’s schedule. So I think it’s a really interesting format from a creation perspective, but I suspect that from the consumption perspective, most of the time consumed will still be on-demand which is what Spotify is known for today.

Jo Szczepanska provides us an extensive timeline for this “multi-disciplinary, human-centered… amalgamation of approaches that involve research and rapid ideation.” I’ll give you the cliff notes here:

Fiction Bonus! Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo: I’m unabashedly a part of a young adult fiction book club, so if there’s a fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, or historical novel that features teen protagonists called to save the world under extraordinary circumstances, I’m there. This is my favorite series in recent memory. It’s two books long and features the most lovable band of crooked thieves you will ever meet attempting a heist that is equal parts madness, redemption and glory. Just pure, wonderful storytelling and a rollicking good time.

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA.

We wanted people to think about the "Internet", which includes, but is a much bigger subject than the Web, an application on the Internet, or search, browsing, etc., which are apps on the Web.

To be sure, many aspects of the life of the mind have been affected by the Internet. Our physical folders, mailboxes, bookshelves, spreadsheets, documents, media players, and so on have been replaced by software equivalents, which has altered our time budgets in countless ways. But to call it an alternation of "how we think" is, I think, an exaggeration.

The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people's ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think. The leap in Internet usage that accompanied the appearance of the World Wide Web more than a decade ago came from its user interface, the graphical browser, which worked around the serial, line-based processing of the actual computer hardware to simulate a familiar visual world of windows, icons, and buttons. The changes we are seeing more recently include even more natural interfaces (speech, language, manual manipulation), better emulation of human expertise (as in movie, book, or music recommendations, and more intelligent search), and the application of Web technologies to social and emotional purposes (such as social networking, sharing of pictures, music, and video) rather than just the traditional nerdy ones.

As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I'm skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. Electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing, nor will they supersede modus ponens or Bayes' theorem.

Maeda is to design what Warren Buffet is to finance---a seasoned technologist who spent more than a decade at the MIT Media Lab before becoming president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a partner at VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and now the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company. Every year, Maeda travels to South By Southwest to deliver his Design in Technology report, a sprawling presentation that outlines the field’s growing impact on technology and business.

What became known as the Google Books Search Amended Settlement Agreement came to 165 pages and more than a dozen appendices. It took two and a half years to hammer out the details. Sarnoff described the negotiations as “four-dimensional chess” between the authors, publishers, libraries, and Google. “Everyone involved,” he said to me, “and I mean everyone—on all sides of this issue—thought that if we were going to get this through, this would be the single most important thing they did in their careers.” Ultimately the deal put Google on the hook for about $125 million, including a one-time $45 million payout to the copyright holders of books it had scanned—something like $60 per book—along with $15.5 million in legal fees to the publishers, $30 million to the authors, and $34.5 million toward creating the Registry.

The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.

In light of this, Fuller developed synergetics, a field of study that considers a system to be larger than the sum of its parts, thereby implying that it is impossible to understand a given system only by considering its parts in isolation. In short, Fuller's synergetics champions a holistic approach to thinking about systems, particularly our own planet and the human societies that inhabit it.

“The goal is to make the process of designing robots accessible,” said Adriana Schulz, a PhD student at MIT who co-led the project. “The actuators, the materials, the code, things like that require a lot of knowledge. Our system encapsulates that expert knowledge, so the user can focus on conceptual design.”

It’s interesting how we identify the “beginnings” of modern design. The website Online Design Teacher begins its timeline in the Victorian period, around the 1830s. Meanwhile, Design Is History begins in 1450, a period which marked the introduction of printing presses in Europe, and the beginnings of the mechanical reproduction of graphic media. Going further back still, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (a big book now in its 6th edition) starts its detailed timeline right back at the invention of writing systems, around 15,000 BCE.

Today, the Russians living in Gornoe often say it’s a ghost town, and sailors call it a Fata Morgana (a mirage), in honor of the sea fairies who, as legend has it, live on the ocean floor, deceiving travelers with phantom visions. By the last count on December 1, 2015, there were 635 people living in Gornoe — 128 of them children.

When I paint … I look at it and I say, “The space in that corner there needs a little blue,” and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too.

It’s impossible to anticipate the arrival of global crises such as the coronavirus outbreak, but firms can mitigate their impacts by taking supply chain preparedness to a higher level. They should act before a disruption occurs and adjust and execute new plans afterward rather than starting from scratch every time they are plunged into a new crisis.

In a 2016 interview with Wired, Parscale called himself “a farm boy from Kansas.” His childhood home was not on a farm but on a paved cul-de-sac in Topeka, within walking distance of a Sonic Drive-In and a disk-golf course. His parents, Dwight and Rita, were entrepreneurs whose businesses, according to ProPublica, “included a swimming pool company, a scuba shop, real estate enterprises, restaurants and a Western-themed nightclub featuring a mechanical bull.” “Am I worth over a million bucks?” Dwight said in an interview with ProPublica. “Yes. But that’s not that much today.” Brad attended a public high school, Shawnee Heights, which students at a nearby school sometimes referred to as Scrawny Whites. In Parscale’s case, the aspersion was exactly half accurate: by ninth grade, according to a former coach, he was already a sturdy six feet five.

In twenty volumes, published between 1885 and 1922, the Fairy Tale series introduced traditional Japanese folk tales, first to readers of English and French, and later to readers of German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian. The tales themselves have diverse sources.

“The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. […] the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”

“event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw that he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”

All working architects leave behind a string of monuments to themselves in the form of buildings they have designed. But what about the final spaces that architects themselves occupy? One might expect to find imposing or self-congratulatory memorials, yet most architects’ gravesites are rather understated. Featured below is a selection of photographs and notes on a dozen of the sites Henry Kuehn researched for his book “Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide,” as well as the author’s preface.

Papert’s career traversed a trio of influential movements: child development, artificial intelligence, and educational technologies. Based on his insights into children’s thinking and learning, Papert recognized that computers could be used not just to deliver information and instruction, but also to empower children to experiment, explore, and express themselves. The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.

This is the story of those two years, as they played out inside and around the company. WIRED spoke with 51 current or former Facebook employees for this article, many of whom did not want their names used, for reasons anyone familiar with the story of Fearnow and Villarreal would surely understand. (One current employee asked that a WIRED reporter turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking whether it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook.)

This was urgent business. But almost no one else seemed to understand. No corporation (not even Hewlett-Packard!) saw the potential in digital computers back then. Colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute, where he went in 1957 as an engineer, told him to forget about them. He poked around largely alone. He sometimes felt like Columbus, whose sailors were afraid of falling off the edge of the world. Or like a creature who had climbed a mountain, seen things coming, but found his hands too clumsy to signal what to do.

In the early 1950s, when he began to get into it all, computers meant serried desks of girls with hand-held calculators. Or else they were mainframes that filled whole rooms, processing data at snail speed on punched-paper tape. He had a different vision, in which everyone had instant access to information on small screens and could collaborate, instantly, to solve the increasingly complex problems the world faced.

WHEN you are a visionary, it’s hard to get other people to see as you do. When you have a plan to save the world through men and computers working together, as Doug Engelbart had, it’s hard to enlist the guys at the water-cooler to take part in the crusade. They called him kooky, and laughed at him for doing weird stuff.

Computational thinking is not new. Seymour Papert, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and an M.I.T. professor, used the term in 1980 to envision how children could use computers to learn.

If you want to build a strong information architecture for the product, you need to understand what it consists of. Pioneers of the IA field, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in their book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” have distinguished four main components: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and searching systems.

Information architecture (IA) is a science of organizing and structuring the content of the websites, web and mobile applications, and social media software. An American architect and graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered to be a founder of the IA field. Today, there are many specialists working on IA development who have established the Information Architecture Institute. According to IAI experts, information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.

In love, there are no easy guidelines. But perhaps, by coming to recognise the degree to which overlapping and different narratives shape our expectations in love, we can avoid some of the worst outcomes. Perhaps, too, we have a philosophical duty to interrogate the extent to which our narratives are shaped by crass romantic clichés from songs, movies and sitcoms – even if we wrongly believe ourselves above them. However, it won’t suffice to recognise that we’re all entangled in complex webs of romantic narrative. We also need to make sure that we are truly co-authoring our we-narratives. The people we love are not just characters, but also creators, of our shared story. To love each other better, we should respect this. The world is unlikely to furnish us with a perfectly matched storyteller, but love won’t flourish if each of us is trying to tell a different story.

“For me, [the goal of] VR is for everyone to do what you want to do and live as you want to,” he says. “It’s not [to recreate] the same issues as you have in reality.”

This device — which is known as the Useless Machine, and more rarely as the Leave Me Alone Box — was conceived at Bell Laboratories in the early 1950s by the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, who was at that point a grad student working a summer job. The first working model was constructed by his mentor, Claude Shannon, who later became known as the father of information theory. This context, the fact that the creators of this aggressively pointless gadget are emblematic figures in the ascendancy of machines over our contemporary world, lends a frisson of historical oddity to what is essentially an executive toy.

His aim was to download as many pages as possible from an archive of academic journals called JSTOR, which was available by paid subscription only to libraries and institutions. That was morally wrong, he thought; the knowledge contained in it (often obtained with public funding, after all) had to be made available, free, to everyone. And it was absurdly simple to do that. He already had access to the library network; no need to hack into the system. He just ran a script, called keepgrabbing.py, which liberated 4.8m articles at almost dangerous speed. MIT tried to block him, but time after time he outwitted them; and then, as a last resort, he plugged in the laptop in the cupboard.

A lot of money came his way when Reddit was sold to Condé Nast in 2006, but relocation to an office made him miserable. Google offered him jobs, but he turned them down as unexciting. Political campaigning became his passion. He wanted to see everything available online, free, with nothing held back by elites or big money, and nothing censored. Information was power, as he proclaimed in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto of 2008, and war was needed “by stealth”, “in the dark”, “underground”, for the freedom to connect. In 2011 there was no fiercer voice against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and in 2012 no one prouder to proclaim it dead.

I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.

In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.

Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”

This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”

In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.

You can look at history and ask yourself, “Who do you think were the greatest energy innovators of all time?” I think Charles Algernon Parsons5 [the inventor of the steam turbine] was really incredible. I think Rudolf Diesel6 [the inventor of the diesel engine] was also incredible. Go and look at how much money they or the company they worked for made. Diesel committed suicide because he thought he was going bankrupt. Parsons made basically nothing. During the first 20 years after you invent a new energy technology, as [Vaclav] Smil7 likes to remind us, the deployment that takes place, with very, very few exceptions, is quite modest. So the incentive for the inventor is most reduced where the adoption cycles are greater than 20 years. We don’t have a similar situation in IT. We don’t have that even in health care, although they sometimes complain that the 20 years don’t give them enough time.

No matter how advanced technology is, it needs human partners to enhance competitive advantage. It must be embedded in what we call the integrated strategy machine. An integrated strategy machine is the collection of resources, both technological and human, that act in concert to develop and execute business strategies. It comprises a range of conceptual and analytical operations, including problem definition, signal processing, pattern recognition, abstraction and conceptualization, analysis, and prediction. One of its critical functions is reframing, which is repeatedly redefining the problem to enable deeper insights. Within this machine, people and technology must each play their particular roles in an integrated fashion.

Zeitgeist novels tend to fall in one of three categories, none of which have anything to do with the quality of the work itself. In the first category are books nostalgic for a simpler, romanticized past; James A. Michener’s Centennial, the best-selling novel of 1974, is an example. The second category is made up of books that unwittingly capture the spirit of their time, a feat accomplished in the early ’60s by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Group. Forward-looking novels that provide glimpses into the future, while echoing anxieties of the present—1984, Neuromancer, White Noise—comprise the third category. Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pulls off the remarkable feat of straddling all three categories, achieving an unusual triple crown. It is a nostalgic, old-fashioned novel that nevertheless reflects the malaise of its era and prefigures our own technophiliac age. Pirsig’s hat trick has much to do with the novel’s incredible commercial success. But it tells us nothing about the novel’s quality.

“ If you look at your Product Designer as someone that makes your solution look presentable, look again. A product designer helps you identify, investigate, and validate the problem, and ultimately craft, design, test and ship the solution.” — Eric Eriksson

Product Design is about problem solving, and product designers seek to improve the experiences of products. And, they do so by using a variety of skills: Animating, Prototyping, Coding, Research, Visual, Interaction Design, Psychology, and Business Strategy (Eric Eriksson).

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. When you’re wearing the visor of an augmented- or mixed-reality system such as Magic Leap, HoloLens, or Meta, it maps the local environment. To make, say, a virtual teacup appear on your real table, it needs to know where your table is. The visor uses outward-facing cameras and sensors to scan your environment to create this map. Magic Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped place in the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter. Your unit (or perhaps another unit in the same location) merely needs to register and update any changes in the space. This in turn will let you share virtual objects across different surroundings, even if participants are in distant places. Someone in Barcelona can drop a virtual flower into your virtual vase in Chicago. Because artificial reality is inherently social, its environments will be inherently social and networked.

ne of the first things I learned from my recent tour of the synthetic-reality waterfront is that virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet. Today the Internet is a network of information. It contains 60 trillion web pages, remembers 4 zettabytes of data, transmits millions of emails per second, all interconnected by sextillions of transistors. Our lives and work run on this internet of information. But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences. What you share in VR or MR gear is an experience. What you encounter when you open a magic window in your living room is an experience. What you join in a mixed-reality teleconference is an experience. To a remarkable degree, all these technologically enabled experiences will rapidly intersect and inform one another.

I first put my head into virtual reality in 1989. Before even the web existed, I visited an office in Northern California whose walls were covered with neoprene surfing suits embroidered with wires, large gloves festooned with electronic components, and rows of modified swimming goggles. My host, Jaron Lanier, sporting shoulder-length blond dreadlocks, handed me a black glove and placed a set of homemade goggles secured by a web of straps onto my head. The next moment I was in an entirely different place. It was an airy, cartoony block world, not unlike the Minecraft universe. There was another avatar sharing this small world (the size of a large room) with me—Lanier.

Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

“Our approach, which we call ‘printable hydraulics,’ is a step toward the rapid fabrication of functional machines,” Daniela Rus, one of the research paper’s co-authors, told CSAIL. “All you have to do is stick in a battery and motor, and you have a robot that can practically walk right out of the printer.”

Modern users expect seamless, uncomplicated solutions to their needs and wants. Stuffing a product or service with vanity features is no longer viable. As the market moves towards simplicity and no-brainer user experiences, anticipatory design is no longer something you can afford to ignore. Look at the examples and consider the checklist above to spot opportunities for improvement in your current user experience. If you are starting out from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to embed these principles from the outset. Regardless, keep this idea close to heart:

Mike is able to have some fast iterations by using After Effects and Cinema 4D, but he also advocates translating other ideas from web design such as the design grid. You can still do a lot of paper prototyping of interface ideas, but VR is a medium that has spatial, depth, and lighting considerations and so it’s helpful to see what it actually might look like in VR as well.

Hypnophobia was a striking theme in Existentialist thought. “Blessed are the sleepy ones” Nietzsche said sarcastically, “for they shall soon drop off.” And he sometimes endeavoured to do without sleep, on one occasion trying to live on four hours sleep a night for a fortnight. (I read this unimpressed when I was a junior doctor in the 1970s, and my 104-hour-week included periods of up to 48 hours continuously on call.)

What are you trying to solve?How do you know it’s a real problem? What data, anecdotes, etc. lead you to believe this?Why solve this problem over others? You have limited resources and time — why apply them to this problem above all else?

In summary, design allows you to demonstrate an ambitious vision (or several) for what the world could be. The better and more precise the design, the easier it is to rally people to create that future.

Many of the Bernard-centered sections of The Brothers Vonnegut are taken up with byzantine bureaucratic feuds between Project Cirrus, the Army, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, which was skeptical about cloud seeding and viewed it as a distraction from more important advances in computer-assisted statistical meteorology. Many famous midcentury scientists tromp through these pages, including the mathematician John von Neumann, who worked on computer prediction of weather patterns at the Institute for Advanced Study, and the physicist Edward Teller, who made crucial theoretical contributions to the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. Most prominent of all is the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, an idol of Kurt’s, who, in 1948, publicly denounced the type of scientist who knowingly participated in the production of weapons technology as “a morally irresponsible stooge in a science-factory.” (One would guess that Bernard took this to heart.)

About half of The Brothers Vonnegut tells a familiar tale of Bildung: It’s the story of a writer becoming a writer, and it’s a compelling and uncommonly detailed one. Strand’s book focuses mostly on the period between 1945—when Vonnegut witnessed firsthand the bombing of Dresden, which would later inspire Slaughterhouse-Five—and 1952, when Bernard left G.E., apparently in a fit of conscience. 

In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut was asked by an interviewer why he started writing science fiction. “I was working for General Electric at the time,” he replied, “right after World War II, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines.” The machine was computer-operated, and it inspired Vonnegut to write a novel, Player Piano, about a future society in which industry has become completely automated, at enormous human cost. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he told his interviewer, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.”