The Technium. A fascinating interview with Kevin Kelly from last February. It’s a long read, or an hour-long video, but so worth the time. One of my favorite nuggets was, “Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.”
Tag: Kevin Kelly
Tech biologists
Dyson: We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.
Wired: If this is true, what’s the takeaway?
Dyson: Hire biologists! It doesn’t make sense for a high tech company to have 3,000 software engineers but no biologists.
Why the Impossible Happens More Often
Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what “everybody knows” about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What’s coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness.
Kevin Kelly – Why the Impossible Happens More Often.
What Books Will Become
We’ll debundle books into their constituent bits and pieces and knit those into the web, but the higher level organization of the book will be the focus for attention — that remaining scarcity in our economy. A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten.
Kevin Kelly – What Books Will Become.