http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-3/ Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s onward, it also gives us what has arguably become the dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time, whether literary, artistic or cinematic. This is the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth. And let’s be honest: it is simply immensely pleasurable… ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:42 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-3/ http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=2056 A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human. ]]> Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:34:36 -0700 http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=2056 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiTTrT29HI0&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:29:31 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiTTrT29HI0&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzhs1Z8Rwnk&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Thu, 05 May 2011 05:56:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzhs1Z8Rwnk&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.”
This charge reflects… ]]> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:48:39 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcvN1dt0yJo&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:11:38 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcvN1dt0yJo&feature=youtube_gdata http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=261 Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense quantity of interfaces that daily calls for our attention, I will try to examine the relationship between the machine and the interface in a media archaeological perspective, that will, hopefully, point towards the physicality of the machine, in contrast to the symbolic ordering that is prevailing in the current understanding of interface.

In the introduction to this conference it is being stated that “in the case of… ]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:53:12 -0700 http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=261 http://incharacter.org/observation/1awe-and-the-machine/ By the twentieth century, some cynicism had crept into descriptions of the newest machines. Writing about the impact of radio on his rural Maine community, E. B. White observed, "One of the chief pretenders to the throne of God is radio itself, which has acquired a sort of omniscience." In the lives of the people in his town, the radio exerted a "pervading and somewhat godlike presence." But it was also something to which they turned daily for advice and instruction. As White wryly noted, "The church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if… ]]> Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:03:00 -0700 http://incharacter.org/observation/1awe-and-the-machine/ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because… ]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:31:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJLHQkA11YY&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:44:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJLHQkA11YY&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17518 An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions. Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial… ]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:45:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17518 http://www.machineanimalcollages.com/ Fantastic meat landscapes and animals made of machinery ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 01:02:00 -0700 http://www.machineanimalcollages.com/