MachineMachine /stream

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When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian…

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What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the…

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There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in…

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How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him,…

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The facts about animated GIFs are stark. They only support a palette of 256 colors. No current browser lists support for animated GIF as a codec for the HTML5 <video>…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance,…

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What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled…

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Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From…

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My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that…

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It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re…

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17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages. No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an…

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This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to…

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Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

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APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews,…

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"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted…

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Arcangel’s conflicted relationship  with technology drives his artistic practice and pervades Pro Tools, the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At 33, Arcangel will be…

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Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be…

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Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

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Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to…

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Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London…

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A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up…

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by Hito Steyerl What happens to identification at this point? Who can we identify with? Of course, identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they’d actually like…

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The historians of 2061 will want to study the birth of the world wide web. How on earth will they know where to start? Today, historians have to piece together…

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The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as…

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Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential,…

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In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a…