MachineMachine /stream

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by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to…

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Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page…

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by Bertolt Brecht In our society one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to conquer their market and justify their existence; in other words discoveries that have not…

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A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel…

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Let’s say a new drug appears to be effective in combating a condition like chronic anxiety and is the subject of popular news stories. When the drug enters clinical trials,…

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For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

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Technology so pervades our culture that it's sobering to consider how poorly we understand it. How do new tools and techniques arise? What principles guide their evolution? And how does…

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Star Trek has long been described as a cult phenomenon…but is it an actual cult? Some anthropologists think so. Following the example of anthropologist Margaret Mead, they lived among the…

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We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for…

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I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming…