Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane (2019) [He developed] a sustained and developing argument, in the face of sometimes dismissive criticism, that recast Earth as, in effect, a superorganism. Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the past 3.8 billion years, a […]
Can “Tech” Die?
Is Tech immortal or can it die? When 95% of the population is being left behind, complaining “too fast!” The bulk of the population being left behind is not a bug in Tech as a social process, it is the defining feature. When they stop complaining and start acting en masse, that’s when it’s no longer […]
An economist explains how to value the internet
digital goods have three characteristics that are very different from previous goods. They’re virtually free, perfect and instant. What that means is the cost of making an additional copy of a digital good is basically zero; each copy is an identical, perfect replica of the original; and they can be distributed anywhere in the world […]
Against Waldenponding
waldenponding, a broad tendency to retreat from, and artificially limit, digital life – the near-religious reactionary movement against digital life – a primitivist, fetishistic fear of screens as demonic objects. A way of relating to digital devices that seems shaped by a fearmongering vision of them as soul-sucking pumps, and their designers as Dark Lords […]
Playing Intelligence
How games and game engines can provide new ways of comprehending networked and distributed forms of intelligence. gaming could serve as an alternative to voting — could potentially be realized with a plurality of people gaming national and global eventualities. For any given issue, different proposals could be gamed in parallel. As some games collapsed, […]