#technology (77 quotes)
Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers.
— , Distrust That Particular Flavor This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.
— , Distrust that Particular Flavor The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function. It seems that all man's industrial effort, all his calculations and his nights spent poring over drawings, all these visible signs have as their sole end the achievement of simplicity. It is as if only the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship's hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder. On the surface it seems that the work of engineers, designers and research mathematicians consists only in polishing and refining, easing this joint and balancing that wing until there is no longer a wing joined visibly to a fuselage, but a perfectly developed form freed at last from its matrix, a spontaneous and mysterious whole with the unified quality of a poem. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.
— , Wind, Sand and Stars Judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone…
— , The Circle The great horizon for evidence-based medicine is finding new methods and tools for disseminating the evidence we already have, to doctors and other decision-makers. This will require innovative collaboration between coders, pharmacists, librarians, doctors and academics. At the simplest level, I’m always frustrated that I can’t press a button, when reading a systematic review, to say ‘notify me when this summary is updated with new trial results’. In more elaborate terms, it’s clear that we should be moving medical knowledge and trial results into structured databases; and perhaps embedding high-quality contextual advice into a doctor’s routine workflow, as they sit at the computer in their office.
— , Bad Pharma Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.
— , Spook Country There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ’roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.
— , Zero History That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a species. The strength we have, the advantage this gives us, is our ability to stand apart from the things we’ve made: to use them and set them aside; to make them prosthetic extensions of ourselves and to let them go.
— , Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology A growing body of opinion thinks […] that PowerPoint privileges the presenter in an unhealthy way and has the effect of discouraging critical discussion and analysis. It may also encourage group-think. PowerPoint is a potentially dangerous instrument of persuasion.
— , The Blunders of Our Governments If we believe that machines are ruining mankind, it may be that we are lacking a little in distance and cannot judge the effects of transformations as rapid as those that we have undergone. What are the hundred years of mechanical history when set against the two hundred thousand years of the history of man? We have scarcely begun to settle in this landscape of mines and power stations. Our life in this modern house has only just begun, and the house is not yet even complete.
Happy 25th birthday, Web.
— , Wind, Sand and Stars The security state isn’t a person, it’s people. There’s so many of them and they’ve been given leave to take so many liberties that they’ve managed to become the environment. Like a demented terraforming project, they’re sucking down our communications and we’re breathing their air. This is an ecological disaster and it demands an ecological response. We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.
— , NSA-Proof Your Email! Consider your Man Card Re-Issued. Never be Afraid Again. In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up.
— , Slow Ideas Fleming saw the House of Rumour as the image of an intelligence service; we can know it now as an ancient vision of the internet. The haunt of credulity, rash error, empty joy and unreasoning fear. The world whispers stories to itself. This is what conspire means: to breathe with.
— , The House of Rumour Now you can relive the thrill of the time you went from your house to a coffee shop to your job to a sandwich place to the grocery store to your house to a friend’s house to a bar and then back to your house.
— , Foursquare Time Machine Feature Lets You Retrace Your Steps All Laser-Like I think efficiency in production processes is key to successful sonic exploration and expression. If one has to do extensive, non-essential computer programming and program navigating in the midst of a creative process in sound, it will definitely retard the sonic exploration process and absorb creative energy. This is because you are doing two distinct technical procedures simultaneously: programming the machine and sculpting a sound. Software as well as hardware should have all the basic system errors fully removed or dramatically reduced before the technology is put to market.
— , Master Organism: A.J. Samuels interviews Gerald Donald ‘Like’ is the placeholder emotion. Don’t give the world more shit people ‘like’.
— , Constellation Games The more you document your own life, the more you check in, you tweet, the more you post photos of what you did last night, the more you do all of this stuff, or even in my case, the more you listen for little lines of dialogue that can make their way into stories, the more you photograph moments, in a way, the more you start to step out of those moments, and if you do that too much, you become a spectator to your own life.
— , CreativeMornings talk I’ll make technologists a deal, I’ll give up my song copyrights if you give up your software patents. Software patents are even less unique than your typical song. So this should be easy right?
— , Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.
— , The Art of Fiction No. 211 If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.
— , Whatever made you think it was your data anyway? So far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers.
— , From Scroll to Screen Our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example … have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.
— , Rule 34 Space travel gave us the ability to see our own world from afar, revealing to us the fragility of our world and the insignificance of human existence when seen from a cosmic scale. Many astronauts describe being profoundly changed by seeing the “blue marble” for themselves. Perhaps these vertiginous experiences, these sudden shifts in perspective will occur more frequently with the advance of technology. Perhaps the opposite will occur and with the decline in mass media we will become increasingly insular and narcissistic. Perhaps our reaction to being able to see the sum of all human life will be to shield our eyes from it. We live in interesting times.
— , The Unbearable Triviality Of Social Networking I think Facebook is looking for a mentor, they are looking for a role model. Right now it is choosing between Apple and Google in this great war between open and closed. It is possible that whatever side Facebook takes will have a lot to do with the future of how we communicate.
— , One on One: Tim Wu, Author of ‘The Master Switch’ Just as previous corporate warlords used the existence of real inefficiencies and deficiencies in other media to gain control, equipment, service and content providers, large corporations will try to use the deficiencies of the Internet to exert control and exclusivity. All the better, they will claim, to provide safe, secure and harmonious operation, while incidentally enhancing profits and reducing competition.
— , I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed