Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

March 12th 2010

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Bjarke Ingels, quoted by Alex Steffen in De-Industrializing the City

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: quote, architecture,.

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Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities.
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March 9th 2010

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Parag Khanna on “neomedievalism”

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: the-future, quote,.

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The state isn’t a universally representative phenomenon today, if it ever was. Already, billions of people live in imperial conglomerates such as the European Union, the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the emerging North American Union, where state capitalism has become the norm. But at least half the United Nations’ membership, about 100 countries, can hardly be considered responsible sovereigns. Billions live unsure of who their true rulers are, whether local feudal lords or distant corporate executives. In Egypt and India, democratic elections have devolved into auctions. Delivering security and providing welfare aren’t just campaign promises; they are the campaign. The fragmentation of societies from within is clear: From Bogotá to Bangalore, gated communities with private security are on the rise.
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March 7th 2010

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Craig Mod on Books in the Age of the iPad

Posted at 1:04pm and tagged with: digital-literacy, books, quote,.

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You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.
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March 6th 2010

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Steve Portigal, from a fascinating discussion transposed here.

Posted at 1:03pm and tagged with: quote, marketing, product-development, design,.

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I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?
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March 4th 2010

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“…The countries, companies, and people that possess it will prosper. In many ways, wisdom is the opposite of strategy — and today, it is strategy, bought by the dozen from legions of besuited, back-slapping consultants, that is cheap, abundant, and worth little.”

-Umair Haque, The Wisdom Manifesto

Posted at 1:03pm and tagged with: quote,.

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The scarcest, rarest, and most valuable resource in the world today is wisdom.
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February 24th 2010

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Roger Cohen

Posted at 1:08pm and tagged with: quote,.

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Community — a stable job, shared national experience, extended family, labor unions — has vanished or eroded. In its place have come a frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs. Feelings of anxiety and inadequacy grow in the lonely chamber of self-absorption and projection.
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February 11th 2010

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Mike Treder (Discouraging, but true. I don’t agree that the Singularity is any different than any other offer of a ‘way out’, though.)

Posted at 1:01pm and tagged with: quote,.

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Most of us simply exist, never asking why it should be this way or how it might be different. We are either too hungry, too busy, or too afraid. The tiny fraction that does ask questions can’t agree on the answers, and anyway have no power to effect change.
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February 7th 2010

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Rene Daalder

Posted at 2:53pm and tagged with: quote, digital-literacy,.

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Meanwhile, the digital age is in full force on other fronts as well as Search engines are promising to give everybody access to the aggregate knowledge brought forth by human culture. Recently, I had some firsthand experiences with a number of institutions whose existence appears to be under siege due to the public’s changing relationship with all this information. For a project I’m currently working on, I visited the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle public library, which is a gorgeous architectural ode to the book, expressing great optimism about a culture worth saving. But in reality, the library holds only 780.000 books, all of which can be contained on one external hard drive you may find on sale for $240 at your local electronics store.
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February 7th 2010

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— From “Digital Ground” by Malcolm McCullough

Posted at 1:03pm and tagged with: quote, Architecture,.

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Man is no longer the measure of all things. The dimensions of human endeavor have expanded from bodily cubits to incomprehensibly tiny angstroms and incomprehensibly large light years. Architecture, comfortably situated in the middle of this spectrum, and rarely departing from human dimension by more than one or two orders of magnitude, has correspondingly lost authority.
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February 6th 2010

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Jeff Hawkins

Posted at 9:01am and tagged with: quote, singularity, the-future,.

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Exponential growth requires the exponential consumption of resources (matter, energy, and time), and there are always limits to this. Why should we think intelligent machines would be different? We will build machines that are more ‘intelligent’ than humans, and this might happen quickly, but there will be no singularity, no runaway growth in intelligence. There will be no single godlike intelligent machine. Like today’s computers, intelligent machines will come in many shapes and sizes and be applied to many different types of problems.
”Intelligent machines need not be anything like humans, emotionally and physically. An extremely intelligent machine need not have any of the emotions a human has, unless we go out of our way to make it so. No intelligent machine will ‘wake up’ one day and say ‘I think I will enslave my creators.’ Similar fears were expressed when the steam engine was invented. It won’t happen. The age of intelligent machines is starting. Like all previous technical revolutions, it will accelerate as more and more people work on it and as the technology improves. There will be no singularity or point in time where the technology itself runs away from us.
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February 5th 2010

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William Saletan on Which is More Important, Politics or Technology?

Posted at 11:06am and tagged with: quote, technology,.

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Gadgets have swept the world before, but mobile computing devices are different. Through applications and upgrades, they can acquire new powers. Apple alone offers more than 100,000 apps and has delivered more than 2 billion downloads. Phones are becoming maps, TVs, libraries, shopping tools, video cameras, car keys, and credit cards.
In more and more places, machines are running the world. On stock exchanges, high-speed computers armed with trading algorithms and superior pattern recognition are thrashing human competitors. Airline autopilots have become so reliable that human pilots can check out. In cars, software is beginning to assume responsibility for steering, braking, and parking. Drones are patrolling our borders, catching humans who try to sneak in. Computers are telling child-welfare agencies whether to take kids away from parents. Programs are running “virtual call centers,” measuring the output of dispersed salespeople and routing customer phone calls to the best performers. Computers don’t just work for us anymore. We work for them.
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February 4th 2010

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Vaclav Smil

Posted at 7:06pm and tagged with: quote, energy, environment,.

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We are now at a point in time comparable to 1850, which marked the outset of the last great energy transition. Then, about 85% of the world’s total primary energy supply came from biomass fuels. In 2005, about 85% of the total supply originated from fossil fuels. By the late 1890s, when fossil fuel consumption rose to equal the biomass contributions, each of them supplied about 0.7 TW (Terawatts or 1012 watts); today, even if we were to replace only 50% of all fossil fuels by renewable energies during the coming decades, we would have to displace coal and hydrocarbons flows of about 6 TW. That is an enormous shift.

Today there is no readily available non-fossil energy source that is large enough to be exploited on the requisite scale. True, energy carried by solar radiation is several orders of magnitude larger than any conceivable global energy demand, but so far, practical conversions into electricity (using photovoltaics) or large-scale industrial heat are quite negligible. Also, other renewable energy flows could not cover today’s worldwide total primary energy supply, even if, economics aside, they were fully exploited by current techniques. And even nuclear power’s contribution is constrained by limited fissionable material.
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February 3rd 2010

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Andrian Kreye

Posted at 9:01am and tagged with: quote, the-future,.

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The Web is like a car now; the fact that it is moving is no longer interesting. What matters is what we do with it, and where we’re going.
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February 2nd 2010

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Rene Daalder: The Age of Optimization

Posted at 12:01pm and tagged with: quote, the-future,.

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We are now routinely transporting our simulated “bodies” to alternate online worlds, where, besides social activities, we are doing most of our mind work in an inter-connective space shared by 1.5 billion internet users.
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February 1st 2010

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Annalee Newitz

Posted at 9:01am and tagged with: quote,.

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Apple is marketing the iPad as a computer, when really it’s nothing more than a media-consumption device - a convergence television, if you will. Think of it this way: One of the fundamental attributes of computers is that they are interactive and reconfigurable. You can change the way a computer behaves at a very deep level. Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you’re using. Hardly more interactive than changing channels on a TV. Sure, you can compose a short email or text message; you can use the Brushes app to draw a sketch. But those activities are not the same thing as programming the device to do something new. Unlike a computer, the iPad is simply not reconfigurable.
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