tag archive: technology

Haven’t read the whole article yet, but good stuff so far:

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?

So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with …

Still working on The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil.

These opening excerpts to chapter five (on the overlapping revolutions of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) are striking:

There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. … But what would happen if technology continued to evolve so much more rapidly than the animal and vegetable kingdoms? Would it displace us in the supremacy of earth? Just as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race. … We are daily giving [machines] greater power and supplying by all sorts …

Just getting started on Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and enjoying it so far, although this is a speed bump:

The biggest obstacle here is the understandable hesitation of publishers to make the electronic versions of their books available, given the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry.

I thought the problem was more that the music industry doesn’t have a clue, and brought on their own decline by turning out mass-produced crap that surprisingly didn’t sell as well when more entertainment alternatives became available.

He goes on to discuss the growth of electronic readers:

The primary issue is going to be finding a secure means of making electronic information available. This is a fundamental concern for every level of our economy. Everything–including physical products, once nanotechnology-based manufacturing becomes a reality in about twenty years–is becoming information.
–Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, p55-56

Earlier in the book, Kurzweil discusses intelligence permeating the universe in a coming epoch of man/machine expansion, but I …

If you found this post looking for how to make the HP Scanjet 2400 Scanner work in GNU/Linux, perhaps this post will help you: Yes, your HP Scanjet 2400 might work in Ubuntu and maybe even other flavors of GNU/Linux.

This isn’t so much an Architectures of Control kind of item, but Dan Lockton’s post about his Epson printer made me think about my own annoyance with my HP scanner. Let’s call it an Architecture of Annoyance.

First, continuing on the pecuniary theme of a recent post, please indulge me in telling you about how I came to own the HP ScanJet 2400. Warning: The story contains a personal revelation of possible copyright infringement. (The copyright musing sprouted all kinds of shoots and leaves, but seems appropriate for a post about optical scanners.)

I don’t have sophisticated scanning needs. I previously owned some cheapo Astra scanner that worked adequately although clunkily and finally went kerplunk while I was scanning …

The picture here at the top of the post is the cell phone that my wife and I have been using for the past five years. (Well, not this cell phone, but the same model, a Nokia 5120, and we each have our own.)

Pretty old and clunky, huh? They’ve worked great for us. It may not be surprising to hear this from a guy who is interested in “free” software, but I can be frugal about a lot of things. (Cheap! My friends and family might say.) And these phones and our plan have been fairly cheap. They were free through a corporate discount plan and then $30 per month total for both phones and 60 anytime minutes each. We probably average about 5 minutes per month. They’re just for emergencies or very brief calls to each other or for long distance calls.

Most of the time, they’re turned off. We’re just not big phone talkers. I …