When YouTube...........................

 

.............................................watches you back.

Well, yes......................

 I saw a description of Bitcoin being everything you didn't understand about computers combined with everything you don't understand about money. Now I feel seen.

-Chris Lynch, from here

The fate of nations...............................

      We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.  The fate of nations has turned on their ability to harness computing power. Globalization as we know it wouldn't exist without the trade in semiconductors and the electronic products they make possible.  America's military primacy stems largely from its ability to apply chips to military uses.  Asia's tremendous rise over the past half century has been built on a foundation of silicon as its growing economies have come to specialize in fabricating chips and assembling the computers and smartphones that these integrated circuits make possible.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Unplugged...............................

  “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”

-Wendell Berry, from here

Adaptable...................................

 The meaning of rational behaviour depends critically on the context of the situation and there are generally many ways of being rational.  We distinguish axiomatic rationality, as used by economists, from evolutionary rationality, was practiced by people.  Many so-called 'biases' are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty.  Evolution in this uncertain world has led characteristics which are primarily adaptive to become embodied in human reasoning.  Humans are successful at adapting to the environment in which they find themselves, and have not evolved to perform rapid calculations of well-defined problems at which computers excel.  This is because the problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Watching and wondering..................

The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Things that truly change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. They need to build up ecosystems around them and identify meaningful problems to solve. That takes time.

In the interim we are mostly left to watch and wonder.

-Greg Satell. as culled from here

thanks Michael

ordered the book

Yet............................

"Remember that computers have no common sense."

-Ray Dalio

On emotional connection.......................or,

.........................................hoping computers stay unmotivated:

David Foster Wallace once said, "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."  In many ways, this is very true.  If you never get bored, you'd be a step closer to being a computer.  Computers do all kinds of boring things for us, and they do them quite well and very quickly.  Computers don't need game mechanics.  They don't get bored or unmotivated.  Yet we are designing offices as if we were machines - but we're not.  Jane McGonigal, a researcher and game designer, argues that by its very nature, efficiency entails removing game mechanics form the design of labor.  In other words, we're taking the fun out of it.
     Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we're now realizing he was also right about some stuff.  When you remove people's emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce efforts, it's soul killing.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

Hate it when.........................

................................................................this happ

Can't we all just get along.......................?

Megan McArdle asks for a fair-minded discussion about a fairly important topic.   Good luck with that:

The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.

As they say in our neighborhood, read the whole thing (including the Coyote Blog posts she references).

On potted plants................................

     This problem isn't unique to the aviators of Flight 447, of course.   It happens all the time, within offices and on freeways, as we're working on our smartphones and multitasking from the couch.  "This mess of a situation is one hundred percent our own fault," said Stephen Casner, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied dozens of accidents like Air France Flight 447.  "We started with a creative, flexible, problem-solving human and a mostly dumb computer that's good at rote, repetitive tasks like monitoring.  So we let the dumb computer fly and the novel-writing, scientific-theorizing, jet-flying humans sit in front of the computer like potted plants watching for blinking lights.  It's always been difficult to learn how to focus.  It's even harder now."

-Charles Duhigg,  Smarter Faster Better:  The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

This would explain a lot...........................

      Examination of the mind structure shows that its function is comparable to the hardware of a computer and the software represents the programming by society as well as by inherited influences.  The fundamental innocence of mankind is based on the reality that the human mind is incapable of discerning truth from falsehood.  It has no innate defense against the utilization of its hardware to play any introduced software program without prior approval, discernment, or options of the will (e. g., the impact of the media).

-David Hawkins,  Discovery of the Presence of God:  Devotional Nonduality

A power shortage.........................?

A read-worthy essay on the future, evolution, artificial intelligence, and us pesky humans may be found here.   An excerpt:

That’s a big potential roadblock for any quest for true artificial intelligence or brain-uploading machinery. Estimates of what you’d need in terms of computing power to approach the oomph of a human brain (measured by speed and complexity of operations) come with an energy efficiency budget that needs to be about a billion times better than that wall.

To put that in a different context, our brains use energy at a rate of about 20 watts. If you wanted to upload yourself intact into a machine using current computing technology, you’d need a power supply roughly the same as that generated by the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant in China, the biggest in the world. To take our species, all 7.3 billion living minds, to machine form would require an energy flow of at least 140,000 petawatts. That’s about 800 times the total solar power hitting the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Clearly human transcendence might be a way off.

via

On mining big data...........................

"Plumbing the depths of chaos, it divines meaning."

"In the 1980's,it was still possible for an amateur to learn everything humans knew about the planets.  Today, that's no longer true.  The Alps of raw data would take more than one lifetime to summit, passing countless Ph D dissertations at campsites along the trail."

"How extraordinary that we've created peripheral brains to discover truths about nature that we seek.  We're teaching them how to work together calmly as a society, share data at lightning speed, and to cooperate so much better than we do, rubbing brains together in the invisible drawing room we sometimes call the 'cloud.'  Undaunted, despite our physical and mental limitations, we design robots to continue the quest we began long ago:  making sense of nature."

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us

Confidence building................

According to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers’ central bank, the total amount of outstanding derivative contracts has declined from a 2012 peak of $700tn to about $550tn. To put this into perspective, the figure has fallen from just under three times the value of all the assets in the world to a little over twice the value.

We are reliant on their risk modelling but these models break down in precisely the extreme situations they are designed to protect us against.

Accounting practices provide an appearance of precision that may be a poor guide to a world characterised by multiple risks and radical uncertainty.

-John Kay, as culled from here

The advantage of "big data"............

The question arises:  now that gasoline is so much cheaper than several years ago, what is happening to the extra money in consumer wallets (estimated at an average of $700 per year)?   The conventional wisdom has been that we are paying down debt or saving.  Not so fast, says Chase:

"The J.P. Morgan study sifts through data from 25.6 million holders of Chase credit or debit cards, allowing a more detailed look at spending habits from near the end of 2013, when gasoline prices were high, to early 2015, when they had bottomed out."

I would say that having access to the financial behavior of 25.6 million people, and having the computing power to make sense of it all, constitutes a significant advantage.  For the record, Chase's computers believe we are spending most of the "windfall."

Back story here.

via

Wondering what Watson thinks of this..........

via

Imagine if you will...............................

      For bankers in the sixties, the computer was arcane and mysterious.  The IBM mainframe computer had given rise to an entirely new race of mutant humans known as programmers and analysts, who spoke a strange language, carried pens in plastic pocket-protectors, and thrived on the power that their unique knowledge gave them over ordinary mortals.  "The banks were having a tough time coping with the computer," said Tom Paine, the rocket scientist and former consultant to Citibank.  "The information revolutions at the time was full of magic and sorcerers.  It was a closed technology, and if your weren't a computer programmer you couldn't hope to fathom it."  Paine remembers when computer departments would ask top management yearly for increases of 20 to 40 percent in computer-related expenses, and the bankers had no idea whatsoever whether these requests were reasonable or absurd.  Bankers, Paine said, fell victim to almost every snake oil computer salesman who got in the door and waxed enthusiastic about the incredible power computers had to solve every problem.  All of them would begin by pointing to the terminal and saying, "Imagine, if you will..."
-Phillip L. Zweig,  Wriston:  Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremecy

Uh-oh........................................

The human brain is not a computer.
Your mind is alive.
And it’s motivated.
Once you’ve come to terms with this mad reality.
Everything in life will suddenly become clear.

-Tom Asacker, as excerpted from here

404..........................................

A smattering of the best "error" pages can be found here.

thanks gerard