Kevin Kelly and Jerry Kaplan discuss an AI future at the 2016 Machine Learning and Market for Intelligence Conference.
Category Archives: Science & Technology
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Wikipedia
: “In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow—a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.”
My buddy Henry has been praising this book for years and I finally got around to reading it.
IBM’s intranet radio station
IBM Radio is a live-streamed intranet community station cofounded by Azis and a few other company designers in Austin. Over the last year, the station has blossomed, and now anyone else in the company can either listen in or record their own show. Those who take part consider it a community hub for the company, and IBMers around the world tune in every day. […] Today, IBM offices throughout the globe have radio “studios,” although Austin is its headquarters. The station heads have a conference room there that’s been soundproofed and filled with recording equipment.
Employees from around the world contribute their own shows that include call-ins about career advice, a show that features weekly guests who talk about what’s going on at the company, and even shows where upper-level executives just tell interesting stories. The station tracks unique listeners—the number of individuals listening in—and found that it reaches between 5,000 and 6,000 people daily.
Fast Company
Quit social media?
“My second objection concerns the idea that social media is harmless. Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.”
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (New York Times)
Does Time Exist?
Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs
“In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.”
“But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.”
Is the Self-Driving Car Un-American?
I don’t know which is more difficult for me to believe: That humans will be on Mars within my lifetime… or that cars will drive themselves. Apparently, both of those things are going to happen and I’m fine with that. “Our republic of drivers is poised to become a nation of passengers,” writes Robert Moor in New York Magazine. Mr. Moor provides a most thoughtful look at where we’ve been and where we’re headed. A few excerpts:
Will middle-aged men still splurge on outlandishly fast (or, at least, fast-looking) self-driving vehicles? Will young men still buy cheap ones and then blow their paychecks tricking them out? If we are no longer forced to steer our way through a traffic jam, will it become less existentially frustrating, or more? What will become of the cinematic car chase? What about the hackneyed country song where driving is a metaphor for life? Will race-car drivers one day seem as remotely seraphic to us as stunt pilots? Will we all one day assume the entitled air of the habitually chauffeured?
Many readers currently blanch at the news that the roads will one day be filled with cars hurtling brainlessly along at high speed. But those people fail to realize one thing: They already are.
Driving correlates with obesity rates, which, separate studies have shown, correlate with poverty rates. Heavy street traffic lowers real-estate values, and the people who live on those streets tend to spend less time outside and have worse relationships with neighbors. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people ages 15 to 29. Emissions have a disproportionate effect on the health of communities of color, and nearly 90 percent of air-pollution deaths occur in poorer countries. A quarter of America’s greenhouse gases are released by our transportation, imposing a future climate cost that will be paid mostly by the nation’s, and the world’s, least fortunate. Meanwhile, 80 percent of car capacity goes unused, which means that most cars on the road, which can seat at least five people, carry only one.
For those of us who see driving as a kind of imprisonment — which, spatially speaking, it quite literally is — an extra hour to work or play (or eat, or read, or meditate, or fix our hair and do our makeup) will be cherished. But for those who see driving as a physical expression of freedom — which, spatially speaking, it also quite literally is — the end of driving will feel like confinement.
Deepgram finds speech with A.I.
“Searching through recordings is really difficult. In terms of workflow, usually the raw audio is transcribed into text, which is then fed into a search tool. If you transcribe using human transcription, it’s too time consuming and expensive. If you try to do it with automatic speech-to-text then search accuracy is the problem. […] Deepgram is an artificial intelligence tool that makes searching for keywords in speeches, private conversations and phone calls faster, cheaper and easier than the old way of doing things. Deepgram indexes audio files in more than half the time of a human transcriber, and costs only 75¢ per hour of audio.”
Amazing. Try it for yourself and see if it doesn’t blow your panties off.
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
“From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on understanding time itself.”
Sleeping into the future is what we do every night.
“Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.” — Albert Einstein’s message in the time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
We know that complete certainty must always elude us. We know that for certain.
“Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein
“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” — Richard Feynman
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.
No one can really explain how memories are formed and retrieved. Nor can anyone explain away Proust’s paradoxical contention: that the past cannot truly be recovered by searching our memories, by interrogating them, by rewinding the film or reaching back into the drawer; rather, that the essence of the past, when it comes to us at all,comes unbidden.
If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run the other way as fast as you can. Nothing good can come from meeting yourself. — Charles Yu
We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.
But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?
Our conscious brains invent the concept of time over and over again, inferring it from memory and extrapolating from change. And time is indispensable to our awareness of self. […] You order the slices of your life. You edit the film even as it records.
“There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.” — The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
“We know it all now, with our thoughts travelling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.” — Ali Smith
If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual.
Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good. […] The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more.
“We perceive time only because we know we have to die.” — Heidegger
Time Travel: A History (review)
Maria Popova describes James Gleick’s new book Time Travel: A History, “a dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature.” A few snippets from her lengthy review:
“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.”
“Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”
“The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing.”
“If we have only the one universe — if the universe is all there is — then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.”
One of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers.
UPDATE: From a good piece in The Guardian: “Howard and his editors also manage a number of celebrity Beatle-fan coups, like the day when, to their astonishment, they spotted a 14-year-old Sigourney Weaver looming lankily over her fellow teenyboppers in footage of a 1964 show.”