“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel’s famous lament captures the disappointment of those of us raised on mid-20th-century technological optimism.
"I just find AI to be creatively soulless": Casey Hudson on the controversial tech and Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic
"I’m just really unimpressed with it."
We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
Innovation that truly serves us all is in scarce supply. That’s a problem.
The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Second Edition
“In an age in which the inexhaustible power of scientific technology makes all things possible, it remains to be seen where we will draw the line, where we will be able to say, here are possibilities that wisdom suggest we avoid.” First published to great acclaim in 1988, Langdon Winner’s groundbreaking exploration of the political, social, and philosophical implications of technology is timelier than ever. He demonstrates that choices about the kinds of technical systems we build and use are actually choices about who we want to be and what kind of world we want to create—technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice. A seminal text in the history and philosophy of science, this new edition includes a new chapter, preface, and postscript by the author.
On technological optimism and technological pragmatism
"There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”
Telepath: building a new kind of computer
So, we made a thing: Let’s back up: for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with computers, fascinated not just by what they can do but what they could become. Like many, I took my early inspiration from science fiction. I dreamed of someday having something like the Enterprise’s computer. And why not? Science fiction has always driven scientists, engineers, and inventors to create real things that change the world.
A quote from Andrew Quinn
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the …
Quote Origin: The Optimist Invents the Airplane and the Pessimist the Parachute – Quote Investigator®
George Bernard Shaw? Gladys Bronwyn Stern? W. H. H. MacKellar? Gil Stern? Mack McGinnis?
Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs
In my opinion, one of the best critiques of modern AI design comes from a 1992 talk by the researcher Mark Weiser where he ranted against “copilot” as a metaphor for AI.
Solarpunk Futures
Players remember the stories of how their Ancestors built a Utopia.
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What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?
We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI
‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley
As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them
Why do we collect things?
Desire, nostalgia, loss, and completeness in the personal collections of Joseph Cornell, Peter Blake, and Vladimir Nabokov
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring. — LessWrong
There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about t…
Our Longing for Inconvenience
People are pining for old technologies—CD players, VCRs, Walkmans. What’s behind our longing for inconvenience?
