
Why Are There No New Googles and Amazons?
The internet has matured, making many new internet-based companies comparatively low-techToday’s startups have targeted a much different set of technologies than did startups in past decades.
Read More ›Today’s startups have targeted a much different set of technologies than did startups in past decades.
Read More ›The late philosopher Jerry Fodor (1935—2017) said that the reason “we’re all materialists” is that the alternatives seem even worse. Transhumanism, had he lived to see it develop, would give him pause for further reflection.
Read More ›Advocates point to the success of Kurzweil’s past predictions as evidence that his Singularity is indeed Near, as his 2005 book predicts or Nearer, as his forthcoming one (June 2020) does. But questions bubbled to the surface.
Read More ›Kessler told his audience at the COSM National Technology Summit that Big Tech companies are so vulnerable that, for legal reasons, the United States is the only safe place for their headquarters.
Read More ›About the Big Tech companies, he says, “The story is not that they have done a lot of bad things but that they have not done enough good things. That remains the core challenge of Silicon Valley.”
Read More ›In the documents Vorhies unearthed, Google seemed to be "intending to scope the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objectively true."
Read More ›Gregory Coppola’s revelations about Google’s politically biased search engine shone a spotlight on how algorithms are written.
Read More ›Everything has a history, including Silicon Valley. According to a new media theorist, an influential Valley philosophy might underlie the current attitudes, values, and beliefs: There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others. Douglas Rushkoff, “The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley” at Medium In an excerpt from his new book, Team Human (2019), Rushkoff traces the history to a post-Cold War collaboration centered on Read More ›
Technology is vital in commerce and war. Corporations spend billions in development and don’t want to get ripped off. Technology and AI, more than ever, determine military superiority. What are the laws that protect technology and how are they enforced? Show Notes 01:20 | Introduction; Daniel M. Ogden, J.D. 03:06 | Reasons for protected technology 04:00 | Determining what needs Read More ›
In this third part of their reflection on Yuval Harari’s Atlantic piece anticipating technology’s march toward tyranny, Jay Richards and Robert J. Marks discuss the many assumptions therein. At the root of these speculations is an overestimation of the power of information processing systems and an underestimation of the human ability to be the true governors of their creations, not their docile “pets”. Harari rightly points to a better understanding of the mind as the way forward, but fails to appreciate its true nature, resulting in a dismal prognosis for art, religion, and democracy. Read More ›
If we have simply taken the big software, hardware, and social media companies who dominate our lives for granted, the reactions from the business world to Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy should give us a lot to think about.
Read More ›