I received from the gloved hand of my postal carrier this afternoon an envelope from WIRED magazine hoping to entice me to read their ink and pulp plea to subscribe to their ink and pulp magazine with the promise of a Free Gift! inside the envelope which turned out, of all things, to be a sad little slip of paper with a conventional 2011 calendar printed on it of a kind that could not possibly be of the least use to the possessor of a single computer or media device, that is to say, to anybody surely who would ever subscribe to their technolowhizbang offering.
Maybe Wired would get some subscribers (and relevance) if they released the full Manning-Lamo chat logs.
ReplyDeleteAin't that the truth!
ReplyDelete> . . .of a kind that could not possibly be of the least use. . .
ReplyDelete> to anybody surely who would ever subscribe to their technolowhizbang
> offering.
Perhaps it's an example of the subject of an article in the
latest issue: "Artificial Intelligence is here. But it's nothing
like we expected." You just need to learn to adjust your
expectations, Dale, and let the Singularity flow over you
naturally.
(No, I haven't read the article -- it just struck me passing
the window of one of the newsstands in the bus station.)
Don't you love it when futurologists who have been handwaving about techno-transcendence just around the corner every hour on the hour for a generation turn around after endless failure and say, well, actually we've had cognitive enhancement for as long as we've had education, we've had virtual reality for as long as we've had literature, we've had nanotechnology for as long as we've had biochemistry, or, hell, ceramics, we've had the singularity for as long as we've had an uncertain future, we've been cyborgs since we've had eyeglasses, clothes, used language, whatever... and it doesn't occur to them that nobody ever needed a futurologist to point out that chemistry or literature exist or are worthy of discussion?
ReplyDeleteYou know, if this dash to the future ever runs out of interest for you, the archaic revival is really picking up some steam.
ReplyDeleteBetween Libertarian fitness regimes, Paleo-diet cults and the 2012/Terrence McKenna/Stoned Ape Theory crowd there's been a lot of boost to the Pleistocene-scene.
I've got the stoned ape thing down already.
ReplyDelete