Archive

Virtual Futures Salon: Radical Technologies, with Adam Greenfield

I am pro­found­ly envi­ous of peo­ple who get to write about set­tled domains or sort of set­tled states of affairs in human events. For me, I was deal­ing with a set of tech­nolo­gies which are either recent­ly emerged or still in the process of emerg­ing. And so it was a con­tin­u­al Red Queen’s race to keep up with these things as they announce them­selves to us and try and wrap my head around them, under­stand what it was that they were propos­ing, under­stand what their effects were when deployed in the world.

What Our Algorithms Will Know in 2100

A lot of the sci­ence fic­tion I love the most is not about these big ques­tions. You read a book like The Diamond Age and the most inter­est­ing thing in The Diamond Age is the medi­a­tron­ic chop­sticks, the small detail that Stephenson says okay, well if you have nan­otech­nol­o­gy, peo­ple are going to use this tech­nol­o­gy in the most pedes­tri­an, kind of ordi­nary ways.

Cyborg Anthropology and the Evaporation of the Interface

When you look at your online pro­file, is that real­ly you? It’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of you that can be act­ed on when you’re not there. But where do you end and the machine begins? The thing is that humans and tech­nol­o­gy have coe­volved with each oth­er over time, being very very cocre­ative. We have sur­vived because of tech­nol­o­gy, and tech­nol­o­gy has sur­vived because of us.

Reimagining Everyday Devices as Information-Delivery Systems

What we’re try­ing to think about now is, take the sort of ven­er­a­ble light bulb and recast it as a com­pu­ta­tion­al appli­ance. So, how do we take some­thing that’s been so remark­ably suc­cess­ful and infuse it with com­pu­ta­tion­al abilities?