One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moores law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. Its as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.
http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_lanier.html
Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Popular Posts
-
Very dry, dull book with some basic financial info like ROI and cash flow. Not a lot here.
-
Some good stuff from a Canadian futurist: - The rising power of the knowledge worker - Continuous training replaces job security; respect is...
-
Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue...
-
I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year. The event overall was ...
-
It's been almost exaclty three years since I've updated this blog. In that three years, I've achieved a lot -- I've gone aft...
-
Here's my (edited) journal entry for this event dated 12/01/98: Wow. I just sessioned and started reading "The Tao of Physics...
-
Nother confirmation Of einstein... the first images of light escaping a black hole show that they lose energy. In this case, it was a superm...
-
Not a bad audio book, but I expected more. Big ideas: Build a high performance, high-trust culture; Identify desired results and un...
-
Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Dont j...
-
I'm sure someone else has written the rules of business out in terms of the Bushido, but here's my take: Truthfulness You must speak...