Author: PGR
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The aesthetics of decentralisation
Despite the cacophony of political conjecture, the story of blockchain so far is a tale of financial speculation, in which the cash rewards reaped by bankers and venture capitalists are largely a result of the techno-utopian hype. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The prospect of decentralizing control does not absolve us of…
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Free market bullshit
David Graeber’s on tour, plugging his new book on the remarkably successful and resonant “bullshit jobs” hypothesis. Snipping this from an interview with him at Dissent Magazine: Brooks: And this also helps to explain why market enthusiasts are wrong in their claims that it’s impossible or unlikely that capitalism will produce bullshit jobs. Graeber: Yes,…
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Roamin’ roads, redux
The WaPo [via the good folk at Moving History] reports on some interesting research which comes to a conclusion that (I hope) no regular reader here would be surprised by: current geographical levels of population and prosperity in Europe correlate strongly with the Roman road network laid down around two millennia ago. Dalgaard and his colleagues…
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Cold equations in the care vacuum
In a nutshell, over-reliance on computer ‘carers’, none of which can really care, would be a betrayal of the user’s human dignity – a fourth-level need in Maslow’s hierarchy. In the early days of AI, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum made himself very unpopular with his MIT colleagues by saying as much. ‘To substitute a…