Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • a mixture of Vatican clergy and the Wizard of Oz: on hype, strategy, and postmodernity

    Don’t tell my mother I said this*, but as time goes by I’ve really come to appreciate the value of paying attention to the experience of old hands. Exhibit A comes with what I will gladly concede is a hefty slice of self-aggrandisement. Rodney Brooks has been working with robots and autonomous vehicles for almost…

  • mixing McLuhan and Marx (Butlerian coda)

    Sometimes you write a thing in a fit of emotional response, and then the universe sidles up, says “oh, that pushed your buttons, did it?” and offers you another hit, and you demonstrate your own weakness to yourself once again, returning like a dog to its own vomit, because it’s just too damned perfect an…

  • Butlerian jihad (slight return)

    I have mostly tried to avoid both consuming and contributing to The “AI” Discourse, having in essence made my point almost a year ago and encountered little since then that has served to do anything but reinforce my feelings on the matter. But I’m breaking that fast for this observation, which is really (and perhaps…

  • geoengineering is just another suitcase word

    … and that’s as good a reason to distrust it on principle as any other. Via Jay, here’s a rant from Jeff Maurer (a Daily Show writer, I think?) about reductive attitudes to geoengineering which, through its own deployment of reductive attitudes, illustrates (presumably unintentionally) exactly why the reductive attitudes it attacks are justifiable. It…

  • cultural-fracking-as-a-service (or: an abjuration of “artificial intelligence”)

    I’m currently in the nuts-and-bolts phase of booting up my consultancy practice: doing stuff like establishing the business as a legal entity, starting bank accounts, buying domain names and (re)making websites. It’s the sort of stuff that makes a heretofore conceptual goal very concrete, very quickly: my business is actually a thing-in-the-world now. As a…