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Conscious Computers
The New York Times magazine last Sunday had an article on social robots: work, mostly at M.I.T., on robots which interact with humans. They interact in very very simple ways. But since we naturally impute agency to almost anything possible–e.g., the weather–it doesn’t take much for us humans to be convinced that there is really…
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Media Monopoly
The current media news is about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t happen to read the Wall Street Journal. And newspaper readership is declining overall. So I think it is fair to ask: does this purchase really matter? Is the media spending a lot of time on it because it is…
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Creating Reality
My original plan for this blog has evidently flagged. I find myself often thinking of things I would like to write about, but I’m not making the time to actually write them. I’m switching to a new plan. My goal now is to write a new post every day (perhaps every weekday), writing for about…
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Psychohistory and finance
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, psychohistory is the scientific study of human behaviour. Psychohistorians are able to predict what large numbers of people will do. However, the theory only works when the people are unaware of the predictions. In the original Foundation trilogy, the goal of the psychohistorians (the Second Foundation) was to create a…
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Micropayments
The web has always struggled with the issue of how authors (or, as they are now called, content creators) get paid. I’ve been working with free software since before the web existed, so this question of how to get paid is not a new issue for me, but here I want to focus on web…