An assortment of articles I found interesting to read. Perhaps you will too.
- “Capitalism, Socialism or Fascism?“, George Washington, 25 October 2009 — What’s America’s new economic system?
- “Recessional“, The New Republic, Jason Zengerle, 24 October 2009 — Bio of Rory Stewart, “the T. E. Lawrence of Afghanistan”
- “The Myth of ‘Deadbeat Dads’“, Stephen Baskerville, Liberty magazine, June 2002
- “The Myth of ‘Deadbeat Dads’“, Stuart Miller, Men’s Insight magazine, 1998
And now for something different from the usual fare of the FM website: “The Mind at AI: Horseless Carriage to Clock“, William C. Hill, AI Magazine, Summer 1989 — Abstract:
Commentators on AI converge on two goals they believe define the field: (1) to better understand the mind by specifying computational models and (2) to construct computer systems that perform actions traditionally regarded as mental. We should recognize that AI has a third, hidden, more basic aim; that the first two goals are special cases of the third; and that the actual technical substance of AI concerns only this more basic aim. This third aim is to establish new computation-based representational media, media in which human intellect can come to express itself with different clarity and force. This article articulates this proposal by showing how the intellectual activity we label AI can be likened in revealing ways to each of five familiar technologies.
Afterword
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Ah yes AI Magazine I still have a stack of them in storage somewhere. Of course long gone now. Hill was right, when people realized that AI was more ordinary then the all marketing hype of the 80s suggested, the market vaporized.
He could simplify things by just saying technology rather then “representative media” all the time. The irony is it is a hang-up about the new mode of representation.
AI started out as a mishmash of various techniques for various reasons including such now mainstream things as object oriented programming for instance, but it missed the reality that there wasn’t a scarcity of computation there was a scarcity of communication in the world, and so it didn’t foresee the huge changes the internet would bring.
At this point the computing industries are getting to the point where they have almost exhausted the latent need for simple communication. It’s been a fun ride and few have the desire to deal with the real problems of human psychology and sociology that further progress will require.
Object Oriented Programming. Ah, ADA, i knew her well, back in the day. :)
Article #1 was most excellent. The link to #3 is not working {FM: now fixed!} . But while I was at “Liberty” I found this article which I think is rather interesting: “The System Is Broken“, by Jon Harrison — Excerpt:
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Fabius Maximus replies: Thank you for posting this! Nice to see another sharing my view of our political system, as expressed in Politics of the FM site: radical leftist reformer or right-wing iconoclast?
Oblat: there is a difference in meaning between the words ‘than’ and ‘then’.