描写

Half-Artificial Intelligence (From Back-Office to Back-Brain)

Prediction of an emergent trend: integration of cheap overseas labour into ‘intelligent’ systems, to fill the gaps where ‘hard AI’ still fails. The press is making a lot of ‘offshoring’ — the movement of call centres, support departments and the like to countries where educational standards are high, and labour is cheap. Ignoring the politics for a bit, this is interesting in other ways: once the infrastructure for such services is in place, the supply side of this market will naturally be looking for higher-margin ways to exploit any surpluses. Imagine similar businesses offering the ‘clever, value-added bit’ to intelligent …

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Viewmaster goes Atomic

Speaking of 100 Suns, what could be more then than a Viewmaster reel of 3D images of atomic tests? Coming soon at Atom Central. I only stumbled over this because I’m still hunting for the image that I hoped would be in 100 Suns — a Rapatronic photograph of a desert test that I hope I can find and post later, with some thoughts. Actually, I’m off to search the amazingly comprehensive The Bomb Project for it. This might take some time…

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Two Things

That thing that happens sometimes, when you are lost in thought and you kick your foot against something in the world, fiercely hard, by accident, and suddenly you are aware that you have feet, and of the world, and it’s very funny, in a Zen kind of oh-here, the world kind of way. Today I took my headphones off in the Number 38 bus at Victoria, and the bus conductor was ringing the bell steadily, slowly, like a call to prayer, every note dying before the next.

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Heft

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of …

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A Painting of Heaven

I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon: When a whole crowd …

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Monthly Archives

October 2003