Tag Archives: future

FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY ONE

Matt Jones in the Southern Review, via Longreads. While the U.S.S.R. eventually won the space race in 1961 by sending Yuri Gagarin into orbit, the Americans stole the show again on July 16, 1969, when NASA launched a Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida. Four days and nearly 240,000Continue reading “FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY ONE”

FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR

From RM Vaughan’s interview with Paul Vermeersch about Self Defence for the Brave and Happy. RM Vaughan: The book moves effortlessly between prophetic pronouncements and intimate, personal observations. Is it a goal of the book to conflate the two in order to make the reader more keenly aware that we live in prophetic times? PaulContinue reading “FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR”

FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE

From Henry Farrell‘s “Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans.” Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social mediaContinue reading “FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE”

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY EIGHT

From Alfred Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. “Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skillContinue reading “THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY EIGHT”

THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

From Douglas Coupland’s Escaping the superfuture. Lately I’ve been experiencing a new temporal sensation that’s odd to articulate, but I do think is shared by most people. It’s this: until recently, the future was always something out there up ahead of us, something to anticipate or dread, but it was always away from the present. ButContinue reading “THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT”

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY NINE

Kevin Kelly on three breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. In the next 10 years, 99 percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly or indirectly, will be nerdily autistic, supersmart specialists. In fact, this won’t really be intelligence, at least not as we’ve come to think of it. Indeed, intelligence may be aContinue reading “ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY NINE”