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The World of Tomorrow 75 Years Later
April 30th will mark the 75th anniversary of the opening of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. With a decade of Depression behind them and a world war looming ahead, 44 million visitors came to catch a...
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Innovation, Technology, and the Church (Part One)
Last week I read a spirited essay by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry titled “Peter Thiel and the Cathedral.” Gobry’s post was itself inspired by a discussion of technology, politics, and theology between Thiel,...
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Innovation, Technology, and the Church (Part Two)
What has Silicon Valley to do with Jerusalem? More than you might think, but that question, of course, is a riff on Tertullian’s famous query, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It was a...
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Unplugged
I’m back. In fact, I’ve been back for more than a week now. I’ve been back from several days spent in western North Carolina. It’s beautiful country out there, and, where I was staying, it was...
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The Stories We Tell About Technology
Michael Solana wants to put an end to dystopian science-fiction. Enough already. No more bleak, post-apocalyptic stories; certainly no more of these stories in which technology is somehow to blame for...
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Preserving the Person in the Emerging Kingdom of Technological Force
What does Iceland look like through Google Glass? Turns out it looks kind of like Iceland. Consider this stunning set of photographs showcasing a tool built by Silica Labs which allows users to post...
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Our Little Apocalypses
An incoming link to my synopsis of Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology alerted me to a short post on Quartz about a new book by an author named Michael Harris. The book, The End of Absence:...
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Waiting for Socrates … So We Can Kill Him Again and Post the Video on Youtube
It will come as no surprise, I’m sure, if I tell you that the wells of online discourse are poisoned. It will come as no surprise because critics have complained about the tone of online discourse for...
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A Few Items for Your Consideration
Here are a few glimpses of the future ranging from the near and plausible, to the distant and uncertain. In another world–one, I suppose, in which I get paid to write these posts–I’d write more about...
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Are Human Enhancement and AI Incompatible?
A few days ago, in a post featuring a series of links to stories about new and emerging technologies, I included a link to a review of Nick Bostrom’s new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers,...
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Technology Will Not Save Us
A day after writing about technology, culture, and innovation, I’ve come across two related pieces. At Walter Mead’s blog, the novel use of optics to create a cloaking effect provided a springboard...
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Our Very Own Francis Bacon
Few individuals have done as much to chart the course of science and technology in the modern world as the the Elizabethan statesmen and intellectual, Francis Bacon. But Bacon’s defining achievement...
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Building Worlds In Which We Matter
Sometimes, when you start writing, you end up somewhere very different from where you thought you were going at the outset. That’s what happened with my last post which ended up framing Peter Thiel as...
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Simulated Futures
There’s a lot of innovation talk going on right now, or maybe it is just that I’ve been more attuned to it of late. Either way, I keep coming across pieces that tackle the topic of technological...
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Why We’re Anxious About Technological Stagnation, And Why We Shouldn’t Be
William Robinson Leigh – ‘”Visionary City,” 1908 Virginia Postrel thinks that Peter Thiel is wrong about the future. I think she is about half right, roughly. If I read her correctly, Postrel’s thesis...
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Thinking About Big Data
I want to pass on to you three pieces on what has come to be known as Big Data, a diverse set of practices enabled by the power of modern computing to accumulate and process massive amounts of data....
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Reading Frankenstein
For some time now I’ve wanted to write about Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic tale, first published in 1818, has long struck me as one of those works whose brilliance has been dulled...
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Reading Frankenstein: Chapters 1 and 2
When I began writing the first Reading Frankenstein post, I did not anticipate putting down nearly 2,000 words. I’m pretty sure that’s not the optimal length for this sort of exercise. My goal moving...
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Reading Frankenstein: Chapter 5
Earlier posts in this series: Walton’s Letters, Chapters 1 & 2, Chapters 3 & 4. _____________________________________________________ In kindly plugging this series of posts on Twitter, Matt...
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Reading Frankenstein: Chapter 6
Earlier posts in this series: Walton’s Letters, Chapters 1 & 2, Chapters 3 & 4, Chapter 5. _____________________________________________________ Last month, in the Guardian’s “My Hero” series,...
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