Category: ideas

“A scan of recent academic titles reveals an abundance of books drawing on what might be called ‘the cyborg concept’ – the idea that people and technology are converging and merging, perhaps even already inextricably fused. What was once a speculative notion about the shape of things to come has become a normal part of the conversation, at least in some quadrants of scholarly life.”

For some time, many experts have been saying that high-density cities are no longer essential for business success. The internet has made it unnecessary for workers and companies to always be in close proximity. But “creative activities — whether economic, cultural or political — thrive on density. In a global economy, with uncertain markets and changing conditions, the most advanced and speculative sectors need concentrations of resources — talent, management, technological infrastructure and buildings. They need dense environments where information does not simply circulate but gets produced. The geography of the global economy consists of both world-spanning networks and these concentrations of resources, as provided by about 40 global cities.”

Long copyrights are choking creativity, and make no sense as incentives to further creativity. “The flood of free content on the internet has shown that most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations. To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights would be enough. The 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a good place to start.”

With computers getting smart enough to beat even the best chess players, some are asking about the “artistic” abilities of machines. If a machine, by the use of sheer calculation, creates something artistic, is the machine artistic? Can machines practice art? “Is the system intelligent? It is because it produces intelligent behavior. If it does something artistic, then it is artistic. It does not matter how it did it.”

Network theory is hot. “As an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components — particles and subparticles — and toward a novel conception of the group. ‘In biology, we’ve had great success stories — the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don’t have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks’.”

A new film claims Hitler was gay, based on evidence sketchy enough that historians (even gay ones) are laughing it off. A yet-to-be-released book claims that Abe Lincoln was gay, and the book’s author insists that he has evidence that George Washington, General Custer, and either Lewis or Clark (he forgets which) all were, as well. All of which begs the question: isn’t this 2003? Haven’t we gotten past the breathless whispering over men sleeping with men that dominated the gossip sheets of the 1980s? Or is there still something so exotic about homosexuality that even the suspicion of it in a historical figure warrants an entire cottage industry?

“American higher education has long had a dynamic tension between intellectualism – represented by the humanities and elite colleges – and more ‘practical’ education offered up by land-grant universities, observers say. But while the US university system is widely hailed for its quality, some fear the pendulum may be swinging toward an overall anti- intellectual approach.”