The Paltry Cost of Priceless Externalities
For the past few years, anyone who has been paying attention has come face to face with the economic phenomenon known as externalities. Popularized by causes like climate change, it is by no means something all that novel or vogue. Ronald Coase was one of the first to discuss the concept back in 1960 with […]
Stalking the Snark: Invariant Counterfactuals, Transcendental Deductions and the Future of AI
I’d like to start off by acknowledging that this is the kind of post that if it were a drug, a machine tool or a firework, the government would insist that it be accompanied by a warning. Something along the lines of… “toying with this crap while inebriated could be bad for you. Especially if […]
Beyond the Cyber-Cryptoverse, the Next Incarnation of the Internet Awaits
Over the years this blog has dealt with the nature of change and innovation as a primary feature of the high tech industry. In Hacking the Future 2.0 we suggested that the means for creating change of unimaginable magnitude have become increasingly open, accessible and ubiquitous. And you don’t have to look far to see […]
Fed Up, IBM Eats Its Own Lunch, Doesn’t Much Care for the Taste
Once upon a time there was a technology company whose prowess was the envy of the world. Their vision could see past horizons. Their imagination could invent the future. The world beat a path to their door just to get a glimpse of the doodles on their napkins. The only trouble was that they couldn’t […]
Facebook: An Annus Horribilis
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared in the Epilogues tab as the conclusion to The Curse of the Walled Garden – Facebook’s Inevitable Implosion Begins. To understand the complete context of the events mentioned here you might want to review that post in its entirety. So, in the interests of wrapping things up, if you […]
AI: Crossing the Chasm One Clock Radio at a Time
Things set in motion acquire inertia and with luck inertia acquires purpose and with purpose accomplishments follow. At least that’s the theory. I was reminded of this the other day while reconfiguring the settings and linkage from Alexa and my smart home hub for the umpteenth time. This usually happens after a change of seasons, […]
The Dawn of Agency
In case you missed it, Google’s recent Duplex demonstration left the attending techno glitterati gobsmacked and agape. Seems they were astonished by the authenticity a few “oh’s” and “um’s” and “ah’s” could produce when added to computer generated speech. I guess most of the audience wasn’t around back in 1990’s when natural language processing systems […]
A Perfect Storm?
Is the age of the too big to bust techno-trust about to come to and end? Have political, economic, sovereign and consumer butterflies created a techno-bombogenesis of dynasty ending proportions? Have the monopoly making network effects of multisided platform flywheels finally reached their asymptotic limit? Will the simple humility of sound business practices, fidelity to […]
AI: Waking the Neuromorphic
Did you catch Intel’s big announcements at CES this year? That’s right, touting its True VR Intel proclaimed 2018 will be the year that virtual reality finally takes off. Which just happened to be the big CES announcement in 2017 and the year before that and the year before that for about the last six […]
Privacy, Blockchains and Balkanization: The Rise of Custody and The End of Adtech as We Know it
What is bigger than Y2K, more expensive than an Oracle upgrade and sneakier than a Sasser worm on a vintage Windows PC? That’s right. GDPR. GDPR may sound a little bit like a German political faction and, in fact, German political factions may have helped get it started but the cold truth is the letters […]
