Congratulations to Grady Booch for sailing past the Kickstarter deadline and raising $25,000 to support his transmedia project, Computing: The Human Experience!
Along with his wife Jan and dedicated group of supporters, Grady has been working hard on this compelling project. There are only a few short days left to support them at the onset. If you do, you'll be in great company with people committed to exploring the human side of computing. This is one of the most important issues of the Imagination Age, and Grady is one of the leaders who can help us understand the implications of our own creations.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
Rita J. King on "Robot Wars" the latest episode of Al Jazeera's Faultlines
Rita J. King, Science House EVP for Business Development (and Futurist at NASA Langley's think tank, the National Institute for Aerospace) appears on "Robot Wars," the most recent episode of Faultlines, Al Jazeera's documentary series focusing on behind-the-scenes issues of our time hosted by investigative journalist Josh Rushing. King appears along with PW Singer, author of "Wired for War" and Spencer Ackerman from Wired's "Danger Room" blog.
Rita discusses the less-understood issues of the increasing ubiquity of robots among humans and in the military industrial complex.
"The accelerated pace of development," Rita says, "is such that it is inevitable that we are going to create machines capable of doing things that we cannot conceive of them doing." Watch the entire episode of "Robot Wars" on Al Jazeera's Faultlines.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Rare 1979 Interview with Philip K. Dick
Rudy Rucker surfaces this amazing interview by Science Fiction author Charles Platt with The Original Philip Kindred Dick. Certainly merits one of my favorite adjectives, "sybaritic."
The interview is deliciously candid, describing his early days working in a retail store as a television repairman in Berkeley and how peculiar his co-workers found him for reading books. At times he drifts off reflecting on how absurd the normal people were and how they informed his books. He also describes how rebellious he was in university, refusing to follow the rules of his ROTC course, for example. He notes that the rebellion was not so much an opposition to war as it was an inability to interact with the devices and understand what people were telling him to do, such as assembling his M-1 Rifle.
Possibly the most visceral part of the interview was when he describes what first informed his novels: In high school geometry class when he realized it was likely that his teacher was, in fact, a robot.
"The greatest threat to humanity in the 20th Century is totalitarian movements."
The last 30 minutes are possibly the most powerful, wherein Dick discusses his occupation by what he perceived to be a female entity who helped to shape his last book VALIS. At one point he mentions that he didn't discuss this with anyone other than his priest. But that he had tried to reach out to Ursula K. LeGuin who thought he was crazy.
It's two hours of your life you'll be glad you spent listening to this.
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