I have written and talked about the need for a “right to be represented by a bot.” By a bot here I mean software that runs on my behalf as an enduser and mediates my interactions with online services. In the web world, the browser is such as bot. For instance, I can run an ad blocker which I instruct on which parts of a site to show to me. I can also run something like 1Password that manages my security. I could use a custom bot to say keep an automatic personal copy of all the images and tex...

I have written and talked about the need for a “right to be represented by a bot.” By a bot here I mean software that runs on my behalf as an enduser and mediates my interactions with online services. In the web world, the browser is such as bot. For instance, I can run an ad blocker which I instruct on which parts of a site to show to me. I can also run something like 1Password that manages my security. I could use a custom bot to say keep an automatic personal copy of all the images and tex...

Google’s announcements of Chromebook and subscription pricing offer a great opportunity to reflect on where we are in the history of computing. It is all too easy to think of this as something radically new, when it is simply the latest entry in a long historical settling down of the locus of computation. I started my ongoing love affair with computing at a fascinating time. In the early 80s businesses were almost entirely dominated by centrally controlled mainframes with dumb terminals while...

Google’s announcements of Chromebook and subscription pricing offer a great opportunity to reflect on where we are in the history of computing. It is all too easy to think of this as something radically new, when it is simply the latest entry in a long historical settling down of the locus of computation. I started my ongoing love affair with computing at a fascinating time. In the early 80s businesses were almost entirely dominated by centrally controlled mainframes with dumb terminals while...

I have been skeptical about Turing complete on chain computation for a long time. Many early proponents took the position that there is no issue because a mechanism such as Ethereum’s gas limits how long a computation can run. They argued that this means computation will always eventually run out of gas and then stop. But the danger of a program not stopping is not the only thing to worry about in a completely open and interconnected computation system. The more pertinent issue is: what will ...

I have been skeptical about Turing complete on chain computation for a long time. Many early proponents took the position that there is no issue because a mechanism such as Ethereum’s gas limits how long a computation can run. They argued that this means computation will always eventually run out of gas and then stop. But the danger of a program not stopping is not the only thing to worry about in a completely open and interconnected computation system. The more pertinent issue is: what will ...