Continuations

[This is a talk I was going to give at Slush but had to change my travel plans.] A 12 minute talk should be plenty to address this simple question. Just kidding. This is one of the profound questions that humanity has grappled with for a long time. Here are three artistic takes throughout history. The first is a biological take on being human. This plate from ancient Greece shows centaurs who are half human and half horse. Mythology is full of human animal hybrids. The centaur myth is likely ...

There have been a number of tweets in my timeline roughly saying: “Ferguson, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine — what is going on with the world?” I don’t know that these can all be reduced to a single underlying reason although the current rate of global change likely has something to do with it. There is, however, one thing they all have in common: an abject failure to recognize each other’s humanity. This failure is all the more frustrating at a time when we should all know that we are inhabiting a roc...

Here on Continuations I have covered a lot of seemingly disparate topics such as the end of work, government surveillance and the digital balkans. They are, however, all part of my fascination with the transition from the industrial age to the information age. While that latter term was coined all the way back in the 1960s, there is reason to believe that the transition is beginning to happen now. Today I want to provide a large scale historical context, taking us all the way back to hunter g...

Yesterday we landed a probe on a comet. I am saying we because this is a major accomplishment for humanity. For reference, powered heavier-than-air flight was invented only a tad more than one hundred years ago. It is important to really let this sink in. After millennia of dreaming about flying into the skies we went in a little over a century all the way to steering a craft to line up with a comet traveling at 40,000 miles an hour! What makes all of this possible is human ingenuity together...