Nick Douglas on Silicon Valley Gossip

According to this morning's SiliconBeat, some guy named "Nick Douglas" is moving to Silicon Valley to become a gossip columnist about the technology industry... but who the heck is Nick Douglas?

Kevin Kelly on the WWW

An old article by Kevin Kelly, re-dredged up by the blog Sentient Development, caught my attention today. Here is the quote in particular:

Ultimately, as the Web becomes more brain-like, it will be a near-literal extension of our own minds. "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know," writes Kelly. "We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy."

To which I reacted - gee, I already do feel like I had a lobotomy when disconnected from the web. I have already given up so many parts of my memory to the idea that "oh, I can just find it again when I need it" that when I can't get online, I feel claustrophobic, irritated, dull-witted... OK, maybe I feel those things at other times too :-) But seriously, the trends that Kelly talks about are already at work...

Here is the Sentient Develoment post

And the original Kevin Kelly article

A risk of total collapse

"We would be foolish to take for granted the permanence of our fragile global civilisation," writes Dylan Evans in a thoughtful and sobering commentary, the full text of which you can read on the Guardian website. Dr. Ralph Metzner, co-president and founder of the Green Earth Foundation goes even further in his reply, posted here on the non-prophet website. He writes:

In one respect, though, I have already left the company of the “intelligent and credible”, since I don’t think civilizational collapse is possible — I say it is happening now. Even as we read each other’s e-mail, and drink to the New Year. That deadly duo of monsters — resource depletion and overpopulation -- are killing off vast areas of biosphere.

Both articles are worth reading...