MachineMachine / stream

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are…

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A data haven is "the information equivalent to a tax haven," a country that helps you evade other countries' rules on what you can and can't do with your bits.…

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It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied…

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The paper that resulted five years later, the abovementioned “Prospect Theory,” not only proved that one of the central premises of economics was seriously flawed—the so-called utility theory, “based on…

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These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers. Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled…

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Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

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We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the…

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Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time: In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the…

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Is it really true that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet? When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that…

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In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to…

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Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly…

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[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give…

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by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to…

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In April 1965, a young researcher named Gordon Moore wrote a short article for the now-defunct Electronics Magazine pointing out that each year, the number of transistors that could be…

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Technology so pervades our culture that it's sobering to consider how poorly we understand it. How do new tools and techniques arise? What principles guide their evolution? And how does…

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This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can…

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The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is…