Archive for the ‘ Technology ’ Category

More Productivity Means Fewer Employees are Required

This is something few want to talk about (except Marxists), but this process has been at work ever since the Industrial Revolution began. The result has always been that the rich (the Industrialists, the Capitalists) got richer and the poor (the workers) got poorer. There used to be a middle-class but they are disappearing too. [ READ MORE ]

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It

Human Computer Interaction video – The Birth of HCI (select video 1.4) Here I am again, like a stuck record. If you know one thing about me, it is that I am very skeptical about the advantages of technology. It seems to me that technology (combined with our natural gullibility) has destroyed our world. But this [ READ MORE ]

The Flame

SECURELIST Duqu and Stuxnet raised the stakes in the cyber battles being fought in the Middle East – but now we’ve found what might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed. The ‘Flame’ cyber espionage worm came to the attention of our experts at Kaspersky Lab after the UN’s International Telecommunication Union came to us for [ READ MORE ]

Prototyping

Computer Human Interaction video (select lecture 1.2) This is a software development concept that has much wider applicability. Any new social endeavor (such as software) should be tried out first, and experimented with (or prototyped), before any serious implementations are attempted. I wish I could tell you that software developers have used this process successfully. But [ READ MORE ]

Human Computer Interaction

Stanford Free Online Course (select lecture 1.1) This is the first lecture in the course. It’s only four minutes long, but like a rocket liftoff, it gets things started in a hurry. I have been waiting for fifty years for online courses – and I am not going to miss this one. Unfortunately, as I keep [ READ MORE ]

An Empty Black Box

This is what people have become. In software terms: an object whose operations and states are known – not completely yet, but since everyone is focused figuring out what remains to be figured out, the unknowns are becoming less and less important. Now that I have said that – in my opinion, quite a mouthful [ READ MORE ]

People Who Made Things

In my father’s time people either made things (in manufacturing) or made things work (in the railroads). People were still important, because nothing would happen without them. What do people do now? Nothing, which is natural because they are nothing. And this is the reason, I believe, they are destroying their world: it has destroyed [ READ MORE ]

We Have Put Too Much of Ourselves Into Our Machines

As result, there is little of us left. This is something thinkers of all kinds have overlooked. Perhaps because they thought of technology and people as two different things – when they are only one. Perhaps because technical change was so slow for so long. But about 500 years ago a technological and social speedup resulted [ READ MORE ]

How Can Computers Help People be People?

I have given a lot of thought to this question. First all, when I mean computers I mean the combination of the computers with their software, networked on the Internet, and also in the wireless. The question in broader terms, is: how can technology help us be human? But this question immediately turns into How do [ READ MORE ]

Not Understanding

Americans do not understand, which is amazing enough – but are also determined to not understand – which is astonishing. My more fastidious readers will ask “Understand what?”, and I can reply “Anything.” They do not understand anything, and are determined not to. Now that I have repeated this twice to my readers (who will probably not [ READ MORE ]

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