You know, it's not a given that there is an 'online' and 'offline' world out there. When you use the telephone, you don't say that I'm entering some 'telephono-sphere.' You don't say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem.
People in the computer industry use the term 'user,' which to them means 'idiot.'
People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
I've been looking at the iPod- the Apple iPod. One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in.
If you ask the typical two- or three-year-old or a teenager what a robot is, they will think about a humanoid that does my homework for me or walks the dog. When I go and talk to kids and pull out the Roomba, it's not this big 'Wow!' moment.
The 'indistinguishable from magic' thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.
If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.
I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.
I always get super confused by the way we look at technology, because since when were all phone calls created equal? It's not like every text is the same or that all texts are human interactions that are compromised. I don't get how conduits somehow dictate sentiment.
People say, 'My phone sucks.' No, it doesn’t! The shittiest cellphone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks. Around the phone.
I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.
I'm not some anti-technology person. I think it's often how people would assume that if they don't know me.
Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.
I used to hate iPhones. Before I got an iPhone, I used to be like, 'What are you doing, sitting there on your phone. Join the real world, man.' I categorically disliked iPhones. When my friends got an iPhone, I was like, 'Oh, we lost him.'
