Programming, the writing of computer code in order to solve a specific problem, is a new intellectual discipline. It has a history going back to logic and mathematics, but it is relatively new as a human endeavour. It is constrained by hardware, by mathematics, by programming languages, and what we might call technical culture: APIs, […]
I can now conclusively answer the question raised at the end of my blog post from December 2019: the 2020s are not a decade of orderly peace. What a strange year. But weren’t years always strange? Time passes not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. A year spent with Covid-19 seems to have passed differently from […]
2019 comes to a close, and with it the 2010s. Below are a few thoughts on these periods of time. The most significant book I’ve read in 2019 is probably Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The German title, literally “Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule” more closely reflects the contents of this monograph. Arendt […]
At first glance, Hubert Dreyfus’ 1992 book What Computers Still Can’t Do (WCSCD, originally published in 1972 as What Computers Can’t Do) seems untimely in the current business climate, which favours massive and widespread investment in AI (these days, often understood as being synonymous with machine learning and neural networks). However, being untimely may in fact […]
Humans primarily live in a world of beings, each of which has meaning. Meaningful beings appear to us interconnected, referencing practices and other beings in a referential totality. Buttons suggest pushing, chairs suggest sitting, a tractor suggests farming. A (Japanese) rice paddy may suggest the heavy labour that goes into the rice harvest each year, […]