Dale Carrico's blog

Part One: "No Survivors"

While I do not deny the existence of reasonably working prototypes, I do not expect driverless cars to transform the transportation landscape in the way their boosters claim. Indeed, I am a bit surprised that anyone would consider such transformative claims the least bit more plausible than the patently ridiculous claims once made with comparable fanfare on behalf of Segways.

In a recent post, the famous liberal economist Paul Krugman asks us to "[c]onsider for a moment a sort of fantasy technology scenario." Even for a fan of Krugman's writing like I am, the appearance of that word "scenario" should be chilling enough to those who know how often it portends think-tank non-thinking is on the way.

The BBC reports: The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change. The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be "dangerous".

A recent article over at io9 offers a rapid-fire scroll of lovely pictures of lovely gardens from Tivoli and Versailles to Suzhou and the Mehtab Bagh. The bright-green images are from Flickr, their vapid captions read like snippets from Wikipedia, but the ideological operation of the article (which may fancy itself "Bright Green") is pure, pernicious futurological bunkum.

When I was a kid it seemed like every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it.

Now, it seems nearly every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it.

Progress under consumer capitalism is marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?

Nobody thinks that pouring more sand onto a pile of sand -- or even pouring more abacuses onto a pile of abacuses -- is the least bit likely eventually to prompt the pile to "wake up" and become intelligent, even though the pile grows incomparably more complex the larger it grows.

There is quite an uproar among the cryonicists at the moment about Kim Suozzi, a young woman who is about to die from a fatal brain tumor and is seeking donations to fund a cryosuspension she irrationally wants but cannot afford on her own.

...Until, One Supposes, There Is Nobody Left To Buy Anything In A World Reduced To An Uninhabitable Cinder. You Know, for Profit!

Songwriter Gotye has released a YouTube re-mix of his ubiquitous hit "Somebody That I Used to Know" generated from YouTube clips of his fans doing their own covers of that hit. It is a mildly edifying clip, but seems to me far more interesting than the simple tribute we are being told it is, whether a tribute to Gotye's fans, a tribute to the YouTube utility that mediated and indispensably facilitated his fame, or a tribute to Kutiman's fabulous Thru-YOU project.