Rise of the Machines

"Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto."

New York Times.... Read it all here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=89cbbf63dc96e70f&ex=1381550400&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

A beautiful commercial.

Antigone by Sophocles (H.D.F. Kitto translation)

“Current on earth, none is so vile as money. For money opens wide the city-gates to ravishers, it drives the citizens to exile, it perverts the honest mind to the honest mind to shamefulness, it teaches men to practice all forms of wickedness and impiety.”

“When I can do no more than I will stop.”

"It was not Zeus who published this decree, nor have the Powers who rule among the dead imposed such laws as this upon mankind; nor could I think that a decree of yours-a man- could override the laws of Heaven, unwritten and unchanging. Not of today or yesterday is their authority; they are eternal; no man saw their birth. Was I to stand before the gods' tribunal for disobeyything them, becuase I feared a man? I knew that I should have to die, even without your edict; if I die before my time, why then, I count it a gain; to one who lives as I do, ringed about with countless miseries, why, death is welcome. For me to meet this doom is little greif' but when my mother;s son lay dead, had I neglected him and left him there unburied, that would have caused me grief; this causes none. And if you think it folly, then perhaps I am accused for folly by the fool."

"Still from the same quarter the same wild winds blow fiercely, and shake her stubborn soul."

Really Great TED talks....

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis.html