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The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognising a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived….As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.
Steven Pinker, psychologist, cognitive scientist and author
new-aesthetic: The little boy learned to fend for himself. He became a beggar, one of the many children begging on the streets of the city. “I had to be quite careful. You could not trust anyone.” Once he was approached by a man who promised him food and shelter and a way back home. But Saroo was suspicious. “Ultimately I think he was going to do something not nice to me, so I ran away.” But in the end, he did get off the streets. He was taken in by an orphanage, which put him up for adoption. He was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania. “I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia.” Saroo settled down well in his new home. But as he got older the desire to find his birth family became increasingly strong. The problem was that as an illiterate five-year-old he had not known the name of the town he had come from. All he had to go on were his vivid memories. So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born. “It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, ‘Does this match?’ And when you say, ‘No’, you keep on going and going and going.” BBC News - Little boy lost finds his mother using Google Earth

new-aesthetic:

The little boy learned to fend for himself. He became a beggar, one of the many children begging on the streets of the city. “I had to be quite careful. You could not trust anyone.” Once he was approached by a man who promised him food and shelter and a way back home. But Saroo was suspicious. “Ultimately I think he was going to do something not nice to me, so I ran away.”

But in the end, he did get off the streets. He was taken in by an orphanage, which put him up for adoption. He was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania. “I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia.”

Saroo settled down well in his new home. But as he got older the desire to find his birth family became increasingly strong. The problem was that as an illiterate five-year-old he had not known the name of the town he had come from. All he had to go on were his vivid memories. So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born.

“It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, ‘Does this match?’ And when you say, ‘No’, you keep on going and going and going.”

BBC News - Little boy lost finds his mother using Google Earth

(Reblogged from slavin)
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Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things.
How To Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
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no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.
“The value of information does… | Wisdom Commons
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What appears to be the established order of present-day civilization is actually only the inert but spectacular momentum of a high velocity vehicle whose engine has already stopped functioning
Earth Ascending: An Illustrated Treatise on the Law Governing Whole Systems - José Argüelles - Google Books
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From the time that VCs invest in a company, they have five years—10 at the most—to sell their entire position, hopefully for many times more than their original investment. After that, it doesn’t matter to them whether the company survives a year or a century.
For High Tech Companies, Going Public Sucks | Epicenter | Wired.com
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This doubling, this doppelganger-ing, of the world, where everything has both a real and a referential part, where there is actually a genre called Reality TV, which is not only on TV but which is staged, should make our lives shimmer with possibility. But I find that there is something oppressive about it. A Plenitude of mirrors makes it hard to tell what’s real, makes it hard to act and react meaningfully.
A Highlight from The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff
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In its last fiscal quarter, Apple sold more iPhones (37,000,000) than babies were born in the whole world (36,300,000).
Another great statistic | What’s Next: Top Trends
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Every company of every size is looking for a “social strategy” through which to extend its brand. Each company wants to build its own social network of customers—or to build pages in existing social networks and win “friends,” “fans,” or “likes” from the millions of potential users out there. It’s as if having what amounts to an email list will breathe life into brands already decimated by the Internet’s powers of deconstruction and transparency.
Amazon Kindle: A Highlight by Nic Hodges from Program or Be Programmed
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On a more subtle level, the abstraction intrinsic to the digital universe makes us rely more heavily on familiar brands and trusted authorities to gain our bearings. Like tourists in a foreign city sighing in relief at the sight of a Starbucks or American Express sign, users tend to depend more on centrally defined themes and instantly recognizable brands. They are like signposts, even for the young people we consider digital natives, who turn out to be even more reliant on brand names and accepted standards for understanding and orientation than are their digital immigrant counterparts. Activism means finding a website, joining a movement, or “liking” a cause—all of which exist on a plane above and beyond their human members. Learning, orienting, and belonging online depend on universally accepted symbols or generically accessible institutions.
From Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or be Programmed.