Kevin O’Connor’s advice on small business innovation is part of my assigned reading in school this Fall. He advises, not surprisingly, that new technologies and new markets are crucial to startup success. He cautions, however, that distinguishing between trends and fads is extremely hard. He suggests (in Chapter Three) that infrastructure is a crucial limiting [...]
Public discourse in the U.S. about science and technology is impoverished. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We don’t trust our elected officials. How ought we to address these problems?
Recent Arizona State graduate Alex Berger presents on his blog:
The Technological Revolution - why everything must change.
Hold onto your hats, folks, and get ready to ride the [...]
Andrew Revkin explained yesterday how he thinks the climate debate has become “a lot more complicated”. Revkin is now framing the serious part of the debate as a conflict between those who believe that capping greenhouse gas emissions will be good enough, and those who believe the solution lies, as Revkin puts it, in “radically [...]
During a recent colloquium I attended, Alisa Carse warned that biomedical technologies increasingly offer opportunities to ignore human vulnerability. After I told Vladimir de Thézier about her talk, he asked me to try to identify her as either a left-wing bioconservative or a technoprogressive. Since readers may be unfamiliar with these terms, I will offer [...]
I woke up late this morning and glanced at the dozens of entries on Dale Carrico’s blog I have been too busy to read. I then discovered this gem from last month, in which Dale pondered a “neuroethical analogue to the eugenics movement”, which he inventively calls, “euneurics”.
One of the most memorable books I ever laid my hands on was Bruce Sterling’s 02005 Shaping Things. It is both a history of created objects and a vision for what they could become. Reading Shaping Things is like waking up in a world where ecological gurus, design students, and electronics engineers banged heads one [...]