I shirk reflecting about group work because I don’t want to be negative. Or because what bothers me about working with other people might be due to a personal trait of my own and not due to my partners’ being poor coworkers, therefore they do not deserve negative feedback. The problem that I always have [...]
One of the points that Kurzweil repeatedly asserts in the “Response to Criticism” chapter of The Singularity is Near, is that the machines of tomorrow will be much different than the machines of today. This is most pointedly voiced in response to the criticism of Dembski and Denton, who believe that machines do not have [...]
I can’t believe how often I go to the bathroom. On average the past week, I went to the bathroom eight times a day. I wonder if my classmates had that same number of toilet flushes in their audit. I suppose I just have a small bladder and have to pee a lot. One of [...]
The singularity, as described in Kurzweil’s, The Singularity is Near, is a technological messiah. Kurzweil even states that the singularity will bring about the epoch in which “The Universe Wakes Up.” This epoch sounds to me like the messianic age of peace, but instead ushered in by more intelligent powers than ourselves rather than divine [...]
I was struck most by the fact that the US supported the same logic of eugenics as the Nazis when I saw the documentary abut Nazi medicine. This makes it seem that the thoughts that the Germans had at that time were anything but foreign–their arguments were sound and convincing. That period is often depicted [...]
The ethical perspectives addressed in “What is Ethics,” by Velasquez, Andre and others, are useful for organizing what is going on inside of our heads when faced with knots of emoting people. The various approaches make it easy to pinpoint how values conflict and solutions never balance out mathematically (unless imaginary numbers are used). For [...]
Last week I read Rheingold’s first chapter, “The Heart of the Well,” about how real feelings can be communicated through virtual mediums. To be sure, I agree that real communication occurs through virtual mediums, but at the same time, what is being communicated virtually is different that what is being communicated when I talk to [...]
The community that started and developed the WELL was different than I had expected. I have always associated The Whole Earth Catalogue with hippie culture that is rooted in the ground. And yet, one of the founding members of The Whole Earth Catalogue developed the technology for the WELL. Obviously, I was wrong in assuming [...]
In order to minimize the effect of Groupthink on me, I commit to the following statements: I will listen without interrupting and will try to fully understand what people are communicating to me. Sometimes I presume I know what people are trying to say to me and I hear my interpretation of them more than [...]
