Weapon Generator (Arms Generator / Buki Generator)
July 15th 2008
This is pretty cool. Type in your name (or any word for that matter) and it creates a weapon!
Archive for July, 2008
On ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’
July 14th 2008
Licklider, J. C. R. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 74-81
Licklider’s essay is similar in topic to Weiner’s essay. Licklider discusses the changes that must happen for man and computer to be symbiotic, but most of these revolve around reducing and potentially removing the time spent doing menial tasks. He discusses how most of his time is spent graphing, plotting, and calculating, all tasks which computers are well suited for and can perform almost infinitely faster than humans performing the tasks by hand. He eludes to, I believe, an evolution of this idea such that the relationship between man and computer become a seamless one. Man and computer should work in harmony to simply accomplish things, and not be bound by one or the other. It’s an interesting idea, and I’d like to see more.
On ‘Men, Machines, and the World About’
July 13th 2008
Wiener, Norbert. “Men, Machines, and the World About.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 67-72
This informal piece draws on different aspects of ‘new media’ by referencing replacing humans as the control mechanisms for machines. The author explains the second industrial revolution as this replacement, and I think the observation is completely justified. I want to take that further and say further steps would include humans being taken out of the design loop, where you just give a design or a description to a machine and it builds it for you. I could take that further and take humans out of the production phase completely, where a learning machine merely figures out what society needs and any given point in time and produces it. Kind of scary, but the essay leads me down that path.
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