Is Kurzweil’s future arriving?
John Rennie over at IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article on Ray Kurzweil’s 108 predictions for 02009 from his book Age of Spiritual Machines. Ray Kurzweil is an avid and fearless predictor who also...
View ArticleThe Lego Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism, pulled from the depths of a 1st or 2nd century wreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, is the oldest known complex scientific calculator. From the moment it...
View ArticleRevolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing
The Computer History Museum’s newly re-designed main exhibition, Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing, is now open to the public. Starting with the abacus and ending with social networking,...
View ArticleThe Expanding Frontiers of Computing
Advances in computing technology have led to increasingly powerful devices – a cell phone can now do what early desktop computers did not even approximate. But these developments have largely been in...
View ArticleThe Evolution of Search Engines
Long before the era of the Internet, humans already dreamt of creating the perfect search engine. In 01895 two Belgian lawyers, Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine, began building their Universal...
View ArticleThe History of Computers
When we think about the development of computers, we often think into the future: we imagine (or work on developing) new software, ever larger capacities for data storage, and ever smaller, sleeker...
View ArticleCory Doctorow, “Who Governs Digital Trust?”
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking. The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer Tuesday July 31, 02012 – San Francisco Video...
View ArticleTim O’Reilly Seminar Primer
“Birth of the Global Mind” Wednesday September 5, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco Tim O’Reilly is a prolific maker of sense. For countless hackers and programmers the world over, his...
View ArticleReviving and Restoring Digital Art
With the ever-accelerating evolution of hardware and software, we stand to lose much more than reels of data. A vast collection of computer art risks slipping into digital darkness, as well. Concerned...
View ArticleGeorge Dyson Seminar Primer
“No Time Is There— The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up” Tuesday March 19, 02013 at the Herbst Theater, San Francisco Photo: Joe Pugliese George Dyson grew up playing with spare...
View ArticleGeorge Dyson, “The Digital Big Bang”
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking. “No Time Is There”— The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up Tuesday March...
View ArticleNicholas Negroponte Seminar Primer
“Beyond Digital” Wednesday April 17, 02012 at the Marines’ Memorial Theater, San Francisco Nicholas Negroponte has made a name for himself not just by predicting the future, but by creating it. He...
View ArticleNicholas Negroponte, “A World of Convergence”
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Beyond Digital Wednesday April 17, 02013 – San Francisco Video is up on the Negroponte...
View ArticleA 240-Year Old Programmable Computer Boy
In the late 18th century, Swiss clock- and watchmaker Pierre Jaquet Droz decided to advertise his business by building three automata, or mechanical robots, in the shape of young children. Still...
View ArticleGeorge Dyson: No Time Is There – A Seminar Flashback
In March 02013 George Dyson spoke for Long Now about the origins of the digital universe. Dyson, an author and science historian, gave a detailed explication of the dawn of the modern computer in the...
View ArticleRetrocomputing Brings Warhol’s Lost Digital Art Back to Life
In 01985, Andy Warhol used an Amiga 1000 personal computer and the GraphiCraft software to create a series of digital works. Warhol’s early computer artworks are now viewable after 30 years of...
View ArticleHow Hard Should the Turing Test Be?
It seems clear that computers are becoming more intelligent, but in the face of this fact, our definition of intelligence itself seems increasingly blurry. The University of Reading recently made an...
View ArticleNew Book Explores the Legacy of Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum
In 02007, SALT speaker Alex Wright introduced us to Paul Otlet, the Belgian visionary who spent the first half of the twentieth century building a universal catalog of human knowledge, and who dreamed...
View ArticleSoftware as Language, as Object, as Art
When The Long Now Foundation first began thinking about long-term archives, we drew inspiration from the Rosetta Stone, a 2000-year-old stele containing a Ptolemaic decree in Ancient Egyptian...
View ArticleEdge Question 02015
It’s been an annual tradition since 01998: with a new year comes a new Edge question. Every January, John Brockman presents the members of his online salon with a question that elicits discussion about...
View ArticleSteven Johnson takes a Long Now Perspective on the Superintelligence Threat
Steven Johnson, former Seminar speaker & author of How We Got to Now, recently wrote on the dangers of A.I. on his blog “How We Got To Next“. He discusses evolutionary software, the existential...
View ArticleThe AI Cargo Cult: The Myth of a Superhuman Artificial Intelligence
In a widely-shared essay first published in Backchannel, Kevin Kelly, a Long Now co-founder and Founding Editor of Wired Magazine, argues that the inevitable rise of superhuman artificial...
View ArticleSteven Johnson on “Spacewar!”
Science author Steven Johnson discusses the legacy of “Spacewar!”, one of the earliest and most influential computer games. Johnson explores this story and more in his latest book, “Wonderland: How...
View ArticleStuart J. Russell on Filter Bubbles and the Future of Artificial Intelligence
“The purpose that we put into the machine has to be the purpose that we desire, otherwise we’re toast.” Computer scientist Stuart Russell discusses the future and possible risks of artificial...
View ArticleAI analyzed 3.3 million scientific abstracts and discovered possible new...
A new paper shows how AI can accelerate scientific discovery through analyzing millions of scientific abstracts. From the MIT Technology Review: Natural-language processing has seen major advancements...
View ArticleThe 5 Questions We Need to Answer About Artificial Intelligence — Gurjeet...
Creators of AI systems have a responsibility to figure out how they might go wrong, and govern them accordingly. From Gurjeet Singh’s Interval talk, “The Shape of Data and Things to Come.” About this...
View ArticlePodcast: The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure | Nadia...
The Long Now Foundation · Nadia Eghbal – The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the...
View ArticleTouching the Future
Aboriginal fish traps. In search of a new story for the future of artificial intelligence, Long Now speaker Genevieve Bell looks back to its cybernetic origins — and keeps on looking, thousands of...
View ArticleThe Next 25(0[0]) Years of the Internet Archive
Long Now’s Website, as reimagined by the Internet Archive’s Wayforward Machine For the past 25 years, the Internet Archive has embraced a bold vision of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Founded in...
View ArticleThe Future and the Past of the Metaverse
In the mid-2000s, the virtual world of the game Second Life was seen by many as a nascent metaverse, a term for virtual worlds coined by Neal Stephenson. Courtesy of Jin Zan CC-BY-SA-3.0 Sometime in...
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