Complexity Scientist and Writer, Silicon Flatirons
Samuel Arbesman is a Senior Adjunct Fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado. His work has appeared in The New York Times and others. He is the author of The Half-Life of Facts (2012).
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Get under the hood
Our laptops are sleek and polished. Our operating systems are fluid and intuitive. Computing is easy and that’s a problem
Samuel Arbesman
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Computing and artificial intelligence
It’s complicated
Human ingenuity has created a world that the mind cannot master. Have we finally reached our limits?
Samuel Arbesman
When we talk about physical books, often we jump rather quickly to the emotional connection we feel to books: their look and feel, their heft in the hand. These are all worth discussing, and I am certainly not immune to the charms of the printed book.
But when I think about physical books as a technology, I prefer to think about their features. And right now, there is at least one feature that I can’t quite replicate in an ebook: nonlinear reading. When it comes to fiction, something meant to be read linearly, an ebook is great. I can carry huge numbers of books, or even just one really big book, much more efficiently. And I get essentially the same reading experience as I would ge...
Master of many trades
Samuel ArbesmanSpecialization is amazing. It allows us to make advances that would not be possible with only a more superficial knowledge of a field. And we are going to continue needing specialists more and more, as knowledge grows incredibly rapidly.
But I think this need for specialization shouldn’t be at the expense of generalists. Because not only is knowledge growing, it’s becoming more tightly interconnected. We have hybrid disciplines popping up, from biophysics to evolutionary psychology, and we also see connections between fields happening at a smaller level, such as mathematical models from physics having applications in urban planning.
So we are going to increasingly need the g...