This isn’t a book and was never written to be one, but readers might get some value of thinking of it that way anyhow… and reading on topics that are most relevant to them.
- For those who still learn difficult skills and find themselves competing with processors, is there a deeper purpose or meaning to the effort, and what happens to our humanity when technical mastery becomes optional?
- Humans do more than consume information and content, rather we attach an emotional value to the authenticity of its source, trusting falsehoods from friends while ignoring invisible expertise, so what does it mean to be real when the truth is generated and simulated?
- When creativity becomes just another commodity, when everyone can create without ever taking the time to learn the once hard-earned skills of art, music, writing and more, what is left of value?
- How did we get from beeping beige boxes on our desk helping us with the tedium of complex business tasks to machines and systems capable of generating language, images, music and even ideas? I saw it but I still often need to take a step back and take a closer look.
- As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for it then you’re not the customer but rather the product. Our attention has been metered out and sold and social media didn’t just connect people, it turned that attention into a kind of infrastructure reshaping communication, identity and even humanity in the process.
- Wrapping our heads around the palpable hate for systems that try to be human can be a something that isn’t quite as obvious as it seems at first glance.
- We may have shifted into a world filled with content, feeds, output and brands but these are no match for the enduring human ideas of art, philosophy, significance and identity which are yet more subtle and bound to our very human experience, perhaps irreplaceably so.
- The flip side of business computing is the gaming industry and every generation has crept ever closer to a perceived finish line of the ultimate computed entertainment, but what does gaming and the popularity of style, art and surrealism say about our technical perfection ambitions?
- It only takes the evidence of our daily experience to know that there is no modern scarcity of content, and even before the flood of generative slop abundance had changed the equation of value for the products of creativity.
- Of Poets & Processors is a blog presented as a series of week-daily posts, a kind of long conversation with some guy who had a role to play in the construction of the digital age and who is now trying to understand what it has done to us. Welcome.
- The lost potential of technology, or how is it that we built something that does terribly useless things at so much cost when the world needed a superhero and instead we got another maniacal villain?
- We humans define ourselves by our roles, attaching identity to our jobs and our hobbies as much as anything else, so after years of handing over our roles to systems and platforms what does human identity even mean anymore?
- What were once immobile beige boxes on our desks have been replaced by slick black rectangles we can barely stand to tear our eyes from anymore, so how have smart devices changed the relationship between humans and machines?