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“… For many years, the conventional wisdom, certainly within the auto industry, was that carmakers would never introduce intelligent safety features so long as there were plaintiff lawyers. Autonomous technology shifted the liability for accidents from the car’s owner to the car’s maker, said industry spokespeople, and was tantamount to corporate suicide. Three developments changed their minds. First, active safety technologies have become substantially more robust, thanks to improvements in sensor design, and, most importantly, in sensor fusion and planning algorithms. Second, drive-by-wire has rendered the legal debate largely academic - car functions are already mediated by computers, one way or another. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the auto industry experienced an unprecedented, violently destabilizing, massive contraction. Technology that previously seemed like a grave, existential threat now seems like the least of their problems. It turns out that, innovation, like freedom, “is just another word for having nothing left to lose.” … Essays about artificial intelligence normally end with some ponderous treacle proclaiming how the more we study AI, the more we appreciate the human mind in all its splendiferous mystery. This is, to be charitable, wishful thinking. AI does teach us about intelligence. It teaches us that “intelligence” is a motley assortment of heuristics, kludges, and cheap tricks. The danger with AI is not that machines will become smarter than us, but that we will become as dumb as machines. The absurdly prescient William S. Burroughs was wise to this fifty years ago. “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods,” pronounces Dr. Benway, in 1959’s Naked Lunch. “Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” 
Arches Hike:
The Crust Lives:
Double:
Moab, UT 
Arch from Below:
Mill Creek:
Friendly Arches Climbers:
Rock:
“Partant d’une idée simple et plutôt pratique, un petit clin d’oeil pour la « Solar Camera Strap », un concept de sangle d’appareil photo intégrant une bande de cellules photovoltaïques souples permettant de recharger ce dernier tout en le transportant. Imaginée par le jeune designer Weng Jie, une idée plutôt intéressante qui peut en outre être déclinée sur d’autres applications.” (via TrendsNow | Solar Camera Strap)
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Alex AinslieI'm a recent Cornell CS MEng graduate interested in data, computation, design and their intersection. In 2009 I graduated early with an independent BA in Computing, Cognition & Aesthetics and a minor in French. My honors thesis examined the traces our Bluetooth-enabled devices leave behind in public space. I have spent the past three summers as an intern at Google working on mobile maps and gmail, suggest, query refinements, social search, and most recently goggles and mobile local search. I will join Google fulltime in August 2010. This site was born as a personal photo journal during a semester spent abroad in Paris and has evolved into a curated collection of links, text, and images. |
