...more recent posts
Lots of interesting thoughts on, well, the future of the book.
Can you eat too many macadamia nuts? Where's the line?
From Harold Cohen's website:
"Harold Cohen, former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), was anWired has a story on Aaron which has recently got the attention of Ray Kurzweil who has backed a free downloadable Aaron screen saver. It only runs on Windows. I'd be curious if anyone checks it out. (via /. and in an unrelated story the screensaver site is completely unreachable at the moment.)
English painter with an established international reputation when he came to UCSD in 1968 for a
one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he
never returned to London. Cohen is the author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research
effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence which began when he was a visiting scholar at
Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973."
I'll start with the punch line: becasue he can.
A minute-by-minute account of a glamorous day in the life of The Wine Importer!
I don't think it's clear to many business people yet, but this is the future of business websites. We're already seeing the beginning of this trend in the fact that Madison Ave. is waking up to the new "sophisticated consumer." This new consumer is hip to the idea that businesses generally don't care about you, and everyone is just out to make money. Pitching someone who holds these jaded beliefs if very difficult. The advertisers are trying to fight this (the Sprite campaigns spring to mind) by being up front about the greed, and thereby making it less of a big deal (and also forging a little bond between the hip jaded consumer who knows it's all crap, and the hip company who will admit that yes, it's all crap.)
Anyway, this advertising ploy isn't going to work for too long. It just breeds even more jaded consumers in a sort of meta-jaded escalating spiral. The real answer is for businesses to actually start giving a crap about something other than money. You can care about that too, of course, but my point is that we (jaded consumers) just want to know that there is a real human being in there, and not just some roboticized money making buerocracy. We don't necessarily want to know that you are nice, or trying to save the world, or anything like that which we probably won't believe anyway. We just want to know that you are human. We want to know that you eat oatmeal in the morning, and that you get bugged by telemarketers, and that you too are perplexed by a law mandating the percentage of floor area that must be covered by carpets in your apartment. This makes us feel very comfortable. "Hey, there's really someone in there!"
Anyway, that's what I think. I don't know how much he would agree with that, or whether he just does it because he's one of those people who needs to talk a lot, but that's sort of my point. Either way is O.K. Just let it all out.
You all called your mothers, right?