Saying that capitalist relations of production and consumption are dominant, essentially across the entire planet by now, constitutes a truism. This is an obvious observation, at least for those who …
cern: the giant microscope
It is said that the large industrial exhibitions that moved through European and American cities from the middle of the 19th century onwards were, among other things (or perhaps primarily), …
from online to onlife: engineering everything
History and Machines Can we perceive the ongoing parade of modern technological applications and wonders as something beyond a mere sum of “good and bad human inventions”? Can we perceive …
Job stealing
How many clicks does it take to place an order on Amazon? Very few! With zero effort, online, a product from anywhere on the planet arrives right at the buyer’s …
the armed parade : robot, work, ideology
In our parts, the issue is not burning. High unemployment but limited (compared to other places) use of information technology and its derivatives in the secondary sector. Internationally, however, it …
MOOCs and adaptive learning
In July 2011, Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, published a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague of his, Peter Norvig, …
Make way!
Autonomous cars? Yes! Autonomous trucks? Yes! (Read a related comment in b&g issue 3). Autonomous flying machines? Yes! Autonomous ships? Autonomous tankers, cargo, Ro-Ro or warships? Not yet, but it …
Sewing automata
Can a robotic machine (or a team of such machines) sew clothes? Anyone who has even an amateur relationship with sewing knows that fabrics have lots of whims. Sometimes two …
the (partial) digitization of the analog educational system
When, in the year 2016, in a society the question of whether (and how) “religious education will be taught in schools” emerges as a very significant challenge, then this society …
the quantum future is near (and it will turn many things upside down…)
with a satellite as a starting point…(…that will conduct quantum experiments in space) The emergence of increasingly extreme innovative technological applications has long become a tedious cliché in the electronic …
short history of computers
Every modern computer is, in essence, supposed to be a physical implementation of an ideal machine, the universal Turing machine that can compute any computable function. Extremely simple in conception, …
the bleeding materiality of “immaterial” capitalism
The belief that in this glossy era of technology and innovation, production has changed form and become immaterial, is dominant in the minds of first-world citizens. Equally dominant is the …