NotAGadget

• Very interesting. A lot of new ideas. Some only gestured toward.
• Software designed get "locked in" effectively limited our possibilities. Some of the locked-ed software designs of the "web 2.0" era where bad. Locked in software turns subjective thoughts into objective reality. eg: MIDI codified musical notes (abstract ideas) into rigid, mandatory structures.
• Book aims to explore if people are being locked like MIDI did for musical notes. (ie: overly defined and restricted in practice)
• UNIX program is a similar to a simulation of a person typing quickly.
• In some respects a "file" is just as permanent aspect of reality as a photon. It might be even more so, ultimately its nature tells us whether or not to believe in photons. The notion of a file is an aspect of our intersubjective reality arrangement that my be much harder to change. "The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh".
• The web provides an example of millions of people working together for the greater good without any explicit threat or reward. A vast number of people did something cooperatively solely because it was a good idea. Very optimistic example!
• Claim: computers only exist if people are there to experience them, the bits dont mean anything without a cultured person to interpret them.
• Wikipedia works like traditional holy books: human authorship is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity.
• In chess, what really happened was that a team of computer scientists built a very fast machine and figured out a better way to represent the problem of how to choose a next move. People, not machines performed this accomplishment. (Not sure this applies to alpha zero…)
• Wisdom of crowds: common idea of why it works is that mistakes that various people make cancel out; another more important idea is that there is some (perhaps small) element of correctness in the logic and assumptions underlying the guesses, such that they cluster around the correct value. This effect is repeatable and widely held to be one of the foundations of market economies and democracies. However collectives can be just as stupid – and in some important cases – even stupider than individuals. All examples of collective intelligence where guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals who guided the process and corrected for failure modes of the crowds. This interplay between the collective and the individual is key to the design of democracies, scientific communities etc.
• Tenure system is designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter. Not just the process.

• Democracy can be thought of as a low-pass filter, smoothing out struggles for consensus. Reduces the potential for the collective to overreact.

  Politics

• Information under-represents reality: Computers cannot presently represent thought or human relationships. Facebook and system standardized testing assume they can. Software should only be designed to perform tasks that can be successfully performed at a given time. This is not the attitude in which the internet software is designed. "When we deploy a computer model of something like learning or friendship in a way that has an effect on real lives, we are relying on faith."

  Buddhism

• The binary character of computers appear at a higher level. eg: far easier to tell a program to run or not, than to sort-of-run with more or less intensity depending on the situation.
• (Big picture argument against Google and Facebook) When money flows to advertising rather than musicians, journalists, or artists, society becomes more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
• Limits to libertarian-ism: Good that we have one currency, one court system and one military. fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government.
• The process of reinvention of youth through music seems to have stopped. This is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture has cloaked itself mainly in retro nostalgic styles.

NowIsDifferent

• Colors and sounds can be measured in rulers. Smells need to be looked up in a dictionary.
• Neoteny (where characteristics of early development are drawn out into adulthood) is an evolutionary strategy. Neoteny opens a window to the world before our brains are fully developed through instinct alone.
• Software doesn't speed up to match improvements in hardware. In fact the opposite, as computers get bigger there are more opportunities for errors and development becomes more conservative when there is more at stake.
• Longevity can slow culture change, which is tied more to the outgoing generational clock.