Monday, June 02, 2003


Bread And Circuses


“You can walk the streets of the United States and you will never find a single person who’s in favor of more consolidated media, unless by chance you happened to bump into one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.” - Reed Hundt, former U.S. FCC Chairman, in Salon


:: Dave Walker 00:34 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/opinion/politics]
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Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. It can be programmed to behave as if it were working with uncertainty, but -- underneath, at the code, at the circuits -- it cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line, the programmer confronts an awful, inevitable truth: The ways of human and machine understanding are disjunct. -- Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine"