Inventing Uselessness: on Japanese influventors’ revolt against work

On the uselessness of quantum queries

Given a prior probability distribution over a set of possible oracle functions, we define a number of queries to be useless for determining some property of the function if the probability that the function has the property is unchanged after the oracle responds to the queries. A familiar example is the parity of a uniformly random Boolean-valued function over {1, 2, . . . , N}, for which N − 1...

in translation: translators on their work and what it means

کتاب در باب ترجمه، اثر استر آلن و سوزان برنوفسکی منتشر شده در ماه می 2013 توسط نشریه کلمبیا است. نویسندگان در این کتاب به بررسی 18 مترجم با در نظر گرفتن نقش آثاری که این مترجمان ترجمه کرده اند میپردازند. کتاب به دو بخش تقسیم میشود: " مترجم در جهان" و " کار مترجم" این دو بخش مقالات همیشگی ترجمه و موقعیت خاص ادبیات بیگانه در جهان وسیع امروزی را مورد خطاب قرار میدهد. در این کتاب مقالات متعددی از ن...

The Uselessness of Public Use

Inventing science

When I was young, we seemed to have plenty of free time available for activities that the more serious generation of today would regard as puerile, if not infantile. Thus I spent endless hours writing scripts for imaginary series such as the ‘Lives of Great Composers’ or ‘Great Moments in Science’. I remember a scene written for one of the former which depicted Berlioz in a morgue, fondling the...

On the Evolution of Artificial Consciousness Re-inventing the wheel Re: Inventing the wheel

My intention here is to show how we might conceptualise the development of some kind of artificial consciousness. The point about evolution that is worth recognising here is that it occurs in any system of interacting components over time in physical and chemical space, through sheer proximity, instability, variability, combination and recombination. These largely chemical processes can be brou...