Digital Vs. Human references

Here is version one of the references (notes) for my book Digital vs. Human. This is the same as in the book, but with hyper-links. I will post an expanded version (version two) and possibly an update (version three) in due course.

Chapter 1: Society and Culture
‘Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun’: Rhodri Philips, ‘Korean Baby Dies as Parents Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun Raise Virtual Bub’, news. com.au, 5 March 2010
‘Being the most wired city on Earth’: Lauren Collins, ‘The Love App’, The New Yorker, 25 November 2013
‘One such robot is Paro’: Thomas Rogers, ‘Will the Elderly Ever Accept Care from a Robot?’, Slate, 17 August 2012
‘dangerous to foster relationships with machines’: Jerome Groopman, ‘Robots that Care’, The New Yorker, 2 November 2009
‘around half of current occupational categories may be lost to automation’: Derek Thompson, ‘What Jobs Will the Robots Take?’, The Atlantic, 23 January 2014 Aviva Hope Rutkin, ‘Report Suggests Nearly Half of US Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerisation’, MIT Technology Review, 12 September 2013 ‘tech culture is focused on solving one problem’: Nick Bilton, ‘Is Silicon Valley in Another Bubble … and What Could Burst It?’, Vanity Fair, 1 Sept 2015
‘There are no excuses — everyone must be online’, Hannah Furness, ‘Martha Lane Fox: No-one Should Say “I Don’t Do the Internet”’, The Telegraph, 24 March 2015
‘four-year-old children are having therapy for compulsive behaviour’: Victoria Ward, ‘Toddlers Becoming So Addicted to iPads They Require Therapy’, The Telegraph, 21 April 2013
‘training potties can now be bought with iPad stands’: Rebecca Pocklington, ‘“iPotty” Combines Child’s Potty with iPad Holder — but It Doesn’t Sit Well with Parents’, Mirror, 11 December 2013
‘computers were everywhere except in the numbers’: Jeff Madrick, ‘The Digital Revolution That Wasn’t’, Harper’s, January 2014
‘The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow’: Alan Jacobs, ‘The Two Cultures, Then and Now’, Books & Culture, March/April 2014
‘number of close friends (people you can really rely on in a crisis)’: Amy Willis, ‘Most Adults Have “Only Two Close Friends”’, The Telegraph, 8 November, 2011
‘rentafriend.com’: Tim Dowling, ‘Would You Rent a Friend?’, The Guardian, 21 July 2010
‘4.7 million people in the United Kingdom do not have a close friend’: John Bingham, ‘Lonely Britain: Five Million People Who Have No Real Friends’, The Telegraph, 12 August 2014
‘33 per cent of Britons, including 27 per cent of 18-to-24-year-olds, felt “left behind”’: John Bingham, ‘“Connected” Generation as Lonely as the Elderly’, The Telegraph, 12 December 2014
‘The stability of these files is, of course, a problem’: Sarah Knapton, ‘Print Out Digital Photos or Risk Losing Them, Google Boss Warns’, The Telegraph, 13 February 2015
‘trust in others, including trust in government and the media, fell to
an all-time low’: ‘Interpersonal Trust in the US Hits a Historic Low’, Harvard Business Review, 15 October 2014  Edelman Trust Barometer, 2014
‘only 19 per cent of Millennials trust others’: ‘Millennials in Adulthood’, Pew Research Centre, 7 March 2014
‘People are coming home and getting on their computers instead of having sex’: April Dembosky, ‘With Friends Like These …’, Financial Times, 19 May 2012
‘have a relationship with a digital girlfriend’: Anita Rani, ‘The Japanese Men Who Prefer Virtual Girlfriends to Sex’, BBC News, 24 October 2013
‘many Japanese feel that they no longer have a future’: Andy Davis, ‘Generation J’, Prospect, 14 November 2012
‘290 million 14-to-15-year-olds globally are neither in education nor working’: ‘Generation Jobless’, The Economist, 27 April 2013
‘23-year-old inventor who sold Oculus Rift’: Josie Ensor, ‘Oculus Rift’s Palmer Luckey: “I Brought Virtual Reality Back from the Dead”’, The Telegraph, 2 January 2015
‘young people as “the miners’ canaries of society”’: Geoff Gallop, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, 22 December 2009
‘50 per cent of the people who have ever reached 65 years of age’: ‘Age Invaders’, The Economist, 26 April 2014

 

Chapter 2: Media and Communications
‘I’m not saying that I came from a perfect world in 1975’: Kylie Morris, ‘American Inmates Released after Decades in Prison’, Channel 4 News, 21 April 2015
‘Texting in particular has become an obsession’: Barbara McMahon, ‘Have You Got FOBO? — What Obsessive-compulsive Phone Checking Is Doing to Your Brain’, The Times, 18 July 2015
‘use of multiple screens at the same time could result in damage’: Sarah Knapton, ‘Second Screening “May Alter the Brain and Trigger Emotional Problems”’, The Telegraph, 24 September 2014
‘Prior to 1980, one in every 2,000 children in the US was believed to be autistic’: Benjamin Wallace, ‘Autism Spectrum: Are You on It?’, New York magazine, 12 May 2014 ‘According to Ofcom’: Tony Dokoupil, ‘The Digital Obsession That’s Driving Us iCrazy’, The Sunday Times, 15 July 2012
‘streaming funerals as a “cost effective” option’: Gabriella Swerling, ‘Live Streaming Takes Funerals into the Digital Age’, The Times, 27 December 2014 ‘constant exposure to one’s own hyper-connected image on social-media’: Hannah Furness, ‘Lionel Shriver: Social Media Makes Teenagers “Neurotic”’, The Telegraph, 22 April 2013
‘Astrid Berges-Frisbey’: Agnes Poirer, ‘Tale of French Youth Captures the Ennui of Its “Lost Generation”’, The Observer, 21 July 2013
‘increasingly at the expense of meaningful conversation’: Sherry Turkle, ‘The Flight from Conversation’, New York Times, 21 April 2012
‘The UK-based photographer Babycakes Romero’: Poorna Bell, ‘Photographer Babycakes Romero Captures “The Death Of Conversation” Due to Smartphones’, The Huffington Post, 27 October 2014
‘Israeli start-up called PrimeSense’: Paul Marks, ‘A Phone, or an All- seeing Sentry at Your Command?’, New Scientist, 24 July 2013
‘84 per cent of people worldwide’: Meena Hart Duerson, ‘We’re Addicted to Our Phones: 84% Worldwide Say They Couldn’t Go a Single Day without Their Mobile Device in Their Hand’, New York Daily News, 16 August 2012
‘Mona Lisa in the Louvre’: Jennifer Roberts, ‘The Power of Patience’, Harvard Magazine, November–December 2013 Amelia Gentleman, ‘Smile, Please’, The Guardian, 19 October 2004
‘Shazam is a real-time radar for what people are listening to’: Derek Thompson, ‘The Shazam Effect’, The Atlantic, December 2014
‘kings and queens known more for their image than their achievement’: Jill Neimark, ‘The Culture of Celebrity’, Psychology Today, 1 May 1995
‘Clinical psychologist John Lucas’: Margaret Farley Steele, ‘The Psychology of Celebrity Worship’, ABC News, 26 June 2009

 

Chapter 3: Science and Technology
‘We think of language, ideas, or history as real’: Jan Westerhoff, ‘Reality: The Definition’, New Scientist, 29 September 2012
‘giving robotic companions legal personhood’: Hannah Devlin, ‘Grasp Future and Give Robots Legal Status, EU Is Told’, The Times, 2 October 2014
‘SociBot-Mini’: Paul Marks, ‘Talk to the Head’, New Scientist, 29 March 2014
‘instead of robots looking like robots, they start looking like us’: Yves Gellie, ‘I, Robot’, Financial Times, 20 July, 2012
‘Rene Descartes’: George Zarkadakis, ‘Why Robot Sex Could Be the Future of Life on Earth’, The Telegraph, 20 January 2014  ‘technological doomsday’: Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’,
Wired, 1 April 2000 ‘time is not real’: Michael Slezak, ‘Saving Time: Physics Killed It. Do We
Need It Back?’, New Scientist, 30 October 2013 ‘algorithms and automated online loans were partly responsible’: Hal Hodson, ‘No One in Control: The Algorithms That Run Our Lives’, New Scientist, 4 February 2015 ‘Cathal Gurrin’: Hal Hodson, ‘Lifelogging: This Is Your Life, on the Record’, New Scientist, 11 January 2014; Catherine de Lange, ‘Lifelogging: Crowdsourcing + Life Logs = Big Insights’, New Scientist, 8 January 2014
‘Forgetting is often more useful than remembering’: Rachel Metz, ‘My Life, Logged’, MIT Technology Review, 10 June 2014
‘control anything from computers to UAVs by simply moving the muscles’: Rachel Nuwer, ‘Armband Adds a Twitch to Gesture Control’, New Scientist, 25 February 2013

Chapter 4: economy and Money
‘great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’: Matt Taibbi, ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’, Rolling Stone, 5 April 2010
‘around two-thirds of the money made in developed countries was typically paid as wages’: Noah Smith, ‘The End of Labour: How to Protect Workers from the Rise of Robots’, The Atlantic, 14 January 2013
‘Large basement developments’: Ed Vulliamy, ‘Development Hell: How the Upmarket Vandals Ruined My Childhood Streets’, The Observer (Guardian), 22 September 2013 ‘a law called Lex Sumptuaria’: India Knight, ‘For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for … Remind Me, Daddy, What’s Poorer?’, The Sunday Times, 16 June 2013
‘global poverty has been reduced by half in 20 years’: ‘Poverty: Not Always with Us’, The Economist, 1 June 2013
‘the on-demand economy is efficiently connecting people selling certain skills’: Yochai Benkler, ‘The Death of the Company Reignites the Battle between Capital and Labour’, Financial Times, 24–25 January 2015
‘Wang Yue’: ‘The Unkindness of Strangers’, The Economist, 27 July 2013  See here too. ‘focusing more attention on their own needs at the expense of others’: Daisy Grewal, ‘How Wealth Reduces Compassion’, Scientific American, 10 April 2012 ‘decline in economic wealth promotes collectivism’: Heejung Park, Jean Twenge, and Patricia Greenfield, ‘The Great Recession: implications for adolescent values and behaviour’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6 March 2014 and here.
‘28 minutes per month travelling to ATMs’: Peter Spence, ‘Apple Wants the Money in Your Pocket’, The Telegraph, 13 September 2014
‘the use of cash is expected to fall by a third by 2022’: Neasa MacErlean, ‘On the Money’, Business Life, September 2014. No link.
‘QE’: Lian Halligan, ‘History Will Surely See QE as a Major Mistake’, The Telegraph, 1 November 2014
‘Everyone wanted a dictatorship’: Richard Evans, ‘A Middle Class Revolt?’, Prospect, September 2013

Chapter 5: Healthcare and Medicine
‘Oscar Pistorius’s “Cheetah” legs’: Catherine de Lange, ‘We are Already Superhuman’, New Scientist, 15 August 2012
‘memory implants or e-pills’: Sally Adee, ‘Memory Implants: Chips to Fix Broken Brains’, New Scientist, 4 June 2014
‘give away up to £5,000 worth of personal data every year’: Jamie Bartlett, ‘Little Brothers are Watching You’, The Spectator, 7 December 2013
‘medically accurate digital body double’: Linda Geddes, ‘In Sickness and in Health’, New Scientist, 15 March 2014. No current link.
‘physical activity levels have fallen by 20 per cent over the past 50 years’: Laura Donnelly, ‘Lazy Britain: We Will Soon Use Little More Energy than If We Stayed in Bed’, The Telegraph, 31 January 2014
‘children today are considerably less fit than their parents’: Richard Gray, ‘Children 300 Yards behind Generation of ’75’, The Telegraph, 20 November 2014
‘malignant brain tumours’: Stephen Adams, ‘Mobile Phones Cause “Five- fold Increase in Brain Cancer Risk”’, The Telegraph, 30 June 2011; ‘Mobile Phones and Children’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 23–24 April 2011
‘wi-fi signals could be having a serious impact on health’: Florence Waters, ‘Is Wi-fi Making Your Child Ill?’, The Telegraph, 9 May 2015
‘“extremely powerful effect” on sleep length and quality’: Tristan Kirk, ‘Less Sweet Dreams after iPad Reading’, The Telegraph, 23 December 2014
‘25 per cent drop in bed days of care’: Randall Stross, ‘Tracking Vital Signs, without the Wires’, The New York Times, 3 September 2011
‘1970 to 2009, spending increased by around 9 per cent per annum’: Jonathan Rauch, ‘The Home Remedy for Old Age’, The Atlantic, December 2013
‘the supply of technology drives demand’: Bjorn Hofmann, ‘Too Much Technology’, British Medical Journal, 21 February 2015  PDF here.
‘trying to avoid what’s been called the death problem’: Mick Brown, ‘Peter Thiel: The Billionaire Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission to Cheat Death’, The Telegraph, 19 September 2014
‘Demis Hassabis’: Murad Ahmed, ‘Lunch with the F T: Demis Hassabis’, Financial Times, 30 January 2015
‘children wouldn’t be distracted by snowflakes falling outside’: ‘Primary School Bans Children Looking at Snow as It Is “Too Distracting”’, The Telegraph, 8 February, 2015
‘our cells and tissues are becoming just another brand of hardware to be upgraded’: Kim Tingley, ‘The Body Electric’, The New Yorker, 25 November 2013
‘A thoroughly modern malady’: Laura Donnelly, ‘Anxiety: A Very Modern Malaise’, The Telegraph, 15 April 2012
‘between 2 per cent and 4 per cent of a population would typically suffer from an anxiety-related condition’: Sophie McBain, ‘Anxiety Nation: Why Are So Many of Us So Ill at Ease?’, New Statesman, 17 April 2014
‘nervous disorder’: Bob Holmes, ‘Worried Sick: What’s Up with Today’s Rampant Anxiety?’, New Scientist, 5 February 2014
‘retired 89-year-old art teacher’: Claire Ellicott, ‘Teacher Died at Dignitas because She Couldn’t Bear Modern Life: Healthy Spinster’s Despair at Fast Food, Email, and Lack of Humanity’, Daily Mail, 6 April 2014
‘self-harm has become the main cause of death for people aged 15 to 49’: Tony Dokoupil, ‘Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic — and What We Can Do to Help’, Newsweek, 23 May 2013

Chapter 6: Automotive and Transport
‘17 per cent of pedestrian deaths’: ‘When the Grannies Get Going’, The Economist, 14 July 2012; Ann Brenoff, ‘Elderly Driving: AARP Study Looks at What Happens When Boomers Hang Up Their Car Keys?’, The Huffington Post, 10 November 2012
‘the biggest orderly rollout of forward-facing cameras’: ‘Kojak Moments’, The Economist, 23 August 2014
‘In 2011, distracted drivers killed 3,300 people in the US’: Jeff Hecht, ‘Just Hang Up and Drive’, New Scientist, 20 July 2013
‘broadly shared by workers, consumers and owners of capital’: ‘To Those That Have Shall Be Given’, The Economist, 4 October 2014
‘A pilotless airliner is going to come’: Philip Ross, ‘When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?’, IEEE Spectrum, 29 November 2011
‘faults in FADEC had been found that were “positively dangerous”’: Tony Collins, ‘Crash of Chinook ZD576 — The 16-year Campaign for Justice’, Computerworld UK, 13 July 2011 Also here.

Chapter 7: education and Knowledge
‘illusion of intelligence’: Karl Taro Greenfeld, ‘The End of Cultural Literacy’, International New York Times, 27 May 2014 ‘test results are pursued at the expense of a rounded education’: Ollie Gillman, ‘Eton Headmaster Slams “Exasperating” A-level and GCSE Exams and Says Teacher Training is “a Mess”’, Daily Mail, 19 May 2015; Tony Little and Anthony Seldon, ‘How to Fit Our Pupils for the 21st Century’, Insight, June 2015
‘OECD study of students in 70 countries’: Sean Coughlan, ‘Computers “Do Not Improve” Pupil Results, Says OECD’, BBC News, 15 Sept 2015  And here.
‘210 child prodigies’: Alex Proud, ‘Your Child Is Not a Genius. Get Over It’, The Telegraph, 10 February 2014
‘education systems that focus on specialisation and limited definitions of intelligence’: Michael Brooks, ‘Invest in Minds Not Maths to Boost the Economy’, New Scientist, 17 December 2013
‘computers make rote procedures obsolete’: ‘Teaching Mathematics. Time for a Ceasefire’, The Economist, 1 February 2014
‘A meta-study of thousands of research papers’: Sarah Montague, ‘How Badly Do We Teach Our Children? Discuss’, The Telegraph, 13 August 2014
‘Most online students are rich, white, male, and already well educated’: Gayle Christensen and Brandon Alcorn, ‘A Lesson in Learning’, New Scientist, 8 March 2014
‘Better sex’: Simon Jenkins, ‘In This Post-digital Age, We Still Thrill to the Power of Live’, The Guardian, 20 June 2014
‘dedicated gamers will spend around 10,000 hours playing online by the time they turn 21’: Lucy Kellaway, ‘Online Life Can Teach Us about the Office’, Financial Times, 25 March 2012
‘study led by Patricia Greenfield’: Abigail Jones, ‘Children Who Switch Off Screens Reconnect with Emotional Cues’, Newsweek, 12 September 2014
‘Slow education like slow food’: Irena Barker, ‘Find the Time for Slow Education’, TES, 2 November 2012
‘spend too long indoors on screens’: Camilla Turner and Jonathan Leake, ‘UK Kids Stuck in the Great Indoors’, The Sunday Times, 13 January 2013
‘You’d think this school would be cluttered with computers. It isn’t’: Matt Richtel, ‘A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute’, The New York Times, 22 October 2011 ‘Michael J. Sandel’: Thomas Friedman, ‘Moral Philosophy Rocks’,
International Herald Tribune (NYT), 16 June 2011 ‘using mobiles before bed almost doubles the chance of teens have a bad night’s sleep’: Sarah Knapton, ‘Banish Smartphones and Computers from Bedroom to Get a Good Sleep, Say Scientists’, The Telegraph, 2 February 2015
‘classroom zombies’: Flic Everett, ‘Why It’s Not Just Teenagers Who Are Suffering from “PhoMo”’, The New Zealand Herald, 18 September 2015
‘10.00 a.m. starts’: Russell Foster, ‘Best Daze of Your Life’, New Scientist, 20 April 2013. Lost link. Try here.

Chapter 8: Work and employment
‘one of a million digital nomads’: John Bingham, ‘Internet Helps Million More Quit Office to Work from a Country Home’, The Telegraph, 4 June 2014
‘90 per cent of employees worldwide were doing jobs they didn’t really like’: Barry Schwartz, ‘Rethinking Our Work’, International New York Times, 29–30 August 2015
‘paper by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne’: Carl Frey and Michael Frey, ‘The Future of Employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?’, Oxford Martin School, 18 September 2013
‘software will make one in three jobs redundant by 2025’: Merryn Somerset Webb, ‘Making Money in the Age of Machines’, Financial Times, 7 November 2015.
‘I feel like they don’t trust you to think like a human being’: ‘Amazon: The Truth Behind the Click’, Panorama (TV show), first broadcast 25 November 2013; Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, ‘Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace’, The New York Times, 15 August 2015
‘Predictive workforce analysis’: Don Peck, ‘They’re Watching You at Work’, The Atlantic, December 2013
‘sleep debt’: Peter Catapano, ‘Doing More May Mean Doing Less’, The New York Times, 17 March 2013. Lost link.

 

Chapter 9: Home and Family
‘future arrives in three flavours’: Edwin Heathcote, ‘Architecture: How Buildings Are Used in Sci-fi Films’, Financial Times, 22 November 2013
‘Instagram, for instance, changed its user agreement’: Douglas Heaven, ‘Lost in the Cloud: How Safe Are Your Online Possessions?’, New Scientist, 26 March 2013
‘how many people it takes to change a light bulb’: David Talbot, ‘The Light Bulb Gets a Digital Makeover’, MIT Technology Review, 20 May 2014
‘89 per cent of people would not be willing to pay one meagre dollar’: MacGregor Campbell, ‘This Means War’, New Scientist, 1 Sept 2012
‘10 per cent of older people do not have a single conversation with another human being’: ‘Esther Rantzen: Britain Is Too Busy to Speak to Older People’, The Telegraph, 27 May 2014
‘number of single-person households has risen by more than 100 per cent’: John Bingham, ‘Bridget Jones Takeover: Number of Singletons Growing Ten Times as Fast as Population’, The Telegraph, 8 May 2014
‘60 per cent of women over 30 in the UAE were unmarried’: ‘The Attraction of Solitude’, The Economist, 25 August 2012
‘KIPPERS’: Natasha Robinson, ‘It’s All Relative, as Research Reveals Generations Living Together’, The Australian, 15 April 2013
‘Danish Council of Ethics’: David Sexton, ‘Ready for Robolove: Could You Fall in Love with a Computer?’, Evening Standard, 14 February 2014
‘how we will protect nature as adults if we have no experience of nature as children’: George Monbiot, ‘If Children Lose Contact with Nature They Won’t Fight For It’, The Guardian, 20 November 2012
‘sales of vinyl’: Kadhim Shubber, ‘Back to Black: Vinyl Discs Enjoy Renaissance’, Financial Times, 24 October 2014 (subscription required to access link).
‘invisible digital other’: Erica Tempesta, ‘Sometimes It’s Easier to Fake It! Invisible Boyfriend App Gives Single Girls a Dream Man Who Will Always Text Back — So FEMAIL Put Him to the Test’, Daily Mail, 21 January 2015
‘50 per cent of people will have met their partner online’: India Knight, ‘Online Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing — Click Send’, The Sunday Times, 26 January 2014
‘no longer read to their children at night’: Graeme Paton, ‘Parents Told: Turn Off Phones and Talk to Your Children’, The Telegraph, 13 September 2013

Chapter 10: Art and War
‘a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell’: Jack Miles, ‘Why God Will Not Die’, The Atlantic, December 2014
‘more that they can’t be bothered (or don’t have the time)’: ‘God Not- botherers: Religious Apathy Reigns’, New Scientist, 30 April 2014
‘Using games to simulate war isn’t new’: P.W. Singer, ‘Meet the Sims … and Shoot Them’, Foreign Policy, 11 February 2010
‘danger that digital training will edge out real-life understanding’: John Markoff, ‘War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat’, The New York Times, 27 November 2010
‘80 per cent of apprehended burglars’: ‘Don’t Even Think about It’, The Economist, 20 July 2013

Chapter 11: Conclusions and Suggestions
‘world’s smallest music venue’: http://folkinabox.net/

Digital Vs. Human – What’s the book about?

For my new book I’ve created an index based upon key concepts rather than trying to include everything and everyone that’s mentioned. Hence there’s no reference to Facebook, Twitter or Google in the index, but plenty of references to drivers and consequences. In a sense the result is an edited word cloud, although I got a few surprises. For instance, it’s no shock that algorithms feature, but quite a surprise that ‘meaning’, ‘reality’ and ‘money’ do. This isn’t quite the final version.

Addiction
 2, 33, 50, 77, 189,
Ageing 11, 14, 17, 18, 75, 77, 86, 87, 106, 107, 117, 119, 121, 122, 135, 172, 197, 220,
Algorithms
 25, 43, 44, 65, 76, 78, 79, 80, 124, 136, 144, 173, 178, 179, 180, 190, 203, 208, 225,
Anxiety
 x, xxii, 16, 18, 36, 127, 128, 129, 130, 155, 167, 189, 212, 220,
Artificial intelligence (AI) xv, 60, 75, 91, 122, 124, 125, 172, 173, 218, 236, 238, 239, 240, 244, 247
Augmented reality xii, 21, 22, 39, 105, 138, 190, 194,
Autism 8, 9, 35, 36,
Automation xv, 3, 5, 20, 76, 84, 91, 127, 135, 147, 148, 156, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 187, 198, 223, 236, 240, 243,
Autonomous systems 75, 136, 223, 234, 238, 243
Avatars
 1, 7, 57, 133, 170, 189, 206, 208, 221
Big Data 64, 112, 114, 143, 173
Collaboration 26, 27, 63
Complexity xi, 46, 50, 114, 134, 166, 174, 220, 235, 248
Connectivity 18, 21, 49, 63, 64, 67, 79, 88, 89, 91, 100, 142, 143, 194, 237
Consciousness 22, 33, 56, 59, 62, 123, 124, 125, 218, 219, 239, 243
Convenience
 6, 17, 23, 49, 81, 137, 194, 195, 201, 202, 210, 236
Death
 (human) 1, 8, 18, 25, 56, 93, 114, 123, 130, 135, 136, 140, 208, 209,
Depression (human) 110, 129
Digital immortality 22, 52, 123, 126,
Digital solutionism 181
Digitalisation 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 93, 98, 194, 204, 219, 221, 237, 238, 247,
Distraction 15, 33, 41, 48, 80, 96, 137, 165
Efficiency
 3, 6, 43, 44, 125, 138, 139, 173, 195, 200, 201, 202, 236, 237
Empathy 33, 35, 48, 49, 58, 82, 89, 93, 156, 166, 188
Exhibitionism
 10, 39, 108, 202
Fear
 xv, 4, 20, 37, 70, 106, 127, 199, 212, 213, 221, 229
Forecasting 55, 225, 234
Gamification 64, 122
Gaming
 209, 222
Humans xv, 6, 9, 28, 50, 63, 82, 93, 107, 126, 130, 158, 159, 188, 195, 220, 226, 232, 234, 240, 241, 244, 245, 247,
Human condition 16, 125, 221, 226, 229
Human enhancement 69, 105, 106, 161
Immortality 22, 52, 123, 126
Income polarisation 74, 91, 177
Internet 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 15, 21, 23, 25, 33, 34, 36, 40, 43, 49, 52, 63, 64, 65, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 102, 109, 112, 142, 154, 163, 173, 192, 201, 208, 219, 225, 234, 242, 248
Internet of Things 21, 64
Isolation 11, 39, 40, 50, 87, 107, 108
Loneliness
 11, 16, 40, 129, 130, 133, 177, 198, 207,
Love 25, 28, 40, 41, 61, 89, 103, 133, 198, 206, 207, 208, 216, 228, 229, 230
Meaning
 1, 16, 117, 174, 216, 221, 227, 228, 237
Memory
 (human) 8, 12, 38, 61, 106, 107, 108, 117, 125, 145, 166, 245
Memory (machine) 61, 66, 67, 89, 107, 108, 110, 172
Mental illness
 182, 234
Money xii, 13, 18, 19, 21, 27, 33, 39, 49, 56, 64, 65, 66, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109, 124, 162, 174, 177, 179, 210,
Narcissism
 10, 38, 197
Online education and learning 44, 47, 155, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165
Personalisation 23, 34, 41, 65, 194
Phones (mobile and cell) 6, 10, 21, 22, 36, 37, 40, 41, 55, 96, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 140, 142, 143, 144, 166, 192, 210, 211, 226, 230,
Polarisation 74, 78, 91, 177, 229
Privacy 23, 36, 63, 76, 113, 114, 182, 192, 241
Provenance 206, 231
Reality 1, 2, 4, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 32, 38, 39, 43, 51, 56, 61, 62, 63, 66, 90, 91, 216, 217, 221, 222, 224, 229, 248
Robots
 xiii, 3, 4, 7, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 69, 70, 76, 77, 84, 111, 130, 155, 178, 179, 182, 188, 189, 198, 227, 243, 244
Screens x, 7, 10, 26, 33, 37, 40, 42, 47, 55, 66, 80, 81, 96, 115, 130, 137, 149, 161, 164, 165, 170, 181, 192, 199, 201, 203, 247
Self-driving (autonomous) vehicles 55, 128, 138, 140, 149
Sharing
 3, 12, 26, 27, 65, 88, 109, 110, 142, 204,
Singularity
 172, 173, 239
Solipsism 56 (and throughout)
Trust
 12, 13, 34, 51, 88, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 110, 115, 141, 151, 173, 182, 194, 206
Uncertainty 18, 86, 216, 220, 236
Violence 27, 221, 222
Virtual reality 1, 2, 15, 21, 22, 26, 39, 41, 61, 63, 108, 194, 209, 222, 248
Volatility
 86, 91, 220
Wearable computing 21, 22, 25, 64, 68, 69, 109, 111, 113, 174, 182

Digital vs. Human: Bibliography

 

Here’s a list of books referenced in my new book Digital vs. Human or otherwise useful. I will update the list across 2016. If readers have any further suggestions please add to the comments. And yes, I know, the links are mostly to Amazon, but this is a blog and I figured it was easy in this particular instance. Order from a physical bookshop if you can.

—-
Angwin, Julia, Dragnet Nation: a quest for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance, Henry Holt, 2014. Video here.

Arkin, Ronald, Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots, Chapman and Hall, 2009

Armstrong, Stuart, Smarter Than Us: the rise of machine intelligence, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. Video here.
Barrat, James, Our Final Invention: artificial intelligence and the end of the Human Era, St Martin’s Press, 2013. Video here.
Bartlett, Jamie, The Dark Net: inside the digital underworld, William Heinemann, 2014. Video here.

 

Bell, Gordon and Gemmell, Jim, Total Recall: how the e-memory revolution will change
everything, Dutton, 2009.

 

Bostrom, Nick, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, http://www.simulation-argument.com/ Video here.

 

Boyd, Danah, It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens, Yale University
Press, 2014. Video here.

Brynjolfsson, Erik and McAfee, Andrew, Race against the Machine: how the digital
revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly
transforming employment and the economy, Digital Frontier, 2011. Video here. See also PDF.

——, The Second Machine Age: work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant
technologies, WW Norton, 2014. Video here.

 

Bywater, Michael, Lost Worlds: what have we lost, and where did it go?, Granta, 2004

 

Carr, Nicholas, The Glass Cage: automation and us, WW Norton, 2014. Video here.

 

Christodoulou, Daisy, Seven Myths about Education, Routledge, 2014

 

Clippinger, John, Crowd of One: the future of individual identity, PublicAffairs, 2007
Coupland, Douglas, Microserfs, Regan, 1995

 

Cowen, Tyler, Average is Over: powering America beyond the age of the great
stagnation, Dutton, 2013. Video here and here.

Davis, Devra, Disconnect, Dutton, 2010. Video here.

Dorling, Danny, All That is Solid: the great housing disaster, Allen Lane, 2014. Video here.

Dyson, George, Darwin among the Machines: the evolution of global intelligence,
Perseus, 1997

Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots: technology and the threat of a jobless future, Basic
Books, 2015. Video here.

Forsyth, Mark, The Unknown Unknown: bookshops and the delight of not getting what
you wanted, Icon, 2014

Gardner, Dan, Future Babble: why expert predictions are wrong — and why we believe
them anyway, Scribe, 2010, Video here.

Gardner, Howard and Davis, Kate, The App Generation: how today’s youth navigate
identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world, Yale University Press, 2013. Video here.

Gleick, James, Faster: the acceleration of just about everything, Pantheon, 1999. Discussion of book on video here.

Greenfield, Susan, Mind Change: how digital technologies are leaving their mark on our
brains, Rider, 2014. Video here.

 

Greenstein, Shane, How the Internet Became Commercial: innovation, privatisation, and
the birth of a new network, Princeton University Press, 2015. Video here.

 

Handy, Charles, The Empty Raincoat: making sense of the future, Hutchinson, 1993

 

——, The Second Curve: thoughts on reinventing society, Random House, 2015

 

Harari, Yuval, Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, Harvill Secker, 2014. Video here.

 

Harris, Michael, The End of Absence: reclaiming what we’ve lost in a world of constant
connection, Current, 2014. VRadio interview here.

 

Head, Simon, Mindless: why smarter machines are making dumber humans, Basic
Books, 2013

 

Johnson, Steven, Future Perfect: the case for progress in a networked age, Riverhead,
2012. Video here.

 

Kaplan, Jerry, Humans Need Not Apply: a guide to wealth and work in the age of
artificial intelligence, Yale University Press, 2015. Video here.
Keen, Andrew, Digital Vertigo: how today’s online society is dividing, diminishing, and disorientating us, St Martin’s Press, 2012.  Video here.
——, The Internet is Not the Answer, Atlantic, 2014. Video here.

 

Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future?, Simon & Schuster, 2013. Video here.

 

——, You Are Not a Gadget, Knopf, 2010. Video here.

 

Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations, WW Norton, 1978. Video here.

 

Louv, Richard, Last Child in the Woods: saving our children from nature-deficit
disorder, Algonquin Books, 2005. Video here.

 

Markoff, John, Machines of Loving Grace: the quest for common ground between
humans and robots, HarperCollins, 2015. Video here.

 

Marwick, Alice, Status Update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media
age, Yale University Press, 2013. Radio interview here.

 

Mayer-Schnoberger, Viktor, Big Data: a revolution that will transform how we work,
live, and think, Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt, 2013. Video here.

 

——, Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age, Princeton University Press, 2009. Video here.

 

Morozov, Evgeny, To Save Everything, Click Here: the folly of technological
solutionism, PublicAffairs, 2013. Video here.

 

Newton, Richard, The End of Nice: how to be human in a world run by robots, self-
published, 2015. Video here.

 

Pasquale, Frank, The Black Box Society: the secret algorithms that control money and
information, Harvard University Press, 2015. Video here.

 

Pinker, Susan, The Village Effect: how face-to-face contact can make us healthier,
happier, and smarter, Spiegel & Grau, 2014. Video here.

 

Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show
business, Methuen, 1984

 

Rosen, Larry, iDisorder: understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming
its hold on us, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

 

Rubin, Charles, Eclipse of Man: human extinction and the meaning of progress,
Encounter books, 2014.

 

Rushkoff, Douglas, Present Shock: when everything happens now, Current, 2013. Video here.
Saul, John, Voltaire’s Bastards: the dictatorship of reason in the West, Viking, 1991. Video here.

 

Schmidt, Eric and Cohen, Jared, The New Digital Age: reshaping the future of people,
nations, and business, Knopf, 2013. Video here.

 

Schumacher, E.F., Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered, Blond
& Briggs, 1973. Short film here.

 

Seidensticker, Bob, Future Hype: the myth of technology change, Berrett-Koehler, 2006

 

Silberman, Steve, Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and how to think smarter about
people who think differently, Allen & Unwin, 2015. Video here.

 

Singer, P.W., Wired for War: the robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century,
Penguin Press, 2009. Video here.

 

Snow, C.P, The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, 1959. Another download here.

 

Steiner, Christopher, Automate this: how algorithms came to rule our world, Portfolio,
2012. Video here.

 

Taylor, Frederick, The Downfall of Money: Germany’s hyperinflation and the destruction
of the middle class, Bloomsbury, 2013. Download here.

 

Toffler, Alvin & Heidi, Future Shock, Random House, 1970. Video here.

 

Tucker, Patrick, The Naked Future: what happens in a world that anticipates your every
move, Current, 2014. Video here.

 

Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each
other, Basic Books, 2010. Video here.

 

——, Reclaiming Conversation: the power of talk in a digital age, Penguin Press, 2015. Video here.

 

Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
Network, and the rise of digital utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006. Video here.

 

Twenge, Jean and Campbell, Keith, The Narcissism Epidemic: living in the age of
entitlement, Atria, 2009. Video here.

 

Wallach, Wendell, A Dangerous Master: how to keep technology from slipping beyond
our control, Basic Books, 2015. Video here.

 

Wallman, James, Stuffocation: how we’ve had enough of stuff and why you need
experience more than ever, Crux, 2013

 

Zarkadakis, George, In Our Own Image: will artificial intelligence save or destroy us?,
Ebury, 2015. Video discussion here.
Zeldin, Theodore, An Intimate History of Humanity, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994

 

——, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: a new way of remembering the past and imagining
the future, MacLehose Press, 2015

Cheap oil – but for how long?

Back to global risks….

Leader in the Telegraph today, which ends as follows:

“This apparent glut in supply, however, means that capacity globally is quite small. It would therefore require only a relatively minor disruption to supply for the situation to reverse and prices to rocket. Rarely have both the geopolitics and economics of oil looked so fragile.”

Science vs. Fiction – sci-fi fans needed!

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Just wondering if there are any sci-fi fans out there with a bit of spare time and brainpower on their hands. I’m trying to find out whether sci-fi had anything to say about oral contraception prior to the arrival of Carl Djerassi in the 1950s. and 1960s

There’s plenty of mention of infertility treatments and artificial reproduction – Brave New World (1932), The Tissue Culture King (1926) and so on, but nothing as far as I can see on the opposite.

All is not well…

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A study by the NASUWT Union in the UK found that 83% of teachers reported workplace stress. Meanwhile, the Public and Commercial services Unions claims that 2/3 of civil servants have suffered from ill health due to workplace stress. To cap things off, the NHS in the UK says that the prescription of heavy duty antidepressants increased by 29% last year. What is going on?

The Future of Money (a ten year perspective)

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One of the good things about having done what I do for a long time is that after a while you can look backwards. Here’s something I wrote about the future of money ten years ago (2005). Some things are spot on. Others are way off. (BTW, sorry about the line breaks, WordPress is doing its own thing).


Like predictions about the paperless office, forecasts about a cashless society have been around for a while. For example, AC Nielsen research says that only 10% of transactions in the US will be cash by the year 2020. Logically this makes sense because electronic commerce is at it’s most powerful in information processing industries like financial services.The idea is essentially that notes, coins, and checks are all hugely inefficient and will be replaced by digital money, which is easier to process. Governments love the idea of getting rid of cash because up to 25% of all cash in circulation globally is used for illegal purposes (in the United States, a staggering 25-30% of people don’t have bank accounts). Companies also love the idea because electronic payments are faster and much cheaper. And as far as multinationals are concerned, the sooner there’s a single global currency the better.
From a technological point of view, the cashless society is certainly getting closer. PayPal already has 63 million accounts, which makes it bigger than most national banks. In South Korea, four million banking transactions were carried out via cell phone in June of last year, and 300,000 people have bought cell phones into which you can plug a memory card securely encrypted with financial data. In Finland and Japan, you can pay for train journeys and restaurant meals by simply waving your phone in front of a payment terminal. And in Australia and Austria, you can pay for a parking space using your phone. Hello mobile micro-payments. Bye-bye cash.
Back in South Korea, more people own cell phones than computers, so it’s pretty easy to see why phone companies could be the banks of the future. Or, as Bill Joy has pointed out, your phone will become your wallet, and a bank or credit card company will give it to you for free. And don’t forget that in the future all phones will be GPS equipped so products like motor or holiday insurance could be sold by the minute on a pay-as-you-go basis. Why? Because your insurance company would know where you are in real time and could calculate risk and payments accordingly. Thus the scene with Tom Cruise in Minority Report suddenly becomes very real with the prospect of retailers (including banks) knowing who you are and what you’re worth (or at least what you spent last time) the second you step into their store.

 
Could the cashless society really happen? Yes. Early signs include the fact that 14% of Britons regularly throw away coins because they can’t be bothered to carry them around. And in the U.S., electronic payments (including debit and credit cards) surpassed check payments in December 2004 for the first time in history, while in Australia check usage has fallen from 50 per person in 1998 to 30 per person in 2003. Other signals include the fact that frequent flier miles are now the world’s second largest currency according to The Economist. Better still, Everquest currency is now more valuable than the Japanese Yen and is regularly traded for real U.S. dollars according to Edward Castronova, associate professor of economics at California State University. Sometimes it seems that the only people who like “real” money are older change-averse people. They won’t be around forever.

 

Nevertheless, all but the most geeky of of Generation Y would have to admit that there is something inherently substantial and emotionally reassuring about paper (and metal) money that’s difficult to replicate in cyberspace. Logically, paper books and newspapers should have been replaced by electronic books and online news a long time ago. But they haven’t. Thousands of years of tradition, human nature, and practicality have put the brakes on these innovations.

 
Then there’s the issue of trust. There are lots of trends that can be used to support a scenario where banks become extinct — acceleration of technology, product convergence, convenience, new channels, and brand promiscuity to name just a few. And remember: Most people don’t just dislike banks. They hate them. They hate waiting in line, the fees, and the lack of any meaningful choice. In the UK there’s even a Web-based service that allows customers to record conversations with their bank to provide evidence of poor service or misleading advice.
If Toyota or Yahoo branch out into financial services (as they’ve done in Japan), the banks could be in for a pretty rough ride. And that’s before Microsoft, Apple, or Vodafone offer banking services based on emerging technologies like digital signatures. Hello hyper-competition. Bye-bye margins.

 

So is this the beginning of the end for physical banks? Not necessarily. In the U.S., branch expansion is a major trend. In Australia, local community banks (and, conversely, private banks) are all the rage.100 years ago, the bigger a bank, the better. Now the opposite is increasingly true. As globalisation and virtual worlds take hold, people are being drawn back to local businesses and physical contact. People also crave simplicity, which is why banks like HBOS in the UK offer a limited choice of easy-to-understand products. This is good for customers, staff, and profits.Equally, most markets are polarising between low-cost providers and premium suppliers offering personalised solutions. Cheap Internet banking via a cell phone can happily exist next to branches that feature people who offer advice on big-ticket items like home loans. If you’re rich, you can have the best of both worlds: phone banking with instant access to a personal assistant and swipe card entry to flagship branches offering legendary customer service. And somewhere in the middle you can find 7-Eleven’s Vcom 24-hour bill pay kiosks.
But let’s go back to trust. UK supermarket Tesco has successfully offered basic products like cash back and car loans, but supermarket credibility is strained when you start talking about more complex matters like wealth management. Or take the fact that whilst we regularly take money out of ATMs, only 5-10% of us are happy to deposit money back in. There’s also the issue of identity theft, a $56-billion problem in the U.S. and up 600% in the past five years in the UK. ID theft is a problem that could bring the cashless society to its knees, but it’s also spawning a number of innovations like identitytheft911.com (Citibank) and ID theft insurance (progeny/AIG). Nobody can be really sure what will happen in the future, but it’s a fair bet that change will happen. Here are a few ideas you can bank on:

– We’re on the verge of a technological explosion that will benefit new entrants.
– Mobile micro-payments will revolutionise the shopping experience.
– Physical banks and customer service are not going away any time soon.
– If cash disappears, private currencies and barter schemes will flourish.
– Digitised money will eventually be embedded in everything from clothes to people.