Life After Google

Above all, you pay in time. Time is what money measures and represents—what remains scarce when all else becomes abundant in the “zero marginal cost” economy.

As Peter Drucker said, “It is less important to do things right than to do the right things.”

Peirce’s “sign relation” binds object, sign, and interpreter into an irreducible triad. It is fundamental to any coherent theory of information that every symbol be linked inexorably to its object by an interpreter,

these pursuits reflect a breakdown of terrestrial intelligence. The intellectuals of this era are simply blind to the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is who we are, how we think, and how we know. It echoes with religious intuitions and psychological identity. It is the essence of mind as opposed to machine.

After von Neumann, Shannon was the most important figure in the establishment of the system of the world that Google now embodies. I would like to say that he showed the way out. But Shannon himself ended up enmeshed in the same materialist superstition that afflicts the Google Age. “I think man is a machine of a very complex sort,”

Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality, calls Google’s triumphant, capacious, efficient data centers “Siren Servers,”

That assumption springs from a belief in evolution as a random process that has produced sub-optimal human brains,

Brave is the leader of this movement.

As Turing concluded, they need an “oracle”—a source of intelligence outside the system itself—and all he could say about the oracle is that it “could not be a machine.” Turing saw that computers repeat the uncertainties of physics that stem from recursive self-reference.