Sublime

Dalzell’s arrival that summer had a big ripple effect, and it magnified the growing anxieties of Shel Kaphan. Before the IPO, Bezos had taken his original partner for a walk, told him the company needed deeper technical management, and then asked him to become chief technology officer of Amazon. It sounded like a promotion, but in reality Kaphan wo

Manage the transfer, not the technology

The business of building intelligent machines could evolve along the same lines as the computer industry, with communities of people training intelligent machines to have specialized knowledge and abilities, and selling and swapping the resultant memory configurations.

Langton, Christopher G., et al. “Life at the Edge of Chaos.” Artificial Life II 10 (1992): 41–91.

The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics. It is easier to multiply than to divide.

Brush up on the prior art:  “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like  Douglas Engelbart  and  Bill Atkinson , and even conte

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

These are all highly contestable statements.

We centralized all our machines and tape library and set up a professional and experienced machine-room team to run them. To maximize scarce S/360 time, we ran all debugging runs in batch on whichever system was free and appropriate. We tried for four shots per day (two-and-one-half-hour turnaround) and demanded four-hour turnaround. An auxiliary 1