Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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The Paradigm of Object Spaces: Better Software is Coming, by Bernhard Angerer and Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Computer Science 2.0

Object Spaces is the start of the road towards making a qualitative revolution in computer science: a major upgrade in how software is made, and in the power of what it can do. Object Spaces takes on infrastructural challenges with an application-centered unified programming paradigm.
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How can we redefine information in the age of social media?, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Information Society, Social Media

On January 24, 2012, I was a keynote speaker at the BOBCATSSS conference on Information Management in Amsterdam. The conference was organised by students from 3 universities of applied sciences, namely Hogeschool van Amsterdam (NL), Hanze Hogeschool Groningen (NL), and Stuttgart Media University (GER).
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A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics, Mathematics

The goal of quantum computing has been clearly and explicitly defined by computer scientists, but the mathematics of how to implement qubits and superposition states does not yet exist. It should be noted right away that most efforts to realize quantum computing are, in my view, too one-sidedly hardware-centric.
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Rules and Patterns System for Design Process Support Software, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Computer Science 2.0

It is necessary, in building towards a Design Process Support Software Application, to design and program a Rules and Pattern System as an extreme form of bottom-up object-oriented intelligence (pragmatic AI) that has a direct relationship between perception and action without a guiding top-down intelligence.
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Improving the Information Society Through Awareness of Languages, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Information Society, Language

This is the text of a paper that I presented at the ISEA2011 festival of new media, electronic and digital arts in Istanbul, Turkey on September 21, 2011.
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Design for a Working Quantum Computer in Software, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Computer Science 2.0

A Quantum/Real World Software System with Similarity-Based Dynamic Objects
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Transforming Computer Science into a Humanities Subject, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Humanities Informatics

Despite its name, Computer Science is so far only an engineering discipline. Computer Science excluded art and sociology at its foundation, making itself into a strictly technical engineering practice, the tweaking of bits and bytes. We need a New Computer Science that integrates art and sociology at a fundamental level.
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Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Consumer Culture, Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard sets out to "classify a world of objects." He wants to go beyond a strictly "technological" analysis of how ordinary objects are intended - by the companies that manufacture them - to operate and to be used. He will instead study the "directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects."
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Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Consumer Culture, Jean Baudrillard

The damaged life of the fragmented individual, performing his duties in the system of production, is circumscribed by a universe of self-referential images and solipsistic spaces which sustain his socialization in that system.
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Diary of a Young Wikipedian, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 11th, 2013 in Category: Wikipedia

The great 19th century French writer Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge. To what extent is Wikipedia an unaware continuation of the “Enlightenment” projects that Flaubert so brilliantly mocked?
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Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 11th, 2013 in Category: Rethinking Science

Influenced by Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Adorno and Horkheimer’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment," and Kubrick and Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey," I believe that we have come to the end of the long era of technology being conceived and developed as a tool for the ‘domination of nature’.
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Political Philosophy of the Information Society, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 10th, 2013 in Category: Information Society

So far in our history there is no Political Philosophy of the Information Society. We have had a Political Philosophy of liberal democracy, a Political Philosophy of capitalism, a Political Philosophy of the various historical forms of totalitarianism: Nazism, Stalinism, fascism.
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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 10th, 2013 in Category: Robotism

I will now outline a programme of 7 concrete near-term steps that a large robotics manufacturing company should take on the road towards introducing robots-slash-androids to the consumer public.
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International Flusser Lecture, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 9th, 2013 in Category: Computer Science 2.0, Media Studies

On July 10, 2012, I gave the International Flusser Lecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Related to this lecture, a small book by me in German will be published in the International Flusser Lecture series by the Walther Koenig Verlag.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 8th, 2013 in Category: Androids & Artificial Life, Robotism

There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives.
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