Skinner box

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The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

And yet our interactions with the machine are conditioned. Critics of social media like Jaron Lanier argue that the user experience is designed much like the famous ‘Skinner Box’ or ‘operant conditioning chamber’ invented by the pioneering behaviourist B. F. Skinner. In this chamber, the behaviour of laboratory rats was conditioned by stimuli – lights, noises and food. Each of these stimuli constituted a ‘reinforcement’, either positive or negative, which would reward some forms of behaviour and discourage others. In the Skinner Box, test subjects are taught how to behave through conditioning. And if this model has found its way into the mobile apps, gaming and social industries, it might reflect the way that behaviourist ideas have achieved a surprising renaissance among businessmen and policymakers in recent decades.

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Nor, even if they thought we did know, would they have any reason to give it to us. The machine is not a democracy, and it isn’t even a market; we are neither customers nor voters. We are digital ‘serfs’, says Jaron Lanier, the ‘livestock of a feudal demesne’, according to Bruce Sterling.52 We inhabit a laboratory, a real-life operant conditioning chamber, into which we have been lured by the promise of democratized luxury. In the early days of the internet, the promise was that we could ‘Ask Jeeves’; now we are offered ‘tools’ and ‘virtual assistants’. On that basis, millions of us have entered a web of surveillance in which we are the servants, providing endless hours of free labour.

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As one former gambling addict puts it, ‘All I can remember is living in a trance for four years.’60 Schüll calls it the ‘machine zone’ where ordinary reality is ‘suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’.61 For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing. Marc Lewis describes how even after kicking junk he couldn’t face ‘a day without a change of state’.62 The Twittering Machine, as a wholly designed operant conditioning chamber, needs none of the expedients of the casino or opium den. The user has already dropped out of work, a boring lunch, an anxious social situation or bad sex, to enter into a different, timeless, time zone. What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we’re avoiding as what we find when we log in – which, after all, is often not that exciting.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

It kinda works like a slot machine, where you’re excited to see who the next person is, or, hopefully, you’re excited to see ‘did I get the match?’ and get that ‘It’s a Match’ screen? It’s a nice little rush.”20 Thrilled by such ease and pleasure, our society is busy putting a Skinner box in every hand by making them ever cheaper, easier to use, and easier to get. But unlike slot machines, our personal Skinner boxes don’t offer the prospect of riches. The market has figured out exactly the bare minimum that will keep us coming back. Of course, almost no one had consciously thought to create a world of Skinner-inspired addictiveness. But that only makes the creation more profound.

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He noticed that the local farmers and laborers were uncomfortable entering the richly carpeted lobby in their dirty work boots—which he quickly corrected by adding some cheap rubber mats. That idea presaged the modern recognition of how social mores guide the adoption of new products, particularly those that incorporate technology. 1930: SKINNER BOX, Burrhus Frederic Skinner By isolating how an animal responded to a controlled input, the Skinner box revealed the way feedback loops guide behavior. Though Skinner’s reductionist view of psychology fell out of favor, it spawned landmark studies of the power of feedback and rewards in the human brain. 1933: SEARS TOPERATOR WASHING MACHINE, Henry Dreyfuss Dreyfuss’s first great hit, the Toperator washing machine, featured a streamlined, art deco design that avoided any hard-to-clean joints—an early nod to the user’s lifestyle that would be echoed widely.

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“I shall probably continue therein, even, if necessary, by making over the entire field to suit myself.”10 His dream was to make the study of animal psychology every bit as rigorous as physics—to eliminate the need for any novelistic interpretation of why any creature might behave a certain way. He once again began by feverishly tinkering, and quickly hit a breakthrough with what would come to be called the Skinner box.11 The device was an uncanny echo of his childhood bedroom designs and his dream of fashioning behavior through the design of an environment. The box was a chamber, sized to a rat or a pigeon, that could be rigged up with a light or a loudspeaker; there was also a lever, which, when pushed, would deliver a food pellet.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

He scared a baby when animals were around in order to prove he could make a human become scared of animals forever. And Skinner formalized an experimental box for conditioning animals in laboratories. Behaviorism has been reduced to gadgetry in pop culture. You tweet for an instant treat, for attention, even if you’re the president. You salivate when you hear a dog whistle. The Skinner box was the archetype. A person in a Skinner box has an illusion of control but is actually controlled by the box, or really by whoever is behind the box. A crucial distinction has to be made, and it isn’t easy to get it right. I was repulsed by the culture of behaviorists, though not behaviorism itself, which can be useful science.

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It wasn’t just the movies! The CIA actually gave people LSD—without notice or consent—to see if that would facilitate mind control. Wiener extrapolated that computers might become powerful enough to run fancier Skinner boxes, more effective, harder to detect, and infinitely creepier. Read Wiener carefully and it’s clear that with good enough sensors, good enough computation, and good enough sensory feedback, a Skinner box could be implemented around a person in a waking state without that person’s realizing it. Wiener comforts the reader by pointing out that it would be so hard to create a giant computational facility and communications network that the danger is only theoretical.

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HAL doesn’t reside in an android that walks around; it just sits there, ambient. Nonetheless it sails. It navigates both the spacecraft and what goes on inside. Now consider a Skinner box. What are the components? There is measurement of the creature in the box. Did the rat press the button? There is feedback. Will food appear? What causes action to be triggered by measurement? In the original experiments, a live scientist was at the controls, but these days, it’s an algorithm. The components of a Skinner box and those of a cybernetic computer are essentially the same. This is perhaps too elementary an observation even to state at this late date, but when I was young the connection was still fresh and shattering.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Therefore it obviously has to be followed by good luck. We are not the only animals to seek statistical patterns of non-randomness in nature, and we are not the only animals to make mistakes of the kind that might be called superstitious. Both these facts are neatly demonstrated in the apparatus called the Skinner box, after the famous American psychologist B. F. Skinner. A Skinner box is a simple but versatile piece of equipment for studying the psychology of, usually, a rat or a pigeon. It is a box with a switch or switches let into one wall which the pigeon (say) can operate by pecking. There is also an electrically operated feeding (or other rewarding) apparatus.

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Interestingly, habits learned when pecks are only occasionally rewarded are more durable than habits learned when all pecks are rewarded: the pigeon is less swiftly discouraged when the rewarding mechanism is switched off altogether. This makes intuitive sense if you think about it. Pigeons and rats, then, are quite good statisticians, able to pick up slight, statistical laws of patterning in their world. Presumably this ability serves them in nature as well as in the Skinner box. Life out there is rich in pattern; the world is a big, complicated Skinner box. Actions by a wild animal are frequently followed by rewards or punishments or other important events. The relationship between cause and effect is frequently not absolute but statistical. If a curlew probes mud with its long, curved bill, there is a certain probability that it will strike a worm.

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Another 'thought' that thrusting its head into the corner had the same beneficial effect. Both were making false positive errors. A false negative error is made by a pigeon in a Skinner box who never notices that a peck at the key yields food if the red light is on, but that a peck when the blue light is on punishes by switching the mechanism off for ten minutes. There is a genuine pattern waiting to be detected in the little world of this Skinner box, but our hypothetical pigeon does not detect it. It pecks indiscriminately to both colours, and therefore gets a reward less frequently than it could. A false positive error is made by a farmer who thinks that sacrificing to the gods brings longed-for rain.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

She would never rebel because she loves you, selflessly and forever.11 The conversational construction of gender is prominent in the intellectual history of artificial intelligence, a topic we will return to. But for now we need to explore the back end of this performance in more depth. At their darkest, these digital assistants are culturally constructed as sentient Skinner boxes, quasi-intelligent systems that must answer, and that inspire the same kind of slavish devotion in their users. But of course, it is the human users who in the end must use these systems—not necessarily Siri, but the interconnected systems that evaluate our search queries, for example, or the algorithms that assign credit scores.

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FarmVille and its successors are effective at eliciting particular rote behaviors from humans through a combination of carrots and sticks, engaging them in actions that the company can monetize directly or use to expand its network of users. The cultural narrative layer of the farm masks a mesmerizing Skinner box, the classic tool of operant conditioning, which, in this case, links revenue-generating behaviors to the innate human rewards of social connectedness and completion. As The Atlantic paraphrased one company executive: “One of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friend with reminders to play Zynga’s games.”8 Ultimately these games are a kind of escapism masquerading as efficiency—plant your crops, build your empire, complete this task all in sixty seconds while you wait in line.

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Players either didn’t realize that this was a satire, or played in spite of that knowledge, like the stay-at-home father who told Tanz, “instead of stupid games that have no point, we might as well play a stupid game that has a point.”13 At its apogee, over 50,000 people were clicking on digital cows and Bogost found himself enmeshed in his own Skinner box of feedback, getting rewarded by the player community when he added new features to the game. Bogost has described this process as a kind of “method design” like method acting, putting himself into the creative space of a social game designer and ultimately suffering the same kind of systemic, dehumanizing entanglement with the software that he sees it inflicting on players: “It’s hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game.”14 Figure 4.1 Cow Clicker screenshot.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

The unlikely juxtaposition of those two seemingly contradictory things—silliness and cruelty—has become a hallmark of the new-economy modern workplace. That’s how I came to think of employees as lab rats. It turns out others had noticed the same thing. “Work is feeling more and more like a Skinner box” is how Gregory Berns, a neuropsychologist at Emory University, put it when he wrote a New York Times article about a study he had conducted about how fear impairs decision-making, which involved putting people into an MRI machine and zapping their feet with electric shocks. A Skinner box, invented in the 1930s by psychologist B. F. Skinner, is a cage in which rats learn that pulling certain levers gets them food and that flashing lights might signal they are about to get a shock through the floor.

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To do that, he constructed an experiment that was downright shocking. He put people into an MRI scanner and made images of their brain while giving them painful electric shocks through electrodes attached to the top of their feet. Berns says it was basically a human version of a Skinner box. Berns, you may recall from Chapter 1, was the guy who once wrote that “Work is becoming more and more like a Skinner box.” Thirty-two people signed up to let Berns and his colleagues turn them into lab rats. He let each person set the maximum amount of pain they could tolerate, then gave them jolts, while using the scanner to see what was going on inside their brains.

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But that’s actually the exact wrong thing to do. In a time of uncertainty, “taking risks and trying new things would actually be in your best interest,” Berns said. “But that’s difficult when you’re afraid of losing your job.” Berns said that for a lot of people, the workplace really does feel like a Skinner box, where you wander around like a rat in one of B. F. Skinner’s cages trying to figure out how to get rewards and how to avoid punishment. “It’s like you’re in a box, and you have no control over what’s happening to you,” Berns said. “It’s controlled by experimenters outside. You learn to associate certain places in that box with good and bad things.”

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

If we know we will receive a reward, our excitement only reflects the emotional value of the reward itself. However, when we only have a chance to gain the reward our brains are more engaged by the thrill of whether we will win or not. The Core Drive in a Skinner Box There’s a substantial amount of research on how the unknown and the unpredictable intrigues and engages our minds. One of the most notable motivational design case studies that explored this phenomenon is the Skinner Box5. 6 The Skinner Box was an experiment conducted by the scientist B. F. Skinner, who placed rodents and pigeons in a box with an installed lever. In the first phase, whenever the animal pressed the lever (the Desired Action), a portion of food was released.

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Here we see that satisfying our burning curiosity is intrinsically motivating to our primitive brain, sometimes more so than the extrinsic reward of food. Have you ever seen a person so addicted to gambling that he forgot that he was tired, hungry, or even thirsty? I often hear critiques of how the Points, Badges, and Leaderboards in gamification simply turns the world into a large Skinner Box, where people are manipulated to mindlessly doing meaningless tasks. I feel the more profound lesson from the Skinner Box is not that Points and Badges motivate people, but that unpredictable results stemming from Core Drive 7 can drive obsessive behavior. Sweepstakes and Raffles In Chapter 5 on Epic Meaning & Calling, I mentioned how I started my first business because of a small raffle held at a UCLA barbecue.

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Epic Meaning within a Team Corporate Competition as an Oxymoron Game Techniques within Social Influence & Relatedness Core Drive 5: The Bigger Picture Chapter 10: The Sixth Core Drive: Scarcity & Impatience The Lure of being Exclusively Pointless The Value of Rare Pixels The Leftovers aren’t all that’s Left Over Persuasively Inconvenient Curves are better than Cups in Economics “This guy’s not expensive enough.” “I Don’t Feel Good When My Pocket Is Too Full After A Purchase” Game Techniques within Scarcity & Impatience Great! So now what? Core Drive 6: The Bigger Picture Chapter 11: The Seventh Core Drive - Unpredictability & Curiosity And, Now it’s Fun The Core Drive in a Skinner Box Sweepstakes and Raffles A Lucky Day with Lucky Diem Suspense and Mystery in a Blender Faking your Way to Virality Google’s Curious Second Button Woot! Creates Midnight Cinderella’s Game Techniques within Unpredictability & Curiosity Core Drive 7: The Bigger Picture Chapter 12: The Eighth Core Drive - Loss & Avoidance Cropping your Losses Affection Held Hostage “Why don’t you take all my money?”

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Skinner were alive today, he would recognize the rat-like behavior of Internet addicts. Back in the 1930s, the Harvard psychologist held that an animal’s behavior is heavily influenced by its experience and conditioning, and that all creatures—including humans—are inclined to do what the world rewards them for doing. To test his theories, Skinner invented the “operant conditioning” chamber, or Skinner Box, in which he put pigeons and rats. This cage’s artfully designed food dispenser was controlled by an array of lighted buttons. When one of them lit up a certain color, pushing or pecking the adjacent lever caused a drawer to open that was filled with food. Eventually, through a process of trial and error and trial and reward, the animals learned to recognize and respond to the cues.

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The same thing happens with social networkers, hunched over keyboards and oblivious to the flesh-and-blood people surrounding them. Couples in restaurants ignore each other while checking their smartphones for messages, and players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) become so absorbed in their play that they collapse from fatigue. The Internet is the ultimate Skinner Box, in which hundreds of millions of users peck keys in search of rewards—game points, engrossing bits of information, or a potential new love object. Neuroscience has given us an understanding of the neurochemistry underlying operant conditioning. We know that animals’ brains are primed for pleasure, and that pleasure is accompanied by the signature release of the chemical dopamine, a neurotransmitter.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Burning Man, business process, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Demis Hassabis, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, name-letter effect, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, search costs, second-price auction, Skinner box, software as a service, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, young professional

After a few days of this pattern, you learn to expect food at noon every day, and your rat tummy begins rumbling right before the nice man shows up—exactly the state Jensen wants you in. Once your body is conditioned to eating crackers at noon, things suddenly change. Instead of feeding you at the time of your maximal hunger, you have to wait another hour, and at one o’clock, the man picks you up and puts you in a well-lit “Skinner box.” You are ravenous. Named after its original designer, the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds.

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The food dispenser releases food pellets every so often for twenty-five minutes, until you have eaten fifty food pellets. At that point you are taken back to your cage and given the rest of your food for the day. The next day, your lunch hour passes by again without food, and at 1:00 P.M. you are placed back into the Skinner box. You’re ravenous but unhappy because this time the food dispenser doesn’t release any pellets. What to do? You wander around the cage, and, passing the bar, you realize that the tin shield is missing. You accidentally press the bar, and immediately a pellet of food is released. Wonderful! You press the bar again.

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Chapter 2: The Meaning of Labor: What Legos Can Teach Us about the Joy of Work Based on Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Dražen Prelec, “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 67, nos. 3–4 (2008): 671–677. Glen Jensen, “Preference for Bar Pressing over ‘Freeloading’ as a Function of Number of Unrewarded Presses,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 65, no. 5 (1963): 451–454. Glen Jensen, Calvin Leung, and David Hess, “ ‘Freeloading’ in the Skinner Box Contrasted with Freeloading in the Runway,” Psychological Reports 27 (1970): 67–73. George Loewenstein, “Because It Is There: The Challenge of Mountaineering . . . for Utility Theory,” Kyklos 52, no. 3 (1999): 315–343. Additional readings George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, “Economics and Identity,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 3 (2000): 715–753.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Rather, like rats in a maze, human beings were merely responding to rewards and punishments doled out by those in control or by the environment itself. We are conditioned to eat berries and run from lions the same way we are conditioned to stop at red lights, genuflect at a church’s altar, or order a Big Mac. The famous Skinner Box, where an animal pushes a lever to get food, became a metaphor for all sorts of “operant conditioning” performed on human beings in casinos, shopping malls, and other spaces where environmental triggers and rewards can be totally controlled. Studying humans in these locations became commonplace, with behavioral engineers using surveillance cameras to track consumers’ movement patterns, likelihood of inspecting merchandise, and response to changes in layout, color, or lighting.

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It wasn’t until the first intentionally “sticky” websites in the mid-nineties—websites designed to keep users from surfing away—that digital technology provided the sort of controlled environment and live feedback mechanisms required to do operant conditioning en masse. Websites, video games, and smartphone apps all serve as virtual Skinner Boxes, giving developers the ability to build in operant conditioning routines to modify human behavior. As I argued in my book Program or Be Programmed , software companies are no longer programming computers; they are programming us people. Notifications, swipes, Likes, and “leveling up” were all developed and optimized for their ability to trigger dopamine releases on cue and foster compulsive behaviors.

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And then if they post the idea, it gets a few hits and likes and comments from others, and ding ding squirt squirt … another hit of dopamine. And another and another. As well as an ounce of dignity for being recognized. It’s as if Q were simply an expression of end-stage internet addiction. The perfect digital Skinner Box and Freudian transference mechanism all at once. An industry success story. After Trump’s loss, things got worse. Sam felt betrayed. He began staying up all night reading Twitter and following links by leading alt-right posters. He became convinced that computers had been used to change the vote—presumably by either Angela Merkel from Munich or Barack Obama himself, working digitally through a consulate in Italy.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Skinner eventually joined the Harvard faculty and became one of the most famous, and certainly one of the most controversial, experimental psychologists of the twentieth century. He called himself a “radical behaviorist.” Much of Skinner’s early experimental research centered on analyzing the behavior of rats and pigeons. His Operant Conditioning Chamber, known widely as the “Skinner Box,” was a device in which he placed an animal, often a rat, which after wandering around in the box would eventually bump into or otherwise cause a lever to be pressed, an action that released a pellet of food for the rat to eat. The next time the rat hit the lever, the same thing happened.

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The delivery of food served, in his view, as a reinforcement designed to encourage a repeat of the lever-pressing behavior. Each time the rat pressed the lever the desired number of times, another pellet dropped into the box, thus reinforcing the consequences of the rat’s behavior. No surprise: rats caught on quickly, and the pellets flowed. The Skinner Box owed much to a predecessor device called the “Puzzle Box,” built by the Columbia University psychologist Edward L. Thorndike. In the Puzzle Box, a cat discovered a piece of salmon that was just out of its reach. Only by accidentally hitting a lever that opened a door on the side of the box was the cat able to get to the food.

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It is necessary to watch this performance for only a few minutes to realize how severely constrained the average baby is, and how much energy must be diverted into the only remaining channel, crying.” World War II was over, and while America was ready to enjoy the fruits of consumerism, it was not quite prepared to embrace the Air Crib, and only a few ever sold commercially. Over the years an urban legend spread that the Air Crib was simply a glorified Skinner Box, this time redesigned for experimenting on a human baby instead of a rat, and that Skinner’s daughter Deborah had suffered greatly under the hands of her mad-professor father, to the point, so the story goes, that she grew up to be psychotic and ultimately shot herself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Skinner summed up his thoughts succinctly in a 1977 statement: “I see no evidence of an inner world of mental life.” He was talking about humans as well as animals. According to Skinner, we were all controlled by two forces: reinforcements and punishments. Best known for his operant conditioning chamber, aka the Skinner box, the psychologist set up experiments in which rats and pigeons were subjected to different stimuli, such as light and electric shocks, to test the effect of reinforcement. If the animals tapped or pecked the correct lever, they would be rewarded with food. The experimenters demonstrated that rewarding some behaviors and punishing others caused the animals to learn new behaviors.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Abraham, Anna, 178–79, 185 abstract thinking, 212, 232 in children, 61–62 engineers excelling at, 46–47, 196 and mathematics, 179, 187 and spatial visualizers, 3, 31–33, 90 See also algebra: and abstract thought Adams, Mark, 128 Adams, Susan, 73 ADHD, 35, 83, 107, 155, 157, 159, 161–63, 176 aeronautical industry, 121–24 algebra, 29, 132, 145 and abstract thought, 11, 32, 56, 62, 187 barrier for students, 6, 10–11, 56–59, 107, 118 and music playing, 187 requirements for, 57–59 teaching of, 61, 65 visual thinkers poor at, 10–11, 32, 56–59, 83, 91, 100 Allen, Colin, 245 Allen, Paul, 124, 180–81 Allen Institute for Brain Science, 255 Alvarenga, Amanda, 270–71 Amazon, 118 America the Ingenious (Baker), 135 American Association of School Administrators, 53 American College Test (ACT), 72–73 American School Counselor Association, 72–73 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 243–44 American Society of Animal Science, 269–70 American Society of Civil Engineers, 202–3 Ames optical-illusion room, 81 Amon, Angelika, 108–9 ancestors, 161, 239–40, 260 Animal Air Transportation Association, 213 animal behavior career in, 44, 100 influences on, 269 and Skinner box, 249–50 study of, 7, 11, 242, 244–51 Animal Legal Defense Fund, 244 animal science, 55–56, 102, 126, 198–99, 201–2 animals and autism, 164–65 breeding of, 272–73 consciousness and, 237, 241–45, 251–61, 265–66, 274 and emotion, 249–51, 253–55, 257, 259–70, 273–74 grazing of, 272 humans’ view of, 240–43 “imprinting” and, 245–46 inner lives of, 237–41, 245, 249, 259 learned behavior of, 246, 249–251, 263 memory pictures of, 238–39, 247–48, 267 and mirror self-recognition, 257–58, 266 nervous system and, 251–53, 257 nonverbal world of, 266–74 protection of, 23, 206, 242–44 and radiation sickness, 222 sensory-based, 238–40, 248, 255–56, 266–67, 270, 274 sentience.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Understood this way, all animal behavior developed through a learning process he called “operant conditioning,” whereby some actions are reinforced by positive consequences (rewards), others discouraged by negative ones (punishments). To demonstrate what he meant, he built the so-called Skinner Box or “operant conditioning chamber,” wherein he subjected animals to various consequences and observed their conditioning. For instance, by giving a pigeon a food pellet whenever it pecked at a button, Skinner conditioned the pigeon to peck the button so as to be fed. He also showed that pigeons could be conditioned to do things like turn in a circle (by reinforcing left turns), or even play competitive Ping-Pong.* According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks.

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Likewise, Stafford argues, “checking email is a behavior that has variable interval reinforcement….Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link.”6 It is enough to have had such an experience a few times to get you regularly fishing for it; constant checking is thus reinforced, “even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.” By this understanding, the gradual introduction of email was arguably one of history’s greatest feats of mass Skinneresque conditioning. We might imagine those first offices wired in the 1970s and 1980s as so many Skinner Boxes, ourselves as the hungry pigeons. By the 1990s, we would all learned to peck, or check email, in hope of a reward. And once created, that habit would not only open us up to all sorts of commercial possibilities, including various other Internet applications depending on the almighty power of check-in to regularly collect human attention.

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

(Businesspeople recognize the addictive properties of these devices: this is why they often call their BlackBerries “CrackBerries.”) I THINK E-MAIL addiction has something to do with what the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner called “schedules of reinforcement.” Skinner used this phrase to describe the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). In particular, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times—say 100 times.

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We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. This explanation gives me a better understanding of my e-mail addiction, and more important, it might suggest a few means of escape from this Skinner box and its variable schedule of reinforcement. One helpful approach I’ve discovered is to turn off the automatic e-mail-checking feature. This action doesn’t eliminate my checking, but it reduces the frequency with which my computer notifies me that I have new e-mail waiting (some of it, I would think to myself, must be interesting or relevant).

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After a few days of this pattern, you learn to expect food at noon every day, and your rat tummy begins rumbling right before the nice man shows up—exactly the state Jensen wants you in. Once your body is conditioned to eating crackers at noon, things suddenly change. Instead of feeding you at the time of your maximal hunger, you have to wait another hour, and at one o’clock, the man picks you up and puts you in a well-lit “Skinner box.” You are ravenous. Named after its original designer, the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

I refuse to believe that anything could be so strong, and yet something tells me that this whole package is designed to hook us and hook us good. These machines and the accompanying casino atmosphere must be calculated to throw us into some kind of trance. Finally, a different kind of answer posted to the site: Darlene dear Darlene, Slot machines are just “Skinner boxes” for people! Why they keep you transfixed is really not a big mystery. The machine is designed to do just that. It operates on the principles of operant conditioning. The original studies on conditioning were done by B. F. Skinner and involved rats. I’m sure you remember this from grade school: The rats are in a box without outside stimulus (like a casino!).

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What we might call the “reinforcement potential” of multiline video slots is further compounded by the fact that they allow players a measure of modulatory control, presenting a complex array of buttons with which they can vary the number of lines and coins on which they bet, giving them a taste of the interactive decision making that proved so compelling on video poker machines yet without requiring their actual skill.53 To borrow from the language of the online gamblers’ forum that opened this chapter, they give the “rat people” a hand in the design of their own Skinner boxes. “By purchasing more lines to play on a slot machine,” an Australian researcher points out, “a player can increase the frequency of reinforcement and reduce the amount of un-reinforced trials.”54 Betting on all lines not only ensures a more consistent rate of reward; it also “insures against” the regret players might feel if wins appear on lines they have not played.55 “In a way,” observes a longtime slots player from Australia named Katrina, “each game becomes like a mini raffle.

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He has complete control.66 Inviting the player to voluntarily configure his own game and thereby giving him “complete control” would neutralize his fear of being controlled, Elsasser suggested. Instead of risking that the “rat people” become aware of the box, this logic goes, let the rats design their own Skinner box. Sylvie Linard, chief operating officer of Cyberview, reiterated the strategy: “Players are very intelligent, so why not be open and transparent and let them play with the [casino] operators, and add to the game with us? Some like free spins, some like interactive bonus rounds—so why not put players into the equation and ask them to build their own games, on demand?

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

C A P I T A L S O F U N R E A L I T Y pIe repetitive physical acts-insert coin, pull lever, insert coin, pull lever-they reminded me of the rats we used to "run" in Skinner boxes back in the college psychology lab. A Skinner box was sort of a slot machine for a rat. The rat was " conditioned" to press a metal bar in his box. When the rat performed adequately, he was rewarded with a pellet of rat candy. You could customize your rat and make him press the bar twice. Or you could teach him to press it at the sound of a buzzer. Or you could really mess his mind up by timing the Skinner box to dis­ pense rat candy only at three-minute intervals no matter how many times he pressed the bar.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

This second stage was epitomized by the vision of a new society in the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two. Originally published to little fanfare, Walden Two became hugely popular in the 1960s, enough that some were inspired to base their communes on it. It was written by B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist and behavioral scientist famous for the Skinner box, in which a test subject animal learns to press a lever in response to specific stimuli. Walden Two reads like exactly what it is: a novel written by a scientist. To Skinner, everyone was potentially a test subject, and utopia was an experiment—not a political one, but a scientific one. In Walden Two, a psychology professor named Burris (B.

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But the problems he lists are decidedly scientific: “exhaustion of resources, the pollution of the environment, overpopulation, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust”—he mentions neither the Vietnam War nor the ongoing struggles over racial equality.35 Even in 1976, the remaining question for Skinner was not how power could be redistributed, or injustice redressed, but how a technical problem might be solved with the very same methods as the Skinner box: “How were people to be induced to use new forms of energy, to eat grain rather than meat, and to limit the size of their families; and how were atomic stockpiles to be kept out of the hands of desperate leaders?” He proposed avoiding politics altogether and working instead on “the design of cultural practices.”36 To him, the late twentieth century was an exercise in R&D.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

(Businesspeople recognize the addictive properties of these devices: this is why they often call their BlackBerries “CrackBerries.”) I THINK E-MAIL addiction has something to do with what the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner called “schedules of reinforcement.” Skinner used this phrase to describe the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). In particular, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times—say 100 times.

…

We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. This explanation gives me a better understanding of my e-mail addiction, and more important, it might suggest a few means of escape from this Skinner box and its variable schedule of reinforcement. One helpful approach I’ve discovered is to turn off the automatic e-mail-checking feature. This action doesn’t eliminate my checking, but it reduces the frequency with which my computer notifies me that I have new e-mail waiting (some of it, I would think to myself, must be interesting or relevant).

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

When Tolman published “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” the most influential behavioral psychologist was Clark Hull at Yale, who argued that every action an organism performs, down to the level of thought itself, is governed by stimulus and response. At Harvard, B. F. Skinner succeeded Hull as behaviorism’s leading thinker. One of the most attractive aspects of Skinner’s work was its empiricism—its precepts could be explored in controlled conditions, such as the “Skinner box,” which tested the extent to which one could condition an animal’s behavior—and its implication that total control over behavior was possible. Tolman was wary of theoretical certainty, and was under no illusion that these rat experiments proved the existence of the cognitive map, which was, after all, just a metaphorical model for understanding behavior.

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., 60 Preparedness Committee of, 35 sensors, 122 Serbia, 71 sex offenders, 196 sextants, 5 Shacklett, Mary, 191 Shapiro, Irwin, 209 Sharp, Andrew, 12–13 Shaw, John, xiii sidereal compass, 6, 14 Sierra Nevada Mountains, 206 Silicon Valley, 77, 79, 96 Simpson, John, 28 621B program, 44, 53, 57 Skinner, B. F., 117, 172, 200 positive reinforcement theory of, 174, 175–77, 199 “Skinner Box,” 117 SLGRs, see Trimpacks Slovakia, 167 Slovenia, 158 smartphones, 55, 72, 223 apps for, 145 GPS-enabled, 244 Smith, S. Percy, 12 Smithsonian Institution, Astrophysical Observatory of, 31 snowmobiles, 114 Sobel, Dava, 26–27 Solomon Islands, 4 Sonoran Desert, 60 Sorge, Ernst, 233 Sotomayor, Sonia, 190–91 South Africa, 251 South America, 12 East Coast of, 204 South by Southwest Festival, 168 South Korea, 166 Soviet Union, xvii, 44, 251 nuclear power of, 209 Sputnik launched by, xviii, 30–37, 39, 251 U.S. relations with, 29–30, 62, 82 in World War II, 250 spacecraft, 203, 210, 259 space exploration, 208, 210, 252, 258–62 space race, 46 spacetime, curvature of, xixn Spain, 246, 259 Special Operations Forces, U.S., 65, 67 speed estimates, 16 Spiers, Hugo, 133 spread-spectrum systems, 54–56, 77 Springfield, Mo., 89 Sputnik, 30–37, 251 sound signals emitted by, xviii, 36–37, 39 SRI International, 122 Stanford University, 48, 122, 142, 171 GPS Laboratory at, 61, 139, 140, 181 Stewart, Brian, xiii–xiv stimulus-and-response concept, 115–16, 118, 133 stock exchanges, 161–64 automated trading in, 161–62 high-frequency traders in, 161–63 importance of accurate timing in, 162 2010 Flash Crash of, 163 volatility in, 163 storms, 27, 192 Strathclyde, University of, 195 Strebe, Daniel, 241 Streetcorner Research (Schwitzgebel), 174 subatomic particles, xvii, 155–56 sugar beets, 73–75, 101–5, 274 sun, 24, 25, 245 activity on, 28 Earth’s orbit of, 41, 228 energy from, 227 radiation from, 258 Sunda peninsula, 3–4 Super Bowl, XLVII, 192 Supreme Court, German, 186, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 178–80, 186, 188–91 Survey of the Coast, 248 Swiss Alps, 158 Switzerland, 158–59, 167 Syene (Aswan), 245 Synchronous Grid of Continental Europe, 158–59 Synchrophasors, 159–61, 163 connecting clocks to, 160, 161 Tahiti, 7–9, 10, 13, 24, 106, 263, 264–66 Taiwan, 4 Taliban, 72 Taos, N.Mex., 180 Tasmania, 4 TechRepublic, 191 Tehran, 84 U.S. hostages held in, 77, 87 Tele Atlas company, 242 Telefónica, 192 telematics industry, 183–84 telephones, 59, 156–57, 191 cellular, 95, 119, 183 digital protocols for, 156, 157 integration of GPS devices and, 119, 154, 244 long-distance service on, 81, 157 mobile, 192, 242 multiplexing techniques and, 156 911 calls on, 158 smart, 55, 72, 145, 223, 244 Yellow Pages guide to, 123 telescopes, 29 radio, 209, 261 Terrestrial Environment, The: Solid-Earth and Ocean Physics (Williamstown Report), 208–9 terrorism, 148, 153 possible targets of, 170–72 Terry, Ron, 50–51 Tevake, 11, 18, 264 disappearance of, 13–14, 21 Texas, 40, 42, 230 Texas, University of (UT), 151 Radio Navigation Laboratory at, 150 Texas Instruments, 58, 78–79, 214 theodolites, 251 think tanks, 122, 146 Thompson, Nainoa, 266 3M company, 179 TI-4100 receivers, 214 Timation project, 40, 42–45, 47, 56–57, 153 Tokyo, xv, 48–49, 91, 121, 225 Tolman, Edward, 115–20, 133, 276 TomTom company, 242–45 data-collection vans of, 242–44 mobile phone mapping program of, 242 WGS 84 referencer system used by, 244–45 topography, 124 torpedoes, radio-controlled, 54 Transcontinental Arc, 249 Transit program, 38–40, 42–43, 45, 76, 81, 259, 270 Transportation Department, U.S., xviii, 149, 165 Transworld Data, 191 Trimble, Charlie, 80–81, 83–94, 95–98, 104, 140–41, 211–12, 254 Trimble 4000A GPS, 87 Trimble GPS receivers, 158 Trimble Navigation, 81, 83–88, 93–94, 96–97, 126, 182 Trimpacks, 94, 95–96 Tripoli, 62 troposhere, 227 Tsikada program, 44 tsunamis, 202, 222, 225–26 Tuamotu Archipelago, 12 Tübingen, 130–31 Tuck, Ed, 88–90 Tupaia, 7–11, 269 Cook and, 7–10, 21–24, 26, 263–64, 266 illness and death of, 10, 11 navigational skill of, 8–10 Pacific map of, 10, 13, 14, 263–64 TV-3 rocket, 32–35 Twin Falls, Idaho, 111 Twitter, 194 U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, 67 UNAVCO (nonprofit university-funded consortium), 215, 224 United Kingdom, 27, 104, 156–57, 187–88, 197, 252 100 wealthiest people in, 242 see also England; Scotland United Nations, 63 Soviet delegation to, 35 United Parcel Service (UPS), 143, 184 United States, 9 bureaucracy in, 93 coastlands of, 108, 224 economy and security of, 143 farms in, 104 400 wealthiest Americans in, 127, 239 Great Plains of, 73 infrastructure sectors of, 143, 144–45 Northeastern, 170–72 Northwestern, 202 nuclear strike capabilities of, 62 Southwestern, 59 Soviet relations with, 29–30, 62, 82 Western, 74, 215, 224 United States Standard Datum, 249 United States v.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

The cages inhabited by animals in his experiments (he taught pigeons to play table tennis and some of his students taught a pig to use a vacuum cleaner) became known as Skinner boxes. But at the same time Skinner invented a kind of sealed, heated crib, which looked like a large fish-tank on wheels, which he tested on his newborn daughter. Skinner wrote about it for the Ladies’ Home Journal, the editors titled the article ‘Baby in a Box’, and from then on most people seemed to believe that a Skinner box could be used for babies as well as lab rats. The crib may have been harmless, but it looked creepy. Despite the controversy surrounding Skinner, behaviourism became more influential and by the 1960s had moved on from rats in mazes to reward tokens for infants and hospital patients with mental illnesses.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

But if I’m right, then becoming aware of it might just free you, so give this a chance, okay? A scientific movement called behaviorism arose before computers were invented. Behaviorists studied new, more methodical, sterile, and nerdy ways to train animals and humans. One famous behaviorist was B. F. Skinner. He set up a methodical system, known as a Skinner box, in which caged animals got treats when they did something specific. There wasn’t anyone petting or whispering to the animal, just a purely isolated mechanical action—a new kind of training for modern times. Various behaviorists, who often gave off rather ominous vibes, applied this method to people.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

Skinner dismissed all this as sheer “mentalism.”90 He wasn’t interested in what a patient said or dreamed but in what he did, i.e., his observable actions and his behavior, including his verbal behavior. Every behaviorist finding began in the laboratory with a rat placed in a small chamber known as a Skinner box, a container about the size of a small carton of paper towels with a bar on one wall. The rat sooner or later learns that if it presses the bar, a food pellet drops onto a little tray. Eventually comes a time when the rat presses the bar…and no pellet drops to the tray. Gradually the rat discovers it will get a pellet only on every third press of the bar or some such change of order.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Behind this clash of cultures, however, demand-side Keynesians and fist-clenched socialists share with conservatives four fundamental beliefs: (1) the economy is chiefly a system of incentives that motivate work, savings, and investment; (2) economic and monetary policy has the power to define the incentives and guide the growth; (3) consumption spending is “70 percent of the economy” and the driving force of economic expansion; and (4) at the center of the system is the human being as a rational respondent to his incentives, a Homo economicus reacting to carrots and sticks, responding to stimuli, robotically pursuing pleasure like a psyche in a Skinner Box. It makes little difference whether you exalt this economic agent as a heroic Randian individual or pity him as a dehumanized cog in the capitalist machine, whether you aggregate him into a Marxian class or agglomerate him into a “grotesque consumer culture.” Whether you approach him from the left or the right, you’re treating the human being as a passive tool of his environment rather than as an active creator in the image of his creator.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In a central insight, shared by my supply-side brethren, Wealth & Poverty saw taxes as a crucial price—the price of earning and investing income—that yielded increasing revenues as the rates were reduced. The source of the rising revenues has remained controversial even among supply siders. Some implicitly accept the behavioral dream of a “Skinner box” economics of stimulus and response, in which lower rates impart a stimulus of reward for more work and risk-taking, yielding more revenues for the government. A successful economy, however, is driven less by the sharp edge of incentives than by the unimpeded flow of information . Capitalism is more an information system than an incentive system.

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Rockefeller, Nelson Romero Barcelo, Carlos Roth, William Rouse, James rule-and-consent systems Ryan, Paul S Said, Edward Salomon, Richard San Diego (California) Sarbanes-Oxley Saudi Arabia The Savage Mind (Claude Levi-Strauss) savings, decline of desire for insurance and Keynes and rates wealth and See also Investment savings accounts Sawyer, John Say, Jean-Baptiste Say’s Law Schlafly, Phyllis Schmidt, Eric Schuettinger, Robert Schultz, Howard Schumpeter, Joseph Schwarzenegger, Arnold scientific breakthroughs s-curves of growth Seattle (Washington) secondary sector jobs security segregation bilingual education and Seldon Technologies semiconductors Senate Budget Committee Senate Finance Committee services, productivity of sexuality and poverty sexual liberation Sexual Suicide (George Gilder) Shackle, George Shamir, Yithzak Shockley, William shopping centers Sierra Club silicon chip Silicon Valley Singapore sinks of purchasing power Sismondi, Simonde de Siuai “Skinner box,” Smith, Adam Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act socialism attitude toward businessmen critique of capitalism demise of hostility to spirit of giving priority of demand under See also Communism social security sociology sociology of despair Software Garden Solomon Islands Solow, Robert Solyndra Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr South civil rights movement and Southwest Airlines Soviet Union Sowell, Thomas space program Spain speculation Spitzer, Elliott Sprague, Peter Sprague Electric company Starbucks Star Wars (film) state college and university system statistical distributions, illusions of statistics of crisis Steiger, William Steiger Amendment Stein, Herbert Steyn, Mark Stockman, David stock market The Studio (John Gregory Dunne) subsidies suffrage, limitations on The Suicide of a Superpower (Patrick Buchanan) sumps of wealth supply curves supply-side economics Susu Sutton, Percy Sweden Switzerland T Taiwan take-home pay Tanamoshi Tanous, Peter Tanzi, Vito targeted approach to promoting investment tariffs tax brake theory taxes and taxation bureaucracy and cuts in deficit spending and destructive effect of government and high level of, in US.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, complexity theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, endowment effect, feminist movement, framing effect, hindsight bias, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, the new new thing, Thomas Bayes, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

(They did this with less enthusiasm when antiaircraft fire was exploding around them, and so were never used in combat.) Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano. The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

His scientific credibil- ity was enormous: in the early 1930s he had single-handedly established the field of "operant" conditioning, in which animals were trained to exhibit almost any desired behavior through a system of reward and punishment. And he was a wonderfully charismatic figure, with an undeniable flair for publicity and the dramatic gesture. He had raised his own infant daughter partially inside a baby- sized, Plexiglas "Skinner box" rigged for the appropriate rewards and punish- 72 THE DREAM MACHINE ments; the reporters had eaten it up. He arrived at Harvard having just pub- lished the utopian novel Walden Two, in which he described an idyllic commu- nity governed by behaviorist principles; he made it sound so attractive that he immediately became the guru for hundreds of disciples who sought to shape their lives by those principles.

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Louise Licklider, Kitty Miller, and the other spouses soon learned to avoid Skinner at parties, since he responded to the stimulus of a pretty young woman by becoming what was then called a wolf; he seems to have made passes at every one of them. What was worse, he did so in front of his wife, a large woman who clearly did not feel herself to be smart or attractive enough in such company. Louise, already horrified by the idea of rais- ing a baby in a Skinner box, was not impressed. And then there was Skinner's fanatical behaviorism. It is hard to know pre- cisely what Lick thought of it because he never said much about Skinner one way or the other. But that silence was in itself probably significant, since he tended to be very vocal about people he liked and respected.

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"Fred Skinner's notion of science was control, not understanding. He wanted to turn a knob and see the behavior change-you know, turn up the reinforcement and see the behavior increase, turn down the reinforcement and see the behavior de- crease. Most of his innovations were devices that would enable him to do that: Skinner boxes, baby cribs, and God knows what. He had one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century." Still, the younger men's reaction was as nothing compared to the tension be- tween Skinner and Smitty Stevens himself. There seemed to be no rapport be- tween them whatsoever, even though it was Stevens who had taken the initiative in bringing Skinner to Harvard in the first place.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

To the first point, he noted that humans have a long and storied history of putting animals’ (often superhuman) senses to human purposes: the seeing-eye dog, the truffle-hunting pig, and so forth. To the second point, he argued, “The ethical question of our right to convert a lower creature into an unwitting hero is a peacetime luxury.”4 Skinner had long been working on the study of reinforcement, and his famous “Skinner boxes” functioned like upgraded, mid-twentieth-century versions of Thorndike’s puzzle boxes. Their lights and levers and mechanical food dispensers, often repurposed from vending machines, allowed for a precise and quantitative study of reinforcement, and they would be used by generations of researchers to follow (not least including Wolfram Schultz in his study of dopamine in monkeys).

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See amplification Selfridge, Oliver, 161 self-training, 174–80, 369n76 Shah, Julie, 116, 271–73, 386n53 Shakespeare, William, 279 Shannon, Claude, 34–35 shaping corrigibility and, 300–01 curriculum for, 158–63, 365nn26–27 DQN models and, 184–86, 192–94, 205 gaming and, 175 in robotics, 365n20 for self-training, 177–78 Skinner’s research and, 154–56, 364n15 sparsity problem and, 156–58 See also incentives Shirley cards, 28–29, 30, 31 See also training data Shlegeris, Buck, 310 side effects, 392n44 See also impact Silver, David, 163, 245 Simon, Herbert, 187 simple models, 99–103, 114, 318–19, 354–55nn47–48 Singer, Peter, 237, 238, 379n67 Singh, Satinder, 173, 202, 365n20, 370n12, 390n29 Skinner, B. F., 121, 124 on curriculum, 159 on free will, 165, 180 on gambling addiction, 207 incentives and, 163, 164–65 intrinsic motivation and, 188 on procrastination, 175 Project Pigeon, 152, 153–55 on shaping, 154, 155–56, 364n15 Skinner boxes, 152–53 sparsity problem and, 158 skip-gram, 341n54 sleep apnea, 101–02, 354n47, 355n48 SLIM (Supersparse Linear Integer Model), 101–02, 354n47 Smith, Holly, 236–37 Soares, Nate, 296–97 soccer, 167 social choice theory, 305–06 social media, 67 social science methodology, 41–42, 43, 46–48, 92–94 sokoban games, 293, 294 “Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers” (Samuel), 126–27 Sony Playstation, 339n18 Sorg, Jonathan, 173 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident (1983), 277–78, 279 Space Invaders, 157 sparsity problem curriculum and, 158–63 DQN model and, 185 incentives and, 163–66 overview, 158–59 self-training and, 174 shaping and, 156–58 Sperber, Dan, 319 spider sense.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Shortly after it was published I read a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. The basic thesis of this very successful book is that in order to gain admission to the digital winner’s circle you need to get your customers addicted to your app. The “trigger, action, reward, investment” sequence is curiously close to that of the Skinner box we all studied in Psychology 101. As author Nir Eyal explains it, “At the heart of the Hook Model is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B. F. Skinner in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards. Skinner observed that lab mice responded most voraciously to random rewards. The mice would press a lever and sometimes they’d get a small treat, other times a large treat, and other times nothing at all.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

Watson, took the blank slate to its ultimate expression.9 Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.10 By the 1940s, behaviorism had become a major field within academic psychology departments, with B. F. Skinner acquiring considerable fame for, among other things, his Skinner box for studying operant conditioning.11 Skinner was also convinced that you often didn’t need to study humans to understand humans—pigeons and rats would do. Or as one of his former students, Richard Herrnstein, answered, deadpan, when I asked him why behaviorists used pigeons for research: “Given the right reinforcement schedule, pigeons are indistinguishable from Harvard sophomores.”12 Eventually, the malleability assumption spilled over into policy.

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Leon Trotsky, “Socialism Will Bring Giant Advances for Mankind,” The Militant 5, no. 34 (1924): 5. 7. Durkheim (1982): 33. 8. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, quoted in Tooby and Cosmides (1992): 24–25. 9. E.g., Watson (1914); Skinner (1938). 10. Watson (1924), quoted in Pinker (2002): 19. 11. Contrary to rumor, the Skinner box was not used to experiment with operant conditioning on Skinner’s infant daughter, though Skinner did invent an “air crib” that was intended to reduce the tasks of caring for an infant. 12. On a personal note, my coauthor on The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein, was a behavioral psychologist who succeeded B.

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

THE SHIT YOU SHOVEL One I suppose that’s exactly the problem—I wasn’t raised to know any better. My father was (Carl Jung, rest his soul) a social scientist of some renown. As the founder and, to my knowledge, sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology, he liked to walk around the house, aka “the Skinner box,” in a laboratory coat. Where I, his gangly, absentminded black lab rat was homeschooled in strict accordance with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I wasn’t fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn’t punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn’t loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Just like us, other animals can benefit from (and perhaps even enjoy) the feelings of enclosure and comfort that can only be found in a home space; we have no strong reason to believe that the experience of a young rabbit huddled in a burrow is markedly dissimilar to that of a child at rest in her bedroom. We experience the pull of our basic attractions to novel sights and sounds in a casino or shopping mall, and we may be driven to spend beyond our means. Though a laboratory rat could not describe a rich phenomenological experience during a frantic session of bar-pressing in a Skinner box in hopes of a rewarding squirt of chocolate milk, the structure of the behavior, and even its neural underpinning, is not significantly different from our own. Indeed, it’s very likely that even the feelings we experience during such occasions, feelings of craving and want, for example, are not qualitatively different from those felt by other animals.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

Immediately Skip saw the therapeutic potential of virtual environments for treating people with cognitive impairments and anxiety disorders: “I thought, what if we could immerse people in functionally relevant environments and do rehab in those contexts? Then we could build in a game element, some way to engage people.” For Rizzo, VR could be the “ultimate Skinner Box,” a controlled setting in which treatment approaches involving conditioning and training could be studied and carried out. Excited about these possibilities, he attended a conference in 1993 organized by Walter Greenleaf, who remains one of the most influential voices in medical VR to this day.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

(Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 and famous for recommending indulgence toward children, was in part a reaction to Watson.) Skinner wrote several bestsellers arguing that harmful behavior is neither instinctive nor freely chosen but inadvertently conditioned. If we turned society into a big Skinner box and controlled behavior deliberately rather than haphazardly, we could eliminate aggression, overpopulation, crowding, pollution, and inequality, and thereby attain utopia.15 The noble savage became the noble pigeon. Strict behaviorism is pretty much dead in psychology, but many of its attitudes live on.

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It is not obviously progressive to insist that equal numbers of men and women work eighty-hour weeks in a corporate law firm or leave their families for months at a time to dodge steel pipes on a frigid oil platform. And it is grotesque to demand (as advocates of gender parity did in the pages of Science) that more young women “be conditioned to choose engineering,” as if they were rats in a Skinner box.76 Gottfredson points out, “If you insist on using gender parity as your measure of social justice, it means you will have to keep many men and women out of the work they like best and push them into work they don’t like.”77 She is echoed by Kleinfeld on the leaky pipeline in science: “We should not be sending [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather than engineers.”78 These are not hypothetical worries: a recent survey by the National Science Foundation found that many more women than men say they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations—and that many eventually switched out for that reason.79 I will give the final word to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the malleability of gender, was surely right when she said, “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

Psychology at Harvard in those years was strongly influenced by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and others who held that all behavior is learned, that animals are born as blank slates to be enscribed by chance, experience, and conditioning. When Skinner went so far as to put his own child in a so-called Skinner box to test behaviorist theories and other faculty members began doing similar experiments (albeit less radical ones), Louise Licklider put her foot down. No child of hers was going into a box, and her husband agreed. Louise was usually the first person to hear her husband’s ideas. Nearly every evening after dinner, he returned to work for a few hours, but when he got home at around 11:00 P.M. he usually spent an hour or so telling Louise his latest thoughts.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

These efforts contributed to the “Boston Miracle” of the 1990s in which the homicide rate dropped fivefold; it has remained low, with some fluctuations, ever since.174 The police and courts, for their part, have been redirecting their use of criminal punishment from brute deterrence and incapacitation to the second stage of a civilizing process, enhancing the perceived legitimacy of government force. When a criminal justice system works properly, it’s not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box. Only a sample of criminal behavior can ever be detected and punished, and the sampling should be fair enough that citizens perceive the entire regime to be legitimate. A key legitimator is the perception that the system is set up in such a way that a person, and more importantly the person’s adversaries, face a constant chance of being punished if they break the law, so that they all may internalize inhibitions against predation, preemptive attack, and vigilante retribution.

…

One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night.

…

The striatum is composed of many parallel tracts (giving it a striated appearance), and it is buried deep in the cerebral hemispheres and densely connected to the frontal lobes. The Seeking system was discovered when the psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner implanted an electrode into the middle of a rat brain, hooked it up to a lever in a Skinner box, and found that the rat would press the lever to stimulate its own brain until it dropped of exhaustion.53 Originally they thought they had found the pleasure center in the brain, but neuroscientists today believe that the system underlies wanting or craving rather than actual pleasure. (The major realization of adulthood, that you should be careful about what you want because when you get it you may not enjoy it, has a basis in the anatomy of the brain.)

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

We studied how Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by linking the ringing of a bell to the appearance of food, and B. F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which used rewards and punishments to positively and negatively reinforce certain behaviours (tested in his eponymous Skinner box). As I learned about the principles of behaviourism that underpinned Skinner’s experiments, the whole notion seemed like a historical oddity, hardly relevant for our modern age of MRI scanners and transcranial magnetic stimulation. But Skinner was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

The written rules appear right there in the standard operating procedures and can be amended or deleted. Although written rules, as we saw above, can be resistant to change, invisible rules are even more stubborn. They’re the silent killers that constrain our thinking without our being aware of it. They turn us into a rat trapped in a Skinner box, pressing the same lever over and over again—except the box was designed by us and we’re free to venture out anytime. We’re perfectly capable of meditating without the cat, but we don’t realize it. We then make things worse by defending our self-imposed limitations. We could do things differently, we say, but our supply chain, our software, our budget, our skill set, our education, our whatever, doesn’t allow it.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

If all behaving organisms obeyed these universal rules, you might as well study a convenient species. Most behaviorist research was done on rats or, Skinner’s favorite, pigeons. Behaviorists loved data, no-nonsense hard numbers; these were generated by animals pressing or pecking away at levers in “operant conditioning boxes” (aka “Skinner boxes”). And anything discovered applied to any species. A pigeon is a rat is a boy, Skinner preached. Soulless droid.* Behaviorists were often right about behavior but wrong in really important ways, as many interesting behaviors don’t follow behaviorist rules.*1 Raise an infant rat or monkey with an abusive mother, and it becomes more attached to her.

…

* And as a great example of the happiness of pursuit, where the rewarding quality of something is as much in the process as in the end product, the mesolimbic dopamine system plays a key role in motivating maternal care in female rats. * Its name—raphe nucleus—is not essential. * An urban legend has persisted forever that Skinner raised his daughter in a giant Skinner box, where she learned to lever press away for all her needs. Naturally, according to the legend, when she grew up she went mad, committed suicide, sued him, tried to murder him, etc. All untrue. * When I was in college, Skinner came to my dorm once for dinner and gave an extraordinarily dogmatic talk afterward.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

The term generally refers to the controversial theories about IQ and heredity of psychologist Arthur Jensen. CHAPTER 10: DICK THALER GIVES ECONOMIC MAN A PERSONALITY 1. I owe this insight (the billiards connection, that is) entirely to Colin Camerer. 2. The apotheosis of this work was the “Skinner box,” devised ca. 1930 by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner. Animals, usually pigeons or rats, were stuck in a box with a lever and a food dispenser. They then learned which actions were rewarded and which were punished, and generally reacted accordingly. Human behavior, Skinner argued, was the result of similar conditioning by society.

The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

With his characteristic activism, Ira did something about this situation. His partner in this was a young editor at Doubleday named Bill Whitehead. Hired to edit psychology books at the division called Anchor Books, Whitehead was not as interested in the world of traditional psychoanalysis or Skinner boxes as in the less conventional fields that had suddenly been thrown into focus by the great social changes occurring in the aftermath of the youth revolution. The Hippie Movement had created an interest for alternative philosophies, particularly the meditative paths of the East. In the wake of this was a hunger for knowledge about human consciousness, self-realization, and global thought that acknowledged both the Bucky Fuller systems sensibility and the strange worlds unlocked by psychedelic drugs.

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

This is mostly going right over Amber's head – she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later – but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was – the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks. "I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place? Are there any aliens there?" "It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

Swan exclaimed. “You can’t make a perfect world and then get decent people, that’s backwards, it can’t work.” The inspector shrugged. “Either way seems unlikely to me.” Then, after a pause: “It can go so wrong. Living in space may be too hard for us. Reduced environments. I’ve seen kids raised in Skinner boxes—human sacrifice—” “You need your sabbatical,” Swan interrupted, not wanting to hear more. She saw suddenly that Genette was looking weary. Usually smalls were hard to read; at first glance they looked rather perfect, like dolls, or innocent, like children. Now she saw the reddened eyes, the blond hair a little oily, the simple ponytail all flyaway with hairs that had broken at the hair tie.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

In 1985, Skinner published a kind of coda, recounting what happened after the novel ended, in the voice of Professor Burris, one of the characters. B. F. Skinner, “News from Nowhere, 1984,” Behavior Analyst 8 (1985): 5–14. 69. Skinner, Walden Two, p. 194. Skinner also had other ideas that did not quite pan out as intended, including using pigeons to guide missiles during World War II and marketing his famous Skinner box for the training of children other than his own (upon whom he famously experimented). B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Knopf, 1979). 70. Skinner, Shaping of a Behaviorist, p. 292. 71. D. E. Altus and E. K. Morris, “B. F. Skinner’s Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two,” Behavior Analyst 32 (2009): 319–335.

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman

Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Neil Armstrong, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Thomas L Friedman, Unsafe at Any Speed

I want to feel that I was something more than a body when I die.” As a news story, Beirut was always much more interesting for its psychology than for its politics. People always used to ask me if I wasn’t terrified living in Beirut. There were moments, of course, but most of the time I was too intrigued observing people’s behavior in this real-life Skinner Box to think about being frightened. In his classic work Leviathan, the seventeenth-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described what he called “the state of nature” that would exist if government and society completely broke down and the law of the jungle reigned. In such a condition, wrote Hobbes, “where every man is enemy to every man … there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

A considerable body of data gathered over five decades has shown that pigeons can discriminate between complex visual stimuli, including the different emotional expressions of human faces as well as the paintings of Picasso and Monet. In 2015, Richard Levenson and colleagues tested whether pigeons could be trained to read radiology and pathology images.45 The team placed twelve pigeons in operant conditioning chambers to learn and then to be tested on the detection of micro-calcifications and malignant masses that indicate breast cancer in mammograms and pathology slides, at four-, ten-, and twenty-times levels of magnification. Their flock-sourced findings were remarkably accurate. This led the researchers to conclude that one could use pigeons to replace clinicians “for relatively mundane tasks.”