Fundamental to this kind of persuasion is the undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over.
.. Franco Moretti, the pioneering scholar of the history of the novel, gives a name to the kind of encounter with texts that machines facilitate: “distant reading,” he calls it.
The New Critics gave us close reading, the engagement with the minute verbal nuances of a text, and the mode still thrives—Helen Vendler’s studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s poems are classic contemporary examples. But as Moretti argues in “Conjectures on World Literature,” one of the essays in his new collection, Distant Reading, close reading implies that certain texts are especially worthy of this kind of scrutiny—that is, it implies a canon. “If you want to look beyond the canon … close reading will not do it,” he observes; you can closely read two hundred poems, but not twenty thousand poems. To analyze such a large quantity of texts, you need to “focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” And this is the kind of concrete pattern-finding that computers specialize in. Distant reading is reading like a computer, not like a human being
.. Humanistic thinking does not proceed by experiments that yield results; it is a matter of mental experiences, provoked by works of art and history, that expand the range of one’s understanding and sympathy. It makes no sense to accelerate the work of thinking by delegating it to a computer when it is precisely the experience of thought that constitutes the substance of a humanistic education.
A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
The Untold Story of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback
Everyone knows the Steve Jobs story—how he was fired from the company he founded, Apple, only to return from exile decades later to save the business.
What’s less well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive. Only by leaving Apple, humbling himself, and finding a second success—with Pixar—was he able to mature into the leader who would return to Apple and build it into the world’s most valuable company.
Larry Page is the Steve Jobs of Google.
.. Page eventually wrote down his rules for management:
- Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
- Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
- Don’t be a bureaucrat.
- Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and cooperation.
- The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.
.. Page had always been a control freak. A college friend told Levy that even back at the University of Michigan, Page was “controlling and paranoid” because “he wanted to make sure everything was done well and right.”In 1998, Page and Brin decided to take all eight of Google’s employees on a company ski trip to Lake Tahoe. When they went to rent a van, they discovered they could save $2.50 per day if they designated a single driver. Page designated himself. He drove the whole way while everyone else played math games in the back.
.. Up front, an executive pitched a new product that helped users find the right offline store to do their shopping.
The executive was well into his pitch when, suddenly, Page interrupted him.
“No,” Page said emphatically. “We don’t do this.”
The room grew quiet.
“We build products that leverage technology to solve huge problems for hundreds of millions of people.”
He went on. “Look at Android. Look at Gmail. Look at Google Maps. Look at Google Search. That’s what we do. We build products you can’t live without.”
“This is not it.”
Page didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. The message was loud and clear.
.. In 2013, Page moved Andy Rubin from the top of Android and asked him to start working on robots. Page envisioned a world in which robots could do things like take care of the elderly and load our self-driving cars with groceries and household supplies while we’re busy at work... He is, at heart, a passionate utopian—one who believes that technology has overwhelmingly made life better for humans and will only continue to do so.
At Google, Bid to Put Its Glasses to Work
“I’m sure Google would love this to be a consumer technology, from a scale perspective, but I’m just not sure it is,” said Chris Curran, chief technologist for the United States advisory practice of PwC, a business consulting firm.
“It’s a technology that’s searching for problems to solve, and it’s really a matter of where do the problems emerge?” he added.