Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2016–2019years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual.
Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status.
A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16
- One truism of AI research (and 'human augmentation' is fairly in the AI space) is that the best brains have overestimated our ability to write useful rules. In a sense our legal systems and national economies are large-scale structures for organizing human effort into something greater. In the 50s people thought white-collar bureaucracy was the crowning achievement of the 20th century (read about White Collar by C Wright Mills).
Other than 'faster mail', it's not clear that any rule systems of the consumer internet make people more efficient workers. No futurists predicted that grindr & SMS would be the best our century had to offer re: automating human resources.
Neural nets were certainly hampered until the 2000s by weaker CPUs, but I wonder if part of the problem was the expectation and hope that humans would be able to write useful rules. This is a very old illusion.
