else 10.28: “Merging with the technology”

This week in our news round up: artists play with the possibilities of the 3-D printing medium, the lines between the digital world and the physical world of drones and dating blur, and Silicon Valley is getting more overtly political. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS.

Artists Take Up Digital Tools – NYTimes
“Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York explores 3-D printers as tools for new art. “In recent years I’ve seen a shift in thinking from ‘What can the machine do?’ versus ‘How can I use this as part of the tool kit to achieve what I want to do?’ ” The New Yorker has a nice slideshow.

There Is No Difference Between Online and ‘Real-Life’ Dating – NYMag
The line between online and offline is blurring as we all use the internet as a tool for meeting and staying in touch with people.

Confessions of a Drone Warrior – GQ
This personal account from retired Predator drone pilot has got us more emotionally involved in the ethical concerns around drone warfare and its human impacts.

Thousands gather in Washington for anti-NSA ‘Stop Watching Us’ rally – The Guardian
Protesters from the right, left, and center come together to protest mass surveillance.

Silicon Valley Attempts to Install Its First Federal Candidate – Valleywag
Congressional candidate Ro Khanna signals Silicon Valley’s foray into fixing government inefficiencies.

Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay? – CNET
Highly speculative, but could Google be working on a floating data center? This is both technically and politically interesting, given surging libertarian interest in seasteading.

Why Facebook Is Teaching Its Machines to Think Like Humans – Wired
“Deep learning” algorithms try to parse vernacular language to find more meaning in phrases like “off the hook.” On Facebook, all the language data is there, we just need better means to make sense of it.

Where Humans Will Always Beat the Robots – The Atlantic
MIT’s Rob Miller believes that for certain kinds of tasks, humans will always be better than machines. But he’s using computing scale to crowdsource those tasks with Mechanical Turk.

Automatic’s quantified car device debuts in Apple stores – Gigaom
Placing this data pulling device in Apple retail stores brings automotive stats–and quantified driving–to the masses.