Farnam Street
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create …
Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe. Here’s how the spiral of silence works and how we can discover what people really think. *** Be honest: How often do you feel …
While runaway cars and vengeful stitched-together humans may be the stuff of science fiction, technology really can take revenge on us. Seeing technology as part of a complex system can help us avoid costly unintended consequences. Here’s …
The growing influence of algorithms on our lives means we owe it to ourselves to better understand what they are and how they work. Understanding how the data we use to inform algorithms influences the results they give can help us avoid …
Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to escape from that and encourage creativity? …
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” It’s unclear exactly who first made that statement, when they said it, or how it was phrased. The most probable source is Roy …
What makes a communications technology revolutionary? One answer to this is to ask whether it fundamentally changes the way society is organized. This can be a very hard question to answer, because true fundamental changes alter society in …
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its …
The least reliable part of the car is the driver. Chris Urmson, who heads Google’s driverless car program, gave a talk at TED in March about the company’s self-driving cars. This could be the most fascinating thing you see …
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.” *** In …
People have worried about losing their jobs to robots for decades now. But how is growing automation really going to change us? Let’s take a look at the limitations of automation and the uniquely human skills that will remain valuable. *** …
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — Claude Shannon (1948) *** Claude Shannon …
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” writes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt. 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural …
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), for those unfamiliar with him, rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. The core of the book is a phrase many of us are familiar …