Tom Chatfield
Tom Chatfield
Tom Chatfieldis a British author, technology theorist, and commentator...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
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Vast volumes of mixed media surround us, from music to games and videos. Yet almost all of our online actions still begin and end with writing: text messages, status updates, typed search queries, comments and responses, screens packed with verbal exchanges and, underpinning it all, countless billions of words.
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Even when they're not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.
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Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.
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In classrooms full of students who range from brilliant to sullen disaffection, it's games - and often games alone - that I've seen engage every single person in the room. For some, the right kind of play can spell the difference between becoming part of something, and the lifelong feeling that they're not meant to take part.
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The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.
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Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.
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As commentators like the American psychologist Gary Marcus have noted, it's extremely difficult to teach a computer to recognise cats. And that's not for want of trying.
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Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.
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I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before.
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Video games are a special kind of play, but at root, they're about the same things as other games: embracing particular rules and restrictions in order to develop skills and experience rewards. When a game is well-designed, it's the balance between these factors that engages people on a fundamental level.
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Modern motor vehicles are safer and more reliable than they have ever been - yet more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents around the world each year, and more than 50 million are injured. Why? Largely because one perilous element in the mechanics of driving remains unperfected by progress: the human being.
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If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level.
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Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.