Cognitive psychology research, however, had its roots in reaction to behaviorism by focusing on things like language which appear to be mental activities capable of occurring without external stimulus. If an animal (including humans) receives some stimulus, there will be a resulting physical “output” which includes activities such as thinking. In brief, strict behaviorists argue that thinking is merely a side effect of behavior that is driven by external stimulus. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy finds its roots in the 1970s schism of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology, and I suppose, in some ways, is an attempt to reconcile the two. Chief among the developments of the weaponization of bits are drones and 3D printers.įirst off, some nice thoughts. That is, the bits of war are having a distinct affect on the material world namely the de-localization of war and the disintermediation of the suppliers of weapons. Whereas commerce has seen a sneaking and disruptive transition from atoms to bits with regards to its goods, war is undergoing a somewhat different change. Still, today, We often overlook bits and how they change the value of goods, or in the case of the weaponization of bits, how they change the value of human life. Surely all those bits were worth something. Negroponte, a well-known MIT professor, had a laptop with a hard drive that was no doubt packed with papers, published and unpublished, documentation and certainly software, perhaps even experimental unreleased projects. The security agents were, of course, skeptical and after examining the device, estimated its worth at about US$2000. The value of the laptop was, in his estimation, one to two million dollars. To make his point, he tells the amusing story of returning from abroad and having to declare the value of his laptop upon arriving at customs.

In that editorial from 1995, Negroponte spoke of how numerous goods were making and would make the transition from reality to the digital landscape and how the valuation of such digital goods was often wildly inaccurate because of our emphasis on things atomic. For a long time now, my views have been influenced by a remarkable editorial by Nicholas Negroponte in Wired magazine entitled “ Bits and Atoms“.

Joe mathlete