I'm An Advocate Of Human Nature.

The Attribution Of Intelligence To Machines, Crowds Of Fragments, Or Other Nerd Deities Obscures More Than It Illuminates. When People Are Told That A Computer Is Intelligent, They Become Prone To Changing Themselves In Order To Make The Computer Appear To Work Better, Instead Of Demanding That The Computer Be Changed To Become More Useful.

I'm Not In Any Sense Anti-facebook.

As Information Technology Becomes Millions Of Times More Powerful, Any Particular Use Of It Becomes Correspondingly Cheaper. Thus, It Has Become Commonplace To Expect Online Services (not Just News, But 21st Century Treats Like Search Or Social Networking) To Be Given For Free, Or Rather, In Exchange For Acquiescence To Being Spied On.

Criticism Is Always Easier Than Constructive Solutions.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.