Long before Klein created IKB, painters and their patrons paid through the nose for the rarest of pigments, lapis lazuli. This mineral that creates the colour ultramarine has only ever been found in Afghanistan. In the middle ages, it was mined there and traded at enormous prices to create European images of the blue heavens. Gold leaf was then daubed on it to make stars.
Colour is magical, colour is divine – you can’t blame Anish Kapoor or his critics for going mad for Vantablack.
Michael Gove :
The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time. It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date. The EU tries to standardise and regulate rather than encourage diversity and innovation. It is an analogue union in a digital age.
Writers, remember: the more we play the algorithmic game, the more the algorithmic game plays us. (All hail the great Algorithm in the Cloud!)
Algorithm-oriented content is becoming ubiquitous. It doesn’t matter what you read or what topics you search for, a growing percentage of online material is designed ground-up for the acquisition of ‘Likes’ and the courtship of search engines. Food, politics, current affairs, cats, academia — everything. It doesn’t matter what you are interested in, there is an army of people writing about it with strategic intent to leverage the algorithmic landscape for their advantage.
The rise of the machine learning :
The quantitative investment world plays down the prospect of machines supplanting human fund managers, pointing out that the prospect of full artificial intelligence is still distant, and arguing that human ingenuity still plays a vital role. But the confident swagger of the money management nerds is unmistakable. Already there are quasi-AI trading strategies working their magic in financial markets, and the future belongs to them, they predict.
The image above looks like concept art for a new dystopian sci-fi film. A billionaire superman with a rictus grin, striding straight past human drones, tethered to machines and blinded to reality by blinking plastic masks. Golden light shines down on the man as he strides past his subjects, cast in gloom, toward a stage where he will accept their adulation. Later that night, he will pore across his vast network and read their praise, heaped upon him in superlatives, as he drives what remains of humanity forward to his singular vision.
