One of the hardest things with machines is to generate sufficient
unpredictability, to create good encryption keys or quality simulations.
Randomness is hard to come by, for computers. Usually this is done by
listening to the supposed outside world, network interrupts, A/D noise,
disk seek times, keyboard and mouse input. If you are lucky you'll get
5-10 high entropy bits per second. And then there are successful attacks
by flooding the machine with the input which is known to the attacker
and not random at all. The computer then becomes predictable, the
simulations take the same sequence, and keys can be guessed.
The intended analogy is, of course, the quality time alone, where one
can tap into thermal noise of synapses, or that flu virus screwing with
your immune system, to generate new snippets of thoughts that the
outside world simply cannot predict.
Lowering the entropy of humans will have interesting consequences.
Perhaps the class division in the future will be more accurately
described by the person's entropy than by income numbers. There will be
gigabyters on one side and two-bitters on the other. Guess which will
you be able to outguess.
others. The risk is very high that massive partaking in life on social
network won't lead to 'collective authorship', but to a buzz-swarm of
totally superficial interactions. As Michel de Certeau has convincigly
argued [15] it is time, and time only, which makes it possible to shape
the everyday world 'below'. When one does not have a place of one's own,
one acts on someone else's territory; if one is unable to put a strategy
in practice, one can resort to tactics. In theory, personal time can
therefore be used to build up significant relationships, also within
heteronymous contexts as are social networks, whose rules are not
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