Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

Making technnological wizardry make people the best they can be

For those whose idea of a career is to make the extraordinary or even the unthinkable possible, few blueprints for success would likely be as instructive as Frank Moss’s The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives (Crown Business, 272 pages). Moss, an aerospace engineer who became a computing industry entrepreneur before heading the MIT Media Lab from 2005 until recently, chronicles in his highly engaging book the many creative inventions and innovations that have earned for the MIT Media Lab its reputation as “the inventor of the future.”

Sorcerers and Apprentices

Consider just a few examples of the technology-driven and cutting-edge wizardry churned out by the MIT Media Lab in recent years: the electronic book reader or e-reader, child-safe airbags for motor vehicles, a mobile humanoid robot to attend to the sick and elderly, a foldable and stackable electric city car, a compact wearable device that transforms any surface into a touch-screen computer, and a lifelike robotic prosthesis to enable amputees to walk naturally again.

Moss takes the reader on an exciting guided tour of the MIT Media Lab, showing the “creative chaos” that makes it a mind-boggling antidisciplinary crucible of technological invention. What makes this approach distinct from typical research-driven or development-driven approaches is its utter practicality. As guiding principle, the MIT Media Lab doesn’t aim to invent supermachines that could equal or surpass human intelligence but to make existing products and services much more intelligent and better at serving people. As Moss reflects towards the end of The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices, “I feel that rather than focusing too much energy on building machines that are as smart as or smarter than humans, we should devote most of our efforts to building machines that help us to be the best human beings we can be for ourselves and others.”

In a review of The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices, Chad Hurley, co-founder and former CEO of YouTube, says: “Anyone who wants to succeed—be it in technology, art, or business—needs to follow the unique multi-disciplinary approach described in this book. Our future depends on innovation. This book provides the inspiration and motivation we need to change the world, one page at a time.”

Read excerpts from Frank Moss’s The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices now!

Read Henry Petroski’s “The Wizardly Ways of a Tech Lab” in The Wall Street Journal now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Frank Moss, an entrepreneur and 25-year veteran of the software and computer industries, was the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011. He holds the Jerome Wiesner professorship of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and remains as the principal investigator for the New Media Medicine research group, which he founded. Moss has spent most of his career bringing innovative business technologies to market, and in recent years has been engaged in development efforts to use technology to address pressing social issues particularly in the area of health care.

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