November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mona Lisa's Smile
This is Chapter 21 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
Virtual reality has its precedents. Pygmalion, the artist of Greek myth, sculpted the image of a young woman in ivory. Stricken by her beauty, he prayed to Aphrodite for a bride in her likeness. The goddess granted his wish by bringing the statue to life.
“Without the underlying promise of this myth,” wrote the eminent art critic, E. H. Gombrich, and without “the secret hopes and fears that accompany the act of creation, there might be no art as we know it.” Gombrich goes on to quote the contemporary English artist, Lucien Freud:
A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life./1/
The creative urge runs strong. Alone among earth's creatures, we contribute creatively even to the shaping of our own lives. “It is our nature to work upon our nature.” Therefore we should not be wholly surprised ...
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