Tom Chatfield Quotes

#1. Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

Tom Chatfield

#2. If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level.

Tom Chatfield

#3. As commentators like the American psychologist Gary Marcus have noted, it's extremely difficult to teach a computer to recognise cats. And that's not for want of trying.

Tom Chatfield

#4. Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.

Tom Chatfield

#5. The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.

Tom Chatfield

#6. For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

Tom Chatfield

#7. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space, not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium, too.

Tom Chatfield

#8. The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured.

Tom Chatfield

#9. The biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash - that's nice - it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.

Tom Chatfield

#10. From exam grading to health education to professional training to democratic participation, paths towards self-realization and success in the world are often daunting and obscure: journeys only the privileged feel confident setting off along.

Tom Chatfield

#11. The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words.

Tom Chatfield

#12. Even when they're not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.

Tom Chatfield

#13. As a medium, electronic screens possess infinite capacities and instant interconnections, turning words into a new kind of active agent in the world.

Tom Chatfield

#14. We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living

Tom Chatfield

#15. Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

Tom Chatfield

#16. In an age of constant live connections, the central question of self-examination is drifting from 'Who are you?' towards 'What are you doing?

Tom Chatfield

#17. We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.

Tom Chatfield

#18. Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.

Tom Chatfield

#19. Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

Tom Chatfield

#20. I spoke at TED Global 2010 about the ways that video games engage the brain, and in particular, the idea of reward structures: how a challenge or task can be broken down and presented to make it as engaging as possible.

Tom Chatfield

#21. Time, presence and physical attentiveness are our most basic proxies for something ultimately unprovable: that we are understood.

Tom Chatfield