There's no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I'm the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there's a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

this is a mess

waste disposal

natural gas

whistle blower

He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

Suppose a large asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and has a 5 percent chance of hitting us, creating $10 trillion worth of physical damage to the U.S. Should the president authorize a $700 billion mission to destroy the asteroid and stave off disaster? If you reason in purely statistical terms, the expected cost of failing to act (0.05 × $10,000 billion = $500 billion) is much less than the cost of acting.

But if the president spends the money to stop the asteroid, nobody will know whether it would indeed have hit the Earth, had he neglected to act. By contrast, if he does nothing, he has a 5 percent chance of going down in history as the president who knowingly failed to avoid catastrophe.