My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading.

(…)

But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

Can a machine accumulate enough information about your patterns of communication to create an effective digital doppelgänger? Could we use the data left behind on Google’s servers and our own hard disks to effectively replace ourselves with an artificial intelligence born and bred of our online conversations and quirks? What might it be like to have a conversation with a past representation of ourselves, what would a hypothetical exchange between two digitally-reconstructed individuals look like?

(…)

The goal was to build an autonomous chat bot that would draw from the content of our logs to construct an infinite stream of back-and-forth conversation between our younger selves. Ideally, these conversations should be reasonably cogent and reflect whatever personality / themes we left behind in our logs.

Presented at Black Hat USA 2009

This document contains a security assessment of the IETF specifications of the Internet Protocol version 4, and of a number of mechanisms and policies in use by popular IPv4 implementations.

This article explores the practice of “beeping” or “missed calling” between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile’s owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as “pick me up now” or a relational sign, such as “I’m thinking of you.” The practice itself is old, with roots in landline behaviors, but it has grown tremendously, particularly in the developing world.

“All around the world, rising prosperity and rising patriotism go hand in hand. But what sort of patriotism is India’s going to be? “