Archive for the 'Humanism' Category

When I Heard The Learn’d Software Engineer

Published by Jarred on September 11, 2008 in Culture, Facebook, Humanism, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. Comments

Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” examines the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that has been developing alongside the evolution of the Web. Thompson brings a balanced perspective to the debate over the influence that the Internet has on our lives, a debate which recently has been dominated by alarmists who claim (often with little data) that the digital millennium will actually take us a step backwards as a race.

Ambient awareness is the term applied to the “incessant online contact” that characterizes the current developments on the Web. From the Facebook News Feed to Twitter, users are currently preoccupied with accessing an aggregation of tiny details to form a larger picture. The metaphor Thompson chooses is beyond perfect:

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

And so the mystery behind the obsession with keeping on top of our friends and their “updates” is revealed, even to those who think they had it figured out. It’s not the trees that fascinate us; it’s the forest. It’s on a level just beyond passive perception. We skim and absorb the information, choosing only to dive into the details only when something piques our interest.

So is this good or bad? A step forward, or a step back?

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The Pace of Human Progress

Published by Jarred on June 4, 2008 in Computing, Health, Humanism and Science. Comments

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil – to my knowledge – is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.

What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:

an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.

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Mapping Our Memories

Published by Jarred on April 14, 2008 in Computing, Google, Health, Humanism and Science. Comments

We’ve discussed augmented reality a little bit before, but this week’s New York Times Magazine featured an article that got me thinking about a similar concept: human augmentation, which I suppose can be loosely defined as improving human performance through the addition of synthetic or otherwise “unhuman” components.

Of course there are lots of spokes in this wheel: we could easily talk about steroids, for example, and how chemical enhancements are changing athletics. However, Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at NYU, focuses in “Total Recall” on research being done into human memory: how it works, how it compares to computer memory, and how the latter can inform and perhaps improve the former.

As Marcus explains, computer storage is orderly and logical: information is stored in specific locations, and there is an accompanying index or “map” that allows quick and accurate retrieval. When you command your computer to find information, it consults the map, finds the information, and displays it. Nice and simple. On the other hand, information in the human brain — as far as we know — isn’t mapped to discrete locations. Our memories ebb and flow, often disappear, and sometimes change. When we “search” for information in our brains, it can be a slower and much less accurate or consistent affair as compared to computers. Marcus calls this a “kluge”, the term engineers use for systems that are “clumsy and inelegant but a lot better than nothing.”

With this discrepancy in storage methods in mind, Marcus wonders if one day it will be possible to embed a memory mapping and tracking system in our brains. He predicts the creation of “a system modeled on Google, which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers.” Suggesting that “there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off”, he maintains that such a procedure would not turn humans into machines because it would only augment, and not alter, existing abilities. The quality or quantity of our memories would not change, only our ability to find them again.

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Augmented Reality: A Preflection

Published by Jarred on February 20, 2008 in Computing, Culture and Humanism. Comments

A Story
While I usually take the bus to work in the morning so I can get in some reading, on my way home I usually end up taking the Metro and making the 20-minute hike up Mt. Saint Alban to our apartment building. It’s nice to get some exercise and fresh air after sitting in front of a computer all day.

As I near the end of my walk each night, I walk right by the National Cathedral. It’s been getting darker a little later these days as we move towards springtime, and so the light on the cathedral has been especially beautiful the past week or so. Tonight as I walked by, I peered up at the heights of this enormous building, trying to make out some of the gargoyles. I’ve always heard that there was a Darth Vader gargoyle up there somewhere, but I had never seen it and had no idea where it was.

I considered pulling out my iPhone to look it up on Wikipedia, but it just felt like a little too much effort and I had to hurry and grab some dinner before a basketball game on TV. Besides, why stare down for three minutes at the glowing screen of my iPhone when I could spend those three minutes watching the glow of the setting sun on the facade of the cathedral?

In those three minutes looking at the cathedral, I thought about how lamentable it is that the wealth of information and the empowering connectivity of the Internet is tied to screens. It is indeed a remarkable advance that, with devices like the iPhone, the full Internet is now in our pockets. But it’s still on a screen in our pockets. When we want to look something up on the web, we have to briefly tune out everything and everyone around us — our reality — so that we can focus on the screen. Why do we have to abandon the object of our research, in order to research it?

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