I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this
experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story,
linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to
first sources as much as possible. The
favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.
What I remembered was that it was written by that
famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous
swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google
“federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.
This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.
The quote?
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb.
Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
David Foster Wallace
This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.
From the prolific interface genius that is
Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.
Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.
The most important perspective in my view is that health, medicine, and biology is now an information technology, whereas it used to be hit or miss.. Information technology grows exponentially, in sharp contrast to the linear growth of hit or miss approaches that have characterized medicine up until recently. As such, these technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years (by doubling in power and price performance each year). The genome project, incidentally, followed exactly this trajectory.
Our intuition is linear, so [we] think in linear terms and expect that the slow pace of the past will characterize the future. But the reality of progress in information technology is exponential, not linear. My cell phone is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer we all shared when I was an undergrad at
MIT. And
we will do it again in 25 years. What used to take up a building now fits in my pocket, and what now fits in my pocket will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
Kurzweil has said similar things many times before, but keep yourself from forgetting it, keep it in mind. This is the future we’re building.
”Just” through incremental improvements, from 2 years ago.
There’s no one revolutionary thing that has changed, it’s just incremental steps.
Edge’s 2009 Question is out!: What would change everything?. The list of answers by some of the most interesting individuals in the third culture individuals out there is as inspiring and thought provoking (and atrociously designed, interface-wise) as ever. Kevin Kelly’s answer my favorite so far:
It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We’d use artificial intelligence the same way we’ve exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we’d plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.
This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.
Great stuff—it’s people like Kelly that make me miss California ;)
Jeff Bezos had remarkably similar, equally inspiring ideas at
a recent TED talk, comparing the web to electricity but Kelly pushes it further, to
”intelligence as electricity”
We will all be wearing something like this in no more than 5 years. Seriously, it’s positively awesome, just look how silly happy I look.
Your brain is uncannily good at patching your vision so you can eerily “see thru” the screen—soon enough the feeling of obstruction disappears and it just floats magically along. The tiny screen is good enough for text to read and you can apparently browse the web too. You control it through some controls at the headphones. It’s already for sale at some very reasonable $700 here in Japan
(online only). So Mannfred Macx!
Oh and I just uploaded a massive 200 photo batch to Flickr, at the end of
this set, starting with
this picture. If you wonder why this blog has seen so little love lately, it’s because most of my online efforts have been directed to photoblogging—these aren’t just pictures, I title each one with a brief summary of what I was thinking when I shot it or what it makes me think. It’s a strange style but it suits me and I hope you like it
(you’ll probably like it, just as for this blog, if you’re more into ideas and stuff than people). There will be much less photoblogging coming though, since I’m focusing all my energies on learning Japanese!
There is no question that ideas and artifacts evolve, in the sense that they will start varying from one another, and some will be selected in preference to others, and then transmitted to a new generation. Most people assume that this cultural “evolution” is simply an extension of human evolution. After all, they argue,
ideas and objects could not survive without us, and therefore they could not have an independent evolutionary history. But that is like saying that humans are part of the evolution of plants, since we could not survive without them. It is true that memes need our minds to exist and evolve, but then so do we require air, water, and photosynthesis, among other things, for our survival. Therefore it does not seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
The Evolving SelfAM
thought
memes more than a cool metaphor before. Now I’m scared.
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back.
He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that.
No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn.
The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.
As David, to whom I own the Big Dog acquaintance, said: its movements are so fluid, so eerily natural, biological, one just knows the days of the flesh are counted. “It was nice being human.”
/blag
