Be a part of the community.
It's free, join today!
|
Originally Posted by MissZooey
 Dreary louse, I perceive this article as having a myriad of points that could be considered "central." Care to elaborate?
|
|
Originally Posted by Doug
tl/dr
|
|
Originally Posted by dreary louse
I can't convince anybody to read some Dostoevsky, or any literature of that nature. Somebody might say these novels are "drawn-out", but that's why they're novels. But fundamentally - it's not a social activity, and reading a book takes one outside the network. This is in spite of how a good novel can alter how you interact with that social network. But it's difficult to convince somebody that doing something so passive is valuable. |
|
Originally Posted by OCallaghan
Holy shit...Doug is banned?
|
|
Originally Posted by dreary louse
I might have missed exactly what you were saying.
|
|
Originally Posted by FrankCobretti
There will come a time when those of us who can afford them will have neural implants that will, essentially, function as a Google search engine. We will have instant access to information without the need to resort to an external interface.
This will continue to shift our paradigm from "knowledge is power" to "analysis is power." |
|
Originally Posted by FrankCobretti
There will come a time when those of us who can afford them will have neural implants that will, essentially, function as a Google search engine. We will have instant access to information without the need to resort to an external interface.
This will continue to shift our paradigm from "knowledge is power" to "analysis is power." |
| Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots. * * * The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing. A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks. "I –" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock. "I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, "Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north. Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred – Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about – it's on the tip of his tongue – * * * Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries. Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base. Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try. The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit. Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out? * * * Portrait of a wasted youth: Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season – but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days. His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse. Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime – if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck – and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years. But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter. "Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid. "Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons. "I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?" "Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner – Manfred – has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already. In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head – except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots – dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town. |
|
Originally Posted by DaveB
The trick is that this shift will not be automatic. Google preys on our sense of immediate gratification (or, as MissZooey's fond of saying, "the illusion of ease"). When we enter a search, we depend not only on PageRank to determine our results, but on our own abilities to formulate search terms that represent our actual questions. So there's all kinds of room for us to come up with an answer that may not be the answer or a good answer.
There needs to be more of an educational emphasis on the analysis you're describing, as well as the means to do useful research using all the tools at our disposal (popular search engines, certainly, but also online databases, individual websites, and, yes, even print resources). Without these skills, people end up in a state of information naivete, fundamentally unable to find good resources, but convinced of their own ability to find "adequate" answers, nonetheless. Google is fine with this, of course, because it's more important that you're content than informed. Without these skills, those neural search engines will just be a way of finding the same questionable information, only faster. |
|
Originally Posted by Eyeball Kid
This isn't too far off, IMHO, from what we'll see in most of our lifetimes.
|
|
Originally Posted by DaveB
There needs to be more of an educational emphasis on the analysis you're describing, as well as the means to do useful research using all the tools at our disposal (popular search engines, certainly, but also online databases, individual websites, and, yes, even print resources). Without these skills, people end up in a state of information naivete, fundamentally unable to find good resources, but convinced of their own ability to find "adequate" answers, nonetheless. Google is fine with this, of course, because it's more important that you're content than informed.
Without these skills, those neural search engines will just be a way of finding the same questionable information, only faster. |
|
Originally Posted by Eyeball Kid
Steven Wolfram has this covered. http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wol...verything.html
|
|
Originally Posted by soylentgreen
Would I be wrong to say that I detect a great deal of this in the operations of the news stations? More and more, they seem (to me) to be flying on details and not context or substance.
|
| Also, with regards to what Frank said as well, do you (and Zooey) sincerely believe our culture is capable of moving in that direction? A position of being able to handle the information overload in a productive manner. Have we not yet passed a point where momentum has made catching up impossible? |
|
Originally Posted by Eyeball Kid
Dave - you're right about Wolfram/Alpha. I think I misunderstood your original point. On the same page now. I was focusing on the "formulating correct search terms" portion of your post. One of Wolfram's big goals is to get his system to understand natural human language and to answer the question you meant to ask (this is a huge problem, and he admits that he thought it might be intractable, but they're doing pretty well so far). But indeed, that doesn't address the sources of the data it's computing, or getting researchers to be able to intelligently synthesize the data Wolfram spits out at them. That's definitely a problem.
|
| Soylent - I wasn't making a value judgment about that future. Parts of that kind of vision fill me with deep unease, even as it fascinates. Something close to that ubiquitous Augmented Reality/mobile internet/lifelogging mobile device just looks pretty likely, to me. How many people do you know already who say they feel "naked" without their smartphones*? Or paralyzed when their net access goes down? I'm not really comfortable with saying these technologies are making us "stupider," just different. It looks like we're just going to have to keep augmenting ourselves to keep up, and as Frank points out, eventually those augmentations are going to move inside of us. And eventually "humanity" will be mostly non-organic. And it will all seem so normal and mundane as it happens. Just like the internet, google, and the iphone are all mundane now. See: http://io9.com/5533833/your-posthumanism-is-boring-me *I admit to feeling this way with my iPhone. It's become an extension of me. I even feel weird letting others use it. And this is how I already feel at the very infancy of mobile computing. Imagine the emotional attachments we might have with our technology in 25 years. Scary/exciting/depressing/thrilling all at the same time. |
