‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations … When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.’
…
‘Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.’
“Natural vs Artificial”, “Man vs Nature” — those are real points of conversation. It’s important that we begin to see through that facade, to create new mythologies that don’t pose that kind of polarity, because it’s going to be a problem if people think it’s a real thing in the world.
How many articles are there now, about how computers and the internet are changing our brains, when actually we’ve been changing our brains for much longer than that — it’s only the most obvious, accelerated changes that are noticed, and the rest pass by as if they never happened. As if we were “natural” before computers, natural before the 1950s, before the 1800s? When? Where is the line? As if these artificial things are not a part of nature…
as if We Are not Nature Itself, Creating.
Stories like Avatar (or Fern Gully, if you like) have their points, and those are important. But we need new stories — stories that contain a different point of view: that of artifice as a manifestation of nature.
Since the beauty and importance of randomness has no real way of being monetized by corporate entities like Google, it is therefore in their financial interest to go in the opposite direction; in other words, to condition people to demand uniformity, order, and repeatability. *That’s* how they deliver earnings.
As a kid growing up in the Mississippi River valley I found the variety of places included in local and AAA guide books would often lead us to places we’d never have otherwise gone to. If those books had been tailored to our preferences they would be worse than no books at all.
“On August 27, 1783 in Paris, [Benjamin] Franklin witnessed the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight.”
“Sir Joseph Banks, a leading botanist and president of the British Royal Society from 1778 to 1820, … corresponded with [Franklin] in Paris. Although ostensibly a man of science, Banks looked at ballooning from a Newtonian worldview, and wrote to Franklin that, “I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed.”
Franklin had told Banks that experimenting with balloons would someday “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.”
He answered Banks’ objection by writing that “It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied. When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”
When a spectator at one of the early balloon launchings asked Franklin what this new invention could be used for, Franklin gave his famous answer: “What is the use of a new-born baby?””
This is a long one, but please try to read. It’s important.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a round table about “Ignorance and Curiosity” — a discussion about how the former fuels the latter. In light of recent political / educational events, the events that transpired couldn’t be more appropriate:
Inevitably the conversation turned toward education, and how (or whether) any teacher can inspire curiosity in their students, despite handling large classes of various types of learners and in the face of budget cuts and systematic constraints.
The very last question of the day was the best — a man asked (and I quote somewhat loosely): “I understand that there’s a fraction of you, of your personality type, who cannot help but be curious and intellectual… but why do you want to expand that fraction? Why do you want others to be like you?”
A great question. One that many people wouldn’t even think to ask. After all, who doesn’t want to live in an intelligent, educated society — the ideal society of the ancient Greek philosophers? (Don’t answer that. It’s incredible, but I could think of a few people, too.) It’s funny that the inquisitor must be a curious man himself, to have challenged them thus.
After some initial difficulty, two of the speakers finally worked it out. Stuart Firestein (Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences) illustrated with the story above (of Ben Franklin and the hot air balloons) and Heather Berlin agreed: the point is hope.
The investigation of our world — science — works by Trial and Error. Especially in the beginnings of such an investigation, one cannot know what will work, what will be important, what it will be used for, how it may change our lives… So many people seem to have too little understanding of this. Unfortunately that’s especially true of those in powerful positions, who have the ability to affect human curiosity, education, progress, livelihood:
Recently, the Head of the US’s House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Lamar Smith, has begun preparing a bill to “revise criteria for science funding and research grants”:
According to ScienceInsider, the bill would require the NSF director to certify that every grant met the following conditions:
The grant must “advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and… secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science”
It must also be “the finest quality, groundbreaking, and answer questions or solve problems that are of utmost importance to society at large”
The grant should not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies”
How does a person such as Smith — who clearly misunderstands the scientific process, who, by making such requests, denies the fact that “groundbreaking” discoveries take many teams, errors, and a wealth of time, and that one cannot always be sure which will be “of utmost importance to society at large” — become Head of The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology?
This is why we want to “expand the fraction” of the curious. Of those who are not simply ignorant, but who are motivated by their own ignorance to continue to be life-long learners, no matter their day-job description, and whether their scope of influence includes a single child or an entire country.
“Amazingly realistic digital screen characters are finally here”
[I beg to differ.]
Meet Zoe: a digital talking head. She can express a range of human emotions on demand with “unprecedented realism” and could herald a new era of human-computer interaction …
Zoe, or her offspring, could be used as a visible version of Siri, as a personal assistant in smartphones, or to replace mobile phone texting with “face messaging” in which you “face-message” friends.
[What? Why?]
The lifelike face can display emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear, and changes its voice to suit any feeling the user wants it to simulate.
Dear, sweet Jesus. Watch the video. Not because it’s “unprecedentedly realistic” but because it’s actually really frightening. The part where she recites “Don’t forget mum’s birthday!” in an angry tone… *shudder*
Oh well. WIP, I suppose.
P.S. According to Kurtzeil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, it may be possible to see such avatars mature in just two years. Once can only hope.
Dmitry Itskov thinks we can have inhabitable avatars for our minds by 2045.
I’m not convinced. Our understanding of the brain is limited, and even what we think we know is constantly in flux.
Besides that, we have no idea what it is to be a brain without a body. Is it really possible to extract thoughts, emotions, personality, etc. — all of which are epiphenomena? Perhaps it’s possible to map something that mimics neuron activities (we don’t even have that figured out) but how will that thing fare without the rest of what those neurons are normally connected to (the body)?
There’s also the question of The Uncanny Valley. It’s not unreasonable to think that this can be solved by 2045, but personally I doubt I’m going to want to interact with an avatar in 2015. A robot is fine, but when there’s supposed to be a “human” inside and one should take whatever face it has seriously, that’s a different story.
So what does this all mean for the future of truth? Is it possible for something to be true but not understandable? I think so, but I don’t think that that is a bad thing. Just as certain mathematical theorems have been proven by computers, and we can trust them, we can also at the same time endeavor to try to create more elegantly constructed, human-understandable, versions of these proofs. Just because something is true, doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to explore it, even if we don’t understand every aspect.
[Credentials] can cause intellectual ossification.
To illustrate that point, Mead told the story of how Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser and maser, took his ideas to the leading quantum-mechanics nabobs at the time, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg:
“They both laughed at him, and basically said, ‘Sonny, you just don’t seem to understand how quantum mechanics works.’ Well, history has shown that it wasn’t Charlie who didn’t know how quantum mechanics works, it was the pontifical experts in the field who didn’t know how it worked.”
I love this story. It’s about { outsider intelligence } — the idea that contributors from outside of a specialized field can help solve problems within or related to that field, and at times even better than those within the field can. Of course, one has a greater perspective and range of thought when looking from the outside in, rather than being on the inside and having already discarded many ideas that are not immediately relevant to one’s work. Those impertinent ideas help us think creatively — help push us out of the “ditch” (read: Edward de Bono).
Does the prospect of being a puppet make you uncomfortable? It does me. The article talks about the almost unimaginable amount of data Netflix collects and analyzes based on your activities for the purpose of capitalizing. Their House of Cards is an initial result of that ‘algorithmic focus group’. And the article hints at how this is becoming more and more prevalent across all of society. After reading this, it’s obvious that traditional TV fiction is done. It’s over. Time to go home. The future is the Internet, and it starts with Netflix.
But, all in all, it’s kind of depressing what this thick, data-driven approach portends. What good are movies, shows, video games, and other modern media if they’re increasingly created—directly or indirectly—from empirical observations of endless data? Where goes the potential of art? How do you transform as an individual by being constantly accommodated—even if it’s a niche accommodation—and not being challenged? In prior times, some of these things could be made with an appreciable amount of creative risk and freedom, and they were unexpected, spoke to something in the collective consciousness. But if the end game is to know the audience so thoroughly that you can creatively anticipate and accommodate their every whim and desire, the possibility of art ceases. If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things generated from minds incompatible with their catered kingdom.
That’s one aspect of the modern Internet that I have always kind of loathed: the physics at work that makes us the rulers of our own skull-sized kingdoms, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace. And to paraphrase another person, we continue to paradoxically spend our time together but alone.
Yes,
But Netflix is not a place for art, just as TV is not a place for art (was it ever?), just as any regular movie theater is not a place for art. We have to remember that.
This isn’t about the internet — there are other places online and “out there” to find real, creative work that has nothing to do with targeting, etc.
Corporations will always do what they do (until pretty soon when, you know, they can’t because we’re all fucked over and out of resources), but I don’t agree that “If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things …”.
Every day, someone out there tries to cater to me. How many times have I pressed the “No, this Ad is not relevant” button on Hulu? Countless. And Hulu will never understand that anything they throw at me, I will not find relevant, because I don’t give a shit about any of it.
That’s the point and role of art, and the artist. By nature the artist is a contrarian, by nature art defies accommodation.
But that’s the artist. The real problem is { teaching others the value of art }, and propagating the notion that they should go look for things that make them uncomfortable. Hasn’t that long been the problem, even prior to this “information age”?
Yes, accommodation is commonplace. I was trying to suggest more of a systemic accommodation in what is traditionally considered artistic mediums, something like an evolution that creeps up over time, a kind of sudden ubiquity—like cellphones or the Internet—that becomes part of the fabric of the everyday. There will be people who see it happening and resist it, but eventually it becomes the cultural status quo, and people in general lose the ability to introspect on what’s going on; and once the previous paradigm cedes to the past, it more than likely becomes at most an historical curiosity.
Netflix might not be a place for art in general, but that doesn’t preclude it from containing art. They still offer some of the greatest cinematic works known to the world. Also, when I wrote that, I had a TV show in mind that I would classify as art: Twin Peaks. Others can make arguments for other shows—I’m personally not a huge fan of the medium—but Twin Peaks, being borne significantly from the mind of the auteur David Lynch, has that certain magic that I’ve spoken about on numerous occasions.
As for teaching others the value of art, yes, I believe I agree in principle with that being the real problem. I just don’t know how much being exposed to the principles and potentials of art through anything approaching an academic lens actually carries over throughout any given individual’s life. I honestly don’t know if there’s a solution outside of a component of abstractly ‘feeling’ art in the world. And if that’s the only solution—that art applies to those who are somehow innately receptive to art—then I believe systemic accommodation has the ability, over time, to anesthetize that facility—if not outright undermining it.
But my ultimate point still remains: that systemic accommodation leads everyone into their separate, subjective ‘skull-sized kingdoms’. Art loses—completely—all objective measure (or any hope of reaching that) and only means something subjectively. It leads people deeper into their private universes, and I think there are social/cultural ramifications for that.
I see. I can’t disagree (nor wish to) with your main point. We already see so much of that through democratization — I feel like a broken record repeating this, but there’s truly a flattened plane when people in general begin to believe that next-to-nothing holds objective value. Everything is the same. But is it really? Not that this is black-and-white; it has its usefulness.
And when you say systemic accommodation, I can take it you mean on this large of a scale, where it’s increasingly difficult (for anyone not predisposed to looking for something else) to happen upon something new by accident.
As for teaching the value of art as a solution to spread receptivity of it, I agree again about the academic lens not being a good tool. I’ll use my own experience: I thought of physics as just another subject to “get through” through most of school. Stupidly enough, I only got interested in it after investigating pseudoscience. Through the “academic lens” (if this is what you mean) the sublimity, importance, Hell, grandeur of it all was entirely lost. Schools mostly don’t cater to passion as we’d like to think, but to a practical, productive work-force.
It has to be something else.
Maybe this something else will be a much-needed and long-awaited revolution for culture just as, say, Khan Academy was for education.
*PS:
Just one more thing; Part of why you’re right about the spread of this type of accommodation is exactly at the root of that word.
On some level, I don’t know if anything will ever help this being the attitude of most people, especially if we don’t take care of other issues first.
And it isn’t because they’re lazy sheeple, but because so many, in this system, work too damned long and hard to want to go home and make themselves uncomfortable some more. A desire for uncomfortable experiences and ideas are likely a mark of someone privileged to have time for those things, or someone faced with those things in life so much that they become a main concern.
But I say that totally loosely. I don’t know what it says about kids in the suburbs, for example. I think a lot of that audience lives in a certain style of comfort that abhors anything “weird”, different, uncomfortable. They have time, money, and say that they’re bored so often. So why don’t they seek those things? A lack of exposure to them in the first place, a community that discourages them, etc…
And in the population who can handle it in the first place (have the stability to do so — time, money, quality of life), should they? Or is it some unseen necessity of cultural systems that things like art, philosophy, and high math and science should be left to the relatively few? After all, there’s study upon study of people with minds for those things also having a propensity for depression, etc.
I think I’ve digressed quite a bit; just something I wonder about sometimes.
Does the prospect of being a puppet make you uncomfortable? It does me. The article talks about the almost unimaginable amount of data Netflix collects and analyzes based on your activities for the purpose of capitalizing. Their House of Cards is an initial result of that ‘algorithmic focus group’. And the article hints at how this is becoming more and more prevalent across all of society. After reading this, it’s obvious that traditional TV fiction is done. It’s over. Time to go home. The future is the Internet, and it starts with Netflix.
But, all in all, it’s kind of depressing what this thick, data-driven approach portends. What good are movies, shows, video games, and other modern media if they’re increasingly created—directly or indirectly—from empirical observations of endless data? Where goes the potential of art? How do you transform as an individual by being constantly accommodated—even if it’s a niche accommodation—and not being challenged? In prior times, some of these things could be made with an appreciable amount of creative risk and freedom, and they were unexpected, spoke to something in the collective consciousness. But if the end game is to know the audience so thoroughly that you can creatively anticipate and accommodate their every whim and desire, the possibility of art ceases. If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things generated from minds incompatible with their catered kingdom.
That’s one aspect of the modern Internet that I have always kind of loathed: the physics at work that makes us the rulers of our own skull-sized kingdoms, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace. And to paraphrase another person, we continue to paradoxically spend our time together but alone.
Yes,
But Netflix is not a place for art, just as TV is not a place for art (was it ever?), just as any regular movie theater is not a place for art. We have to remember that.
This isn’t about the internet — there are other places online and “out there” to find real, creative work that has nothing to do with targeting, etc.
Corporations will always do what they do (until pretty soon when, you know, they can’t because we’re all fucked over and out of resources), but I don’t agree that “If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things …”.
Every day, someone out there tries to cater to me. How many times have I pressed the “No, this Ad is not relevant” button on Hulu? Countless. And Hulu will never understand that anything they throw at me, I will not find relevant, because I don’t give a shit about any of it.
That’s the point and role of art, and the artist. By nature the artist is a contrarian, by nature art defies accommodation.
But that’s the artist. The real problem is { teaching others the value of art }, and propagating the notion that they should go look for things that make them uncomfortable. Hasn’t that long been the problem, even prior to this “information age”?
We are immersed in our own time and it can be difficult to see the world around us objectively. One of the modern definitions of an artist, in fact, is someone who is particularly insightful about their own cultural moment. Thanks to global capitalism, social media and the internet, we are more interconnected and interdependent than at any other time in history. Some see this as a utopian moment. With internet access, we can all contribute to and benefit from what is being called the Information Revolution. For others, the prevalence of technology in our lives threatens our individuality and privacy, and reduces us to a data point that can be monetized by corporations like Facebook, Google, and Apple.
Excerpt from “A Beginners Guide to the History of Western Culture”, Khan Academy, Art History (via quoting-khan-academy)
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.
Perhaps I’ll give someone who researches these things a really good idea:
Would it be possible to use responsive materials (like those that respond to pressure, or that used for { Harvard’s flexible robots }) for touchscreens and tablets, to emulate the texture of paper when touched with a stylus?
One thing that’s missing from the experience of any freehand writing or drawing on such a device (even Wacom) is the friction of pen-on-paper. For me, the lack of texture is totally confusing.
