“future shock”
60 posts under this tag.
I just found an essay titled “Ambient Findability” by Peter Norville that seems almost like an outline of what would one year later become his terrific same-titled bookAM. The ideas are pretty rough and unpolished in the essay (or perhaps it’s only that I saw them first full-formed) but here are three highlights:
Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog” was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability” is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.
As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.
And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.
Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top ReviewersAM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet KlausnerAM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.
[Inside Friendster] there have also been Fakesters, evidence of how contemporary Americans crave connectedness. Users composed profiles for their pets (and then connected their pets), their colleges (and then connected to their alma maters) and household odds and ends (and then watched the conversation that developed between “salt” and “pepper”). To Ms. [danah] boyd it was interesting not only because people played with identity, but also because of the range of reasons they did so.
Apparently Friendster management could conceive of only one reason: to subvert the site. So it began terminating the Fakesters. That set off a Fakester revolution, complete with a manifesto: ”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all fakesters and real people are created equal.”
Yesterday’s postELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).
Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies BrandeisWP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).
1 While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.
I will one day build a Fortune Global 500WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.
Finally, in the richest country of the world, dumb matter’sEE last stalwart has fallen. A new U.S. study commisioned by Oxygen found that, given the choice, women would opt for tech items rather than luxury items like jewelry or vacations.” (via Yahoo! News) More precisely, “3 of 4 women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace” and “86 percent would prefer a new digital video camera to a pair of designer shoes.” It’s all downhill for dumb matter now (and all down the rabbit hole for us).
How’s that for jargony singularity reporting?
Google’s Music Search represents one important future of Google’s “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” mission: digesting the chaotic web and regurgitating it anew, catalog-like, simpler and more standardized (which has worrying implications, but is also a wonderful prospect, provided it’s just one more option). Yes, this is similar to what it actually does through search, but the difference is that this new Google-digested web is browsable, not just a black-box accessible piecemeal only through question & answers. Google wants to become the interface.
No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought. It can allow a decision maker to do almost nothing but decision making, instead of processing data to get into a position to make the decision.
J.C.R. Licklider, Invited commentary after ”The Computer in the University” talk by Alan Perlis at the Sloan School of Business Administration, April 1961, as quoted by M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, p180 EE (emphasis added)
The mouth-wide-open wonder at today’s technologic possibilities that begun with my grandfather’s mosaicELZR, has not subdued—what with my succesful cloning of The EconomistELZR tables or my quick spideringELZR—but it has gradually become an expectation. I’ve thought long and hard about it and am finally ready to accept it.
Because, in the end, disbelief of what we can now accomplish is only laziness by another name. I have a (much cherished) cousin who shuns digital photography altogether because it’s too easy. I say that’s bollocks. If manipulating photos is now mom’s play, that only means the challenge moves to being creative with the tools at hand. And when machines become creative (as they will no doubt do), then our challenge will be to find good things for them to be creative at. And when they figure that out—well, we’d better be seafaringEE by then.
But after all, civilization is some 15k years old, so what’s the wonder? We should be gods by now (and we are, in a way).
Ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull. ( p5—emphasis added)
Andy Clark’sWP fab Natural Born Cyborgs? is at times techno-lyrical to the verge of incomprehension (or overpretentiousness—normal pretentiousness is of course to be cherished), but there are many thought-provoking paragraphs to be found in this essay of his (also the introduction of his same-titled 2003 bookAM ).
The conjecture, then, is that one large jump or discontinuity in human cognitive evolution involves the distinctive way human brains repeatedly create and exploit various species of cognitive technology so as to expand and reshape the space of human reason. We, more than any other creature on the planet, deploy non-biological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement (but not, typically, to replicate) our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quire different from those of the naked brain. Human brains maintain an intricate cognitive dance with an ecologically novel, and immensely empowering, environment: the world of symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments and culture. ( p4—emphasis added)
Particularly interface-relevant is this gem right here.
The cognitive anthropologist Ed Hutchins WP, in his book Cognition In The WildAM depicts the general role of cognitive technologies in similar terms [i.e. as thought prosthetics], suggesting that “[Such tools] permit the [users] to do the tasks that need to be done while doing the kinds of things people are good at: recognizing patterns, modeling simple dynamics of the world, and manipulating objects in the environment.” This description nicely captures what is best about good examples of cognitive technology: recent word-processing packages, web browsers, mouse and icon systems, etc. It also suggests, of course, what is wrong with many of our first attempts at creating such tools: the skills needed to use those environments (early VCR’s, word-processors, etc.) were precisely those that biological brains find hardest to support, such as the recall and execution of long, essentially arbitrary, sequences of operations. ( p4—emphasis added)
The book itselfAM I haven’t (yet) read. Something at first warned me away from it, making me imagine it would be too repetitive and “impressionistic”. But I just read the quote below, and I’m intrigued. It’s on the wishlist.
These [Alzheimer] patients were a puzzle because although they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on?
A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools, and aids. Examples included message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; labels and pictures on doors; “memory books” to record new events, meetings, and plans; and “open-storage” strategies in which crucial items (pots, pans, checkbooks) are always kept in plain view, not locked away in drawers.
Before you allow this image of intensive scaffolding to simply confirm your opinion of these patients as hopelessly cognitively compromised, try to imagine a world in which normal human brains are somewhat Alzheimic. Imagine that in this world we had gradually evolved a society in which the kinds of scaffolding found in the St. Louis home environments were the norm. And then reflect that, in a certain sense, this is exactly what we have done. Our own pens, paper, notebooks, diaries, and alarm clocks complement our brute biological profiles in much the same kind of way. Yet we never say of the artist, or poet, or scientist, ”Oh, poor soul—she is not really responsible for that painting/theory/poem; for don’t you see how she had to rely on pen, paper, and sketches to offset the inadequacies of her own brain?”
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
How can you not love such news? (via KurzweilAI.net)
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it’s queerer than we can suppose.
J.B.S. Haldane WP (attributed)
Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTubeWP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).
The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free
pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”
And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.
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