“technology”
89 posts under this tag.
I feel naive and pretentious today, and I feel like writing down some of my fundamental beliefs in whatever simplistic terms my 21 years are able to muster. These are some of the rules that I’ve gleaned throughout my life, those by which I want to live my life, and those thru which I choose to conceive the world. They are not written in stone, they’re not hold-come-what-may, nothing is, but they are among the more hold-more-stubbonly-at-least that I’ve got. And they are in turn based on some even more fundamental certainties: that knowledge is better than ignorance, that love is better than indifference, that technology is better than helplessness, that liberty is better than slavery.
The form I’ve written them in is not arbitrary, I believe each of the 4 axes (knowledge, love, technology, and liberty) can be approached in basically just 3 ways:
That which is looked for can never be attained.
Reasons vary but self-flagellation is among the more common: we’re simply too stupid, too egoist, too different, too irresponsible, too brutish, etc. Or perhaps the gods are simply too wily, too treacherous, too twisted, or too evil.
This is not only the laziest attitude to take, it is plainly false and misleading, for we’ve all understood something, loved someone (however briefly or faintly), achieved something thru technology that we wouldn’t had been able to do alone, and been part of free societies (your family, your friends, spontaneous commercial activity…).
It is the opposite of action, the opposite of hope, and it is embraced only after a lifetime of the most demeaning indoctrinations (see Religion).
That which is looked for can be attained sometimes, but usually not.
The usual attitutude, it at least acknowledges everyday experience. Though not necessarily harmful, it shortchanges its believer and generally leads to apathy, because we give up too easily.
In it most dangerous form, it borrows from the previous attitude, either casting us as unworthy searchers of the particular instance or wrapping it up in mystical mumbo jumbo à la élan vital.
That which is looked for can always be attained.
This is the only creative attitude and the only one with any merit. For it is the only one that spurs us to action, blaming the responsibility for improvement squarely at us (and that’s why this attitude is so hard to even entertain—laziness is just so comfy). It is the only empowering attitude, the only one that offers hope, tapping boundless creativity and ingenuity that would otherwise remain dormant.
In its root it is simply another face for the fundamental problem strategy of assuming there’s a solution:
I have found there are ways to foster finding useful analogies when working on problems. First, you need to assume up front that there is an answer to what you are trying to solve. People give up too easily. You need confidence that a solution is waiting to be discovered and you must persist in thinking about the problem for an extended period of time.
Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence
And do note that it cannot be falsified: if that which is looked for has not been attained, even after a million millennia of trying, this does not imply that it is not attainable, just that it has not been attained yet, that we still haven’t tried hard or smart enough. It is thus, to a degree, an act of faith, but one which we, and we alone, are responsible to carry out.
And so here they finally are, 4 things I believe in:
Anything can be understood.
Intelligence itself, Mind, Consciousness, Emotions, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Anyone can be loved.
Anyone. I repeat: Anyone. Gender, Age, Race, Class, Nationality—they’re only bothersome hurdles, not insurmountable ones.
And mind that I’m not talking here about sexual love or romantic love, I’m not talking about the love whose opposite is hate, I’m talking about the one whose opposite is indifference.
Anything can be done thru technology.
Universal Translation, Space Colonization, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Uploading, Time Travel, Eternal Youth, Immortality, Abundance, Artificial Reality, Godness.
Anything can be done thru liberty.
That is, anything can be done thru voluntary agreements (the free-market, nonprofits, open source, whatever). In fact, I believe a substantially bigger claim: everything that can be done thru coercion (that is, thru violence or its threat), be it for good or for ill, can be done better thru liberty.
Applied, this means that private money, private law, private health systems, private roads, private intellectual property protection, private police, private FDAs, private militia, private philanthropy, etc. are not only possible but preferable to their modern, illegitimate incarnations.
If the Internet is anything, it’s a collection of minds and wills. If the evidence is there, the minds believe.
Through the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable… soon..
But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.
My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.
I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.
It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.
Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.
I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.
- 382: emotional dettachment
- 481: “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” (personal favorite)
- 888: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”
- 3: the desire to want to dial the the Penfield mood organ (interestingly, this emotion has a very low number, suggesting it’s a basic, heavily-relied-upon one)
- 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”
- unknown 1: “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job”
- unknown 2: “ecstatic sexual bliss”
- unknown 3: “despair”
- unknown 4: “businesslike professional attitude”
- unknown 5: “self-accusatory depression”
The Penfield mood organ is a wonderfully original invention but what’s even most admirable is the masterful introduction to it Philip Dick pulls off: those 1,300 words are dense and microcapsuled enough to be able to stand alone as a great short story.
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. ”Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Series Blenders
With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.) What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web
 I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).
The device I envision is about the size of an iPod video, has a minimal, ultra-fast and responsive OS (mere scaffolding for the browser), a 100+ GB harddrive, a huge screen (say, 4X2.5 inches), and, most importantly, an updated, vastly more capable interface that is still as brilliant as the clickwheel. I only hope Apple has the vision to try it (soon).
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
Me conmovio tanto la despedida de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su hermano que se la lei a mi mama unas horas mas tarde, traduciendola al hablar. Le impresiono mucho y me pidio inmediatamente que la tradujera en forma al Español. Eso he hecho. Espero que quien no tenia la oportunidad de leerla lo haga.
He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.
We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).
Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.
Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,
and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.
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