edge - eyal matsliah on Diigo

03 Jul 09

24 Sep 08

Edge: TURING'S CATHEDRAL by George Dyson

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google artificial-intelligence technology edge computing

Whether
we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share"
or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together
and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and
ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are.
Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate
fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is
privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem.
7 more annotations...
- TURING'S
  CATHEDRAL [10.24.05]
  
  A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of
  John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer
  
  by George Dyson
- As organisms,
  we possess two outstanding repositories of information: the information
  conveyed by our genes, and the information stored in our brains.
- it will
  inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things
  with the results.
- We can
  divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems;
  non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description
  but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and,
  finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but
  that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that
  computers can understand.
- "An argument
  in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it
  is large enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required,"
  advised Turing's former assistant and cryptanalyst Irving J. Good, speaking
  at IBM in 1958.
- A network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or
  ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that
  need not be explicitly defined. It is much easier to find explicit answers
  than to ask explicit questions. And some will be answers to questions
  that programmers will never have to ask.
- I found myself recollecting the words of Alan
  Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
  a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct
  such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating
  souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing
  had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will
  providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

03 Sep 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 11

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climate-change edge environmentalism politics thinkers

In every case, weak or decentralised government,
>

but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all,
>

whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed
>

officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic
>

decline and usually war.
>
David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even
>

if China is better at making everything than France, there
>

will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France
>

rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say,
>

luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find
>

it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import
>

luxury goods and insurance.
>
3 more annotations...
- Sure,
  >
  
  it is possible to have too little government. Only, that
  >
  
  has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the
  >
  
  century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say
  >
  
  that the risk of too little government is greater than the
  >
  
  risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn
  >
  
  is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better
  >
  
  off we will all be.
  >
- But
  >
  
  none of this is to say that we as people should not worry about
  >
  
  global change; we should worry a lot. This is because climate
  >
  
  change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular,
  >
  
  it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant
  >
  
  climate change will change rainfall patterns, and probably
  >
  
  patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily
  >
  
  threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people
  >
  
  supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism.
  >
  
  It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
  >
  
  small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
  >
  
  part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
  >
  
  we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
  >
  
  places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
  >
  
  sweeping effects.
  >
- It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
  small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
  part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
  we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
  places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
  sweeping effects.

01 Sep 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 10

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edge education learning predictions science thinkers

28 Aug 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 9

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edge emergence god philosophy religion science thinkers

CARLO
ROVELLI

Professor
of Physics, University of the Mediterraneum, Marseille;
Member, Intitut Universitaire de France: Author, Quantum
Gravity

What
the physics of the 20th century says about the world might
in fact be true

There
is a major "dangerous" scientific idea in contemporary
physics, with a potential impact comparable to Copernicus or
Darwin. It is the idea that what the physics of the 20th century
says about the world might in fact be true.
We still haven't digested that the world is quantum mechanical,
and the immense conceptual revolution needed to make sense of
this basic factual discovery about nature.
14 more annotations...
- Another
  example: take Einstein's relativity theory. Relativity makes
  completely clear that asking "what happens right now on
  Andromeda?" is a complete non-sense. There is no right now
  elsewhere in the universe. Nevertheless, we keep thinking at
  the universe as if there was an immense external clock that ticked
  away the instants, and we have a lot of difficulty in adapting
  to the idea that "the present state of the universe right
  now", is a physical non-sense.
- I
  think that seen from 200 years in the future, the dangerous scientific
  idea that was around at the beginning of the 20th century, and
  that everybody was afraid to accept, will simply be that the
  world is completely different from our simple minded picture
  of it. As the physics of the 20th century had already shown.
- KAI
  KRAUSE
  
  Researcher, philosopher, software
  developer, Author: 3DScience:
  new Scanning Electron Microscope imagery
- My
  first thought was: what if any really smart set of people
  really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial
  it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society
  to a dead stop?
- This
  was not meant to sound like doom and gloom naysaying. I
  see myself as a sincere optimist, but one who believes in realistic
  pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.
- GEOFFREY
  MILLER
  
  Evolutionary Psychologist,
  University of New Mexico; Author, The
  Mating Mind
  
  Runaway
  consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox
  
  The
  story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was
  talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence
  with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy
  holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively
  on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing
  species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years.
  They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common
  by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So,
  where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence
  is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum
  became known as Fermi's Paradox.
- I
  suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox.
  Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they
  just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio
  signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway
  consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels
  to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as
  we are doing today.
- Heritable
  variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist
  the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will
  evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism.
  They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive
  drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard
  work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental
  stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious
  Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.
- 3.2. The Ultimate Superset can affect our individual lives. Another
  analogy: Say that geese flying south for the winter have rather
  unreliable magnetic field detectors in their brains. However, there's
  a rule built into their brains that leads them to try to stay near
  their fellows as they fly. The flock as a whole would navigate
  far better than any individual bird, because the noise in the individual
  bird brain navigation systems would cancel out. The emergent entity — the
  flock — in turn would affect the individual geese, helping
  them to navigate better than they could on their own.
- 4.4. Next, consider our species. One could try to push this perspective
  into a historical context, and note that evolution by natural selection
  reflects the effects of interactions among living things. If so,
  then the emergent properties of such interactions could feed back
  to affect the course of evolution itself.
- As much as
  I admired Stephen Jay Gould (and I did, very much), perhaps he
  missed the mark on this one. Perhaps there is a grand project
  waiting to be launched, to integrate the two great sources of
  knowledge and belief in the world today — science and religion.
- How counties adapt to massive,
  rapid upheaval will go a long way towards determining the eventual
  outcome. To paraphrase Darwin, it is not the strongest, not the
  largest, that survive rather it is those best prepared to cope
  with change.
- Within
  the U.S. there are many who are adapting very successfully. They
  tend to concentrate in a very few zip codes, life science clusters
  like 92121(between Salk, Scripps, and UCSD) and techno-empires
  like 02139 (MIT). Most of the nation's wealth and taxes are generated
  by a few states and, within these states, within in a few square
  miles. It is those who live in these areas that are most affronted
  by restrictions on research, the lack of science literate teenagers,
  and the reliance on God instead of science.
- When
  we assume stability and continuity we can wake up to irreconcilable
  differences. Science and a knowledge driven economy can allow
  a few folks to build powerful and successful countries very quickly,
  witness Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland, but changes of this
  magnitude can also bury or split the formerly great who refuse
  to adapt, as well as those who practice bad governance. If we
  do not begin to address some current divides quickly we could
  live to see an Un-Tied States of America.

26 Aug 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 8

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edge science thinkers

ANDY CLARK

School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh
University

The
quick-thinking zombies inside us

So
much of what we do, feel, think and choose is determined
by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information.
SHERRY
TURKLE

Psychologist, MIT;
Author, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet

After
several generations of living in the computer culture,
simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity
in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of
another time.
4 more annotations...
- I
  have long believed that in the culture of simulation, the
  notion of authenticity is for us what sex was to the Victorians — "threat
  and obsession, taboo and fascination." I have lived
  with this idea for many years, yet at the museum, I find
  the children's position startling, strangely unsettling.
  For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have
  no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for
  a specific purpose.
- The
  woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability
  of computational objects like Paro to convince their users
  that they are in a relationship. I call these creatures (some
  virtual, some physical robots) "relational artifacts." Their
  ability to inspire relationship is not based on their intelligence
  or consciousness, but on their ability to push certain "Darwinian" buttons
  in people (making eye contact, for example) that make people
  respond as though they were in relationship. For
  me, relational artifacts are the new uncanny in our computer
  culture — as Freud once put it, the long familiar taking
  a form that is strangely unfamiliar. As such, they confront
  us with new questions.
- What
  does this deployment of "nurturing technology" at
  the two most dependent moments of the life cycle say about
  us? What will it do to us? Do plans to provide relational
  robots to attend to children and the elderly make us less
  likely to look for other solutions for their care? People
  come to feel love for their robots, but if our experience
  with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful
  interchange, can it be good for us? Or might it be good for
  us in the "feel good" sense, but bad for us in
  our lives as moral beings?
- Relationships
  with robots bring us back to Darwin and his dangerous
  idea: the challenge to human uniqueness. When we see children
  and the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic pets
  the most important question is not whether children will
  love their robotic pets more than their real life pets or
  even their parents, but rather, what will loving come to
  mean?

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — P6

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edge predictions science thinkers

LEONARD SUSSKIND

Physicist, Stanford University; Author, The
Cosmic Landscape

The "Landscape"

I
have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous
idea.

According
to some people, the "Landscape" idea will eventually
ensure that the forces of intelligent design (and other
unscientific religious ideas) will triumph over true science.
From one of my most distinguished colleagues:

From
a political, cultural point of view, it's not that
these arguments are religious but that they denude
us from our historical strength in opposing religion.
As
you may have guessed the idea in question is the Anthropic
Principle: a principle that seeks to explain the laws of
physics, and the constants of nature, by saying, "If
they (the laws of physics) were different, intelligent
life would not exist to ask why laws of nature are what
they are."
9 more annotations...
- But the
  A.P. is really shorthand for a rich set of ideas that are
  beginning to influence and even dominate the thinking of
  almost all serious theoretical physicists and cosmologists.
- The universe is vastly bigger than the portion that we
  can see; and, on a very large scale it is as varied as
  possible.
- Meanwhile
  string theorists, much to the regret of many of them, are
  discovering that the number of possible environments described
  by their equations is far beyond millions or billions.
  This enormous space of possibilities, whose multiplicity
  may exceed ten to the 500 power, is called the Landscape.
  If these things prove to be true, then some features of
  the laws of physics (maybe most) will be local environmental
  facts rather than written-in-stone laws: laws that could
  not be otherwise. The explanation of some numerical coincidences
  will necessarily be that most of the multiverse is uninhabitable,
  but in some very tiny fraction conditions are fine-tuned
  enough for intelligent life to form.
- Why
  is it that so many physicists find these ideas alarming?
  Well, they do threaten physicists' fondest hope,
  the hope that some extraordinarily beautiful mathematical
  principle will be discovered: a principle that would completely
  and uniquely explain every detail of the laws of particle
  physics (and therefore nuclear, atomic, and chemical physics).
  The enormous Landscape of Possibilities inherent in our
  best theory seems to dash that hope.
- What
  further worries many physicists is that the Landscape may
  be so rich that almost anything can be found: any combination
  of physical constants, particle masses, etc. This, they
  fear, would eliminate the predictive power of physics.
  Environmental facts are nothing more than environmental
  facts. They worry that if everything is possible, there
  will be no way to falsify the theory — or, more to
  the point, no way to confirm it.
- STEWART BRAND
  
  Founder, Whole
  Earth Catalog, cofounder; The Well; cofounder, Global
  Business Network; Author, How Buildings Learn
  
  What
  if public policy makers have an obligation to engage
  historians, and historians have an obligation to try
  to help?
  
  All
  historians understand that they must never, ever talk about
  the future. Their discipline requires that they deal in facts,
  and the future doesn't have any yet. A solid theory of history
  might be able to embrace the future, but all such theories
  have been discredited. Thus historians do not offer, and
  are seldom invited, to take part in shaping public policy.
  They leave that to economists.
- A
  dangerous thought: What if public policy makers have an obligation
  to engage historians, and historians have an obligation to
  try to help?
  
  And
  instead of just retailing advice, go generic. Historians
  could set about developing a rigorous sub-discipline called "Applied
  History."
  
  There
  is only one significant book on the subject, published in
  1988. Thinking In Time: The Uses of Hustory for Decision
  Makers was written by the late Richard Neustadt and
  Ernest May, who long taught a course on the subject at Harvard's
  Kennedy School of Government. (A course called "Reasoning
  from History" is currently taught there by Alexander
  Keyssar.)
- These
  few stories show the importance of the interplay of minds
  and hormonal signals, of brains and bodies. This idea has
  been taken to a profound level in the well-known studies
  of Anthony Damasio, who finds that emotional or "gut feelings" are
  essential to making decisions. "We don't separate emotion
  from cognition like layers in a cake," says Damasio, "Emotion
  is in the loop of reason all the time."
- It's OK not to know everything, it doesn't make science weaker.
  >
  
  Only more human.
  >

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 7

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edge predictions science thinkers

NEIL GERSHENFELD

Physicist;
Director, Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT; Author, Fab

Democratizing access to the means of invention

The
elite temples of research (of the kind I've happily spent my
career in) may be becoming intellectual dinosaurs as a result
of the digitization and personalization of fabrication.
The
ultimate consequence of the digitization of first communications,
then computation, and now fabrication, is to democratize access
to the means of invention. The third world can skip over the first
and second cultures and go right to developing a third culture.
Rather than today's model of researchers researching for researchees,
the result of all that discovery has been to enable a planet of
creators rather than consumers.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005

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edge predictions science thinkers

25 Aug 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 4

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edge science thinkers

We
are entirely alone

Living
creatures capable of reflecting on their own existence
are a one-off, freak accident, existing for one brief
moment in the history of the universe. There may be
life elsewhere in the universe, but it does not have
self-reflective consciousness. There is no God; no
Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives.
I
think that many people find the suggestion dangerous because
they see it as leading to a life devoid of meaning or moral
values. They see it as a suggestion full of despair, an idea
that makes our lives seem pointless. I believe that the opposite
is the case. As the product of that unique, freak accident,
finding ourselves able to reflect on and enjoy our conscious
existence, the very unlikeliness and uniqueness of our situation
surely makes us highly appreciative of what we have.
15 more annotations...
- Life
  is not just important to us; it is literally everything we
  have. That makes it, in human terms, the most precious thing
  there is. That not only gives life meaning for us, something
  to be respected and revered, but a strong moral code follows
  automatically.
- The
  fact that our existence has no purpose outside that existence
  is completely irrelevant to the way we live our lives, since
  we are inside our existence. The fact that our existence
  has no purpose for the universe — whatever
  that means — in no way means it has no purpose for
  us. We must ask and answer questions about ourselves within
  the framework of our existence as what we are.
- There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry Harpending
  and I have, we think, made a strong case that natural selection
  changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand years or so, favoring
  certain kinds of cognitive abilities and generating genetic
  diseases as a side effect.
- But
  at any rate, we have almost certainly changed. There is something
  new under the sun — us.
- This concept opens strange doors. If true, it means that
  the people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably
  fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed — some,
  anyhow — over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The
  Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued
  that there was something qualitatively different about the
  human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed
  one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have
  been on to something.
  
  If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently
  because of biological differences, history is never going to
  be the same.
- What would it be like if our
  political chambers were based on the principles of empathizing?
  It is dangerous because it would mean a revolution in how we
  choose our politicians, how our political chambers govern,
  and how our politicians think and behave. We have never given
  such an alternative political process a chance. Might it be
  better and safer than what we currently have? Since empathy
  is about keeping in mind the thoughts and feelings of other
  people (not just your own), and being sensitive to another
  person's thoughts and feelings (not just riding rough-shod
  over them), it is clearly incompatible with notions of "doing
  battle with the opposition" and "defeating the opposition" in
  order to win and hold on to power.
- We
  have had endless examples of systemizing politicians unable
  to resolve conflict. Empathizing politicians would perhaps
  follow Mandela and De Klerk's examples, who sat down to try
  to understand the other, to empathize with the other, even
  if the other was defined as a terrorist. To do this involves
  the empathic act of stepping into the other's shoes, and identifying
  with their feelings.
- A world
  where everything about a person can be found and archived is
  a world with no privacy, and therefore many technologists are
  eager to maintain the option of easy anonymity as a refuge
  for the private.
- The standard model of particle physics taught
  us that some of those properties, like mass, are only the consequence
  of a particles interactions with other fields. As a result
  the mass of a particle is determined environmentally, by the
  phase of the other fields it interacts with.
- I
  don't know which model of quantum gravity is right, but all
  the leading candidates, string theory, loop quantum gravity
  and others, teach us that it is possible that all properties
  of elementary particles are relational and environmental. In
  different possible universes there may be different combinations
  of elementary particles and forces. Indeed, all that used to
  be thought of as fundamental, space and the elementary
  particles themselves are increasingly seen, in models of quantum
  gravity, as themselves emergent from a more elementary network
  of relations.
- After
  Einstein we understand geometry is contingent and dynamical,
  which means it evolves subject to law. This means that Einstein's
  move can even be applied to aspects of what were thought to
  be the laws of nature: so that even aspects of the laws turn
  out to evolve in time.
- We
  can see by how I have stated it that these two methods are
  closely related. Einstein emphasizes the relational aspect
  of all properties described by science, while Darwin proposes
  that ultimately, the law which governs the evolution of everything
  else, including perhaps what were once seen to be laws-is natural
  selection.
- We physicists have now to understand
  Darwin's lesson: the only way to understand how one out
  of a vast number of choices was made, which favors improbably
  structure, is that it is the result of evolution by natural
  selection.
- Now the only
  possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and
  for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of
  evolution.
- This
  idea remains dangerous, not only for what it has achieved,
  but for what it implies for the future. For there are implications
  have yet to be absorbed or understood, even by those who have
  come to believe it is the only way forward for science. For
  example, must there always be a deeper, or meta-law, which
  governs the physical mechanisms by which a law evolves?

24 Aug 07

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cognitive-dissonance edge emergence free-market happiness morphogenetics relativity science thinkers

Telling
More Than We Can Know

Do
you know why you hired your most recent employee over the runner-up?
Do you know why you bought your last pair of pajamas? Do you
know what makes you happy and unhappy?

Don't
be too sure. The most important thing that social psychologists
have discovered over the last 50 years is that people are very
unreliable informants about why they behaved as they did, made
the judgment they did, or liked or disliked something. In short,
we don't know nearly as much about what goes on in our heads
as we think. In fact, for a shocking range of things, we don't
know the answer to "Why did I?" any better than an
observer.
Does it matter that we often don't know what goes on in our
heads and yet believe that we do? Well, for starters, it
means that we often can't answer accurately crucial questions
about what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy.
15 more annotations...
- Two weeks later
  the psychologist called people up and asked them how much
  they liked the art poster they had chosen. Those who did
  not analyze their reasons liked their posters better than
  those who did.
- Skepticism about our
  ability to read our minds is safer than certainty that we
  can.
- STEVEN
  PINKER
  
  Psychologist,
  Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate
  
  Groups
  of people may differ genetically in their average talents
  and temperaments
- In
  June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist
  Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population
  geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews
  have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and
  that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product
  of this evolutionary history.
- The
  human genomic revolution has spawned an enormous amount of commentary
  about the possible perils of cloning and human genetic enhancement.
  I suspect that these are red herrings. When people realize that
  cloning is just forgoing a genetically mixed child for a twin
  of one parent, and is not the resurrection of the soul or a source
  of replacement organs, no one will want to do it. Likewise, when
  they realize that most genes have costs as well as benefits (they
  may raise a child's IQ but also predispose him to genetic disease), "designer
  babies" will lose whatever appeal they have. But the prospect
  of genetic tests of group differences in psychological traits
  is both more likely and more incendiary, and is one that the
  current intellectual community is ill-equipped to deal with.
- Now
  we have not only action at a distance but something infinitely
  more disturbing: these interactions violate conventional notions
  of causality because they are non-local. Two particles that have
  been joined in an intimate relationship within an atom remain
  coherently correlated with one another in their properties no
  matter how far apart they may be after emission from the atom.
  Einstein could not bring himself to believe that this 'spooky'
  implication of quantum mechanics could possibly be real.
  
  The
  implied entanglement means that there is a holistic principle
  of connectedness in operation at the most elementary level of
  physical reality. Quantum fields have subverted our basic notions
  of causality and substituted a principle of wholeness in relationship
  for elementary particles.
- I
  believe that the differences between humans and nonhumans are
  quantitative, not qualitative.
- But why dangerous? Because, if we take this idea to its logical
  conclusion, it challenges almost every aspect of our lives — scientific
  and nonscientific alike.
- My
  idea is dangerous because it challenges scientists at a more
  basic level, that of how we perform research.
- One of the most dangerous ideas at large in the current culture
  is that the "free market" is the ultimate arbiter of
  political decisions, and that there is an "invisible hand" that
  will direct us to the most desirable future provided the free
  market is allowed to actualize itself. This mystical faith is
  based on some reasonable empirical foundations, but when embraced
  as a final solution to the ills of humankind, it risks destroying
  both the material resources, and the cultural achievements that
  our species has so painstakingly developed.
- My
  dangerous idea is dangerous only to those who support the hegemony
  of the market. It consists in pointing out that the imperial
  free market wears no clothes — it does not exist in the
  first place, and what passes for it is dangerous to the future
  well being of our species. Scientist need to turn their attention
  to what the complex system that is human life, will require in
  the future.
- Beginnings
  like the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators,
  which focus on such central requirements as health, education,
  infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety,
  need to become part of our social and political agenda. And
  when their findings come into conflict with the agenda of the
  prophets of the free market, the conflict should be examined — who
  is it that benefits from the erosion of the quality of life?
- Ecology
  has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows,
  matter cycles. " Yet this maxim applies equally to complex
  systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites
  the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears
  that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural
  tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent
  phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's
  origins.
- Nobel laureate
  Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the
  hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures
  in Dublin in 1943.
- The
  concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound.
  Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human
  world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably
  to the non-living world. This dangerous idea, once broadly
  distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from
  many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous
  diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being
  the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon
  intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

www.edge.org/q06_2.html - Preview

edge education science thinkers

My
dangerous idea is one that most people immediately
reject without giving it serious thought: school
is bad for kids — it makes them
unhappy and as tests show — they
don't learn much.
Schools
need to be replaced by safe places where
children can go to learn how to do things
that they are interested in learning how
to do. Their interests should guide their
learning.
2 more annotations...
- In fact, emergence and complexity theory
  explains how the principles of self-organization
  and emergence cause complex systems to arise
  from simple systems without a top-down designer.
- Unfortunately,
  what appears to be a rather modest proposal
  on some counts, is dangerous on another. It is dangerous to those who abhor biologically
  grounded theories on the often misinterpreted
  perspective that biology determines our
  fate, derails free will, and erases the
  soul. But a look at systems other than
  the human mind makes it transparently clear
  that the argument from biological endowment
  does not entail any of these false inferences.

06 May 07

How do we know what we know ? - Edge 208

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authoritative edge knowledge larry-sanger research science wikipedia

02 Apr 07

"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier - at Edge

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collaboration edge essay social-web thinkers

"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online
Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier
That
>

new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only a month. In April, Kelly reviewed
>

a site called "popurls" that aggregates consensus Web
>

filtering sites...and there was a new "most Meta". We
>

now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what
>

other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose
>

from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
>

15 Mar 07

AFFECTIVE FORECASTING...OR...THE BIG WOMBASSA /w Daniel Gilbert at EDGE

www.edge.org/...gilbert_index.html - Preview

authoritative book dangilbert edge essay growth happiness psychology science

Harvard's Social Cognition and Emotion Lab, which is
bringing scientific rigor to the study of subjective
experiences such as satisfaction and happiness.
Gilbert
is well-known for his work on what he and his long-time
collaborator, Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia,
call "affective forecasting", which is "the ability
to predict one's hedonic reactions to future events."
2 more annotations...
- Gilbert
  approaches these issues as a scientist, not a clinician.
  He is "interested in learning how people can become
  better affective
  forecasters,
  but
  not because
  I believe
  that
  people should become better affective forecasters.
  My job as a scientist is to find and explain these
  errors and illusions, and it is up to each individual
  to decide how they want to use our findings."
- AFFECTIVE
  FORECASTING...OR...THE BIG WOMBASSA: WHAT YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO
  GET, AND WHAT YOU DON'T GET, WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT
  [2.13.04]
  
  A Talk with Daniel Gilbert

12 Mar 07

What are you optimistic about ? answers by top EDGE thinkers - summary at the Independent.co.uk

news.independent.co.uk/...article2163703.ece - Preview

bloglink120307 edge future opinion science summary thinkers

selected highlights from edge's feature - what are you optimistic about ? and why ?
http://edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html - eyalnow on 2007-03-09

Under favourable conditions, sails produce far more horsepower than is needed to drive a ship. At marginal sacrifice in speed, by running the auxiliary propulsion system in reverse, this energy can be stored.
- maybe this can be applied to other systems as well, such as the conversion of breaking power into energy in hybrid cars - on 2007-03-09
Add Sticky Note
I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution and consumer product.
- is he joking ?
  how can we share, collaborate and aggregate knowledge if everyone has their own private printed copy of it ? - on 2007-03-09
Add Sticky Note
51 more annotations...
- Then, as populations shrink, demands on resources will be reduced. Nature will begin to repair itself, reclaiming what we have so hastily taken.
  - really ? It's different than what Al Gore says in "an inconvenient truth" - on 2007-03-09
  Add Sticky Note
- We are the first generation in history that has watched the human population double in our own lifetime, and no future generation is likely to see it again.
- W Daniel Hillis
  
  Physicist; computer scientist; chairman, Applied Minds, Inc; author, 'The Pattern on the Stone'
- Demographics
- I am optimistic about humankind's ability to reach a sustainable balance with other life on Earth, in part because the number of humans on Earth will soon start to decrease.
- Population forecasts vary, but they all agree that human population growth is slowing.
- There is no doubt that the environmental challenges of the next decades are daunting, and they will require all the power of human striving and creativity to overcome them.
- Both these corks are skeuomorphs - objects that preserve formal vestiges of the constraints of an original no longer strictly necessary in the new material.
- I see much of the history of technology as an unplanned trajectory in which emergent skeuomorphic qualities often turn out to have been critical.
- Timothy Taylor
  
  Archaeologist, University of Bradford; author, 'The Buried Soul'
- Skeuomorphism
- I grew up with Alan Turing's unsettling vision of a future machine indistinguishable from a human in its reactions. Ray Kurzweil's provocative prediction of the impending "singularity" - the point when computer intelligence would start to leave humans gasping in its intellectual wake - added to my fears.
- I have recently become quite relaxed about all this. Computers' eventual power will probably not be in simulation or deception. Instead, by surpassing us in some areas, they will relieve our brains and bodies of repetitive effort. If they behave as other skeuomorphs before them, it will be computers' currently unimagined emergent qualities that we will come to value most, enhancing and complementing our humanity rather than competing with and superseding it.
- I quickly realised that asking the opening question of ordinary train encounters, "Where are you from?", had become patently obsolete.
- Walter Isaacson
  
  President & CEO, Aspen Institute; former CEO, CNN; former managing editor, 'Time'; author, 'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'
- Print as a technology
- Simon Baron-Cohen
  
  Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; author, 'The Essential Difference'
- The rise of autism
- autism is on the increase. Thus, in 1978, the rate of autism was four in 10,000 children, but today (according to a Lancet article in 2006) it is 1 per cent.
- No one quite knows what this increase is due to,
- though conservatively it is put down to better recognition, better services, and broadening the diagnostic category
- It is neither proven nor disproven that the increase might reflect other factors, such as genetic change or some environmental (eg, hormonal) change.
- But I remain optimistic that, for a good proportion of them, it has never been a better time to have autism.
- Why? Because there is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age.
- Many children with autism develop an intuitive understanding of computers in the same way that other children develop an intuitive understanding of people.
- So, why am I optimistic? For this new generation of children with autism, I anticipate that many of them will find ways to blossom, using their skills with digital technology to find employment, to find friends, and in some cases to innovate.
- George Dyson
  
  Science historian; author, 'Darwin Among the Machines'
- David Deutsch
  
  Quantum physicist, Oxford University; author, 'The Fabric of Reality'
- Whether solutions are possible
- They always are. Why is that important? Firstly, because it is true.
- If we are optimistic that failure to improve ourselves means merely that we haven't found the solution yet, then success is never due to divine grace (nowadays known as "natural resources") but always to human effort and creativity, and failure is opportunity.
- Matt Ridley
  
  Science writer; founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; author, 'Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code'
- The enduring pessimism of human beings about the future does real harm by persuading people, especially the young, to retreat from adventure and enterprise into anomie.
- The future
- Richard Dawkins
  
  Evolutionary biologist; Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science, Oxford University; author, 'The God Delusion'
- The final scientific enlightenment
- And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.
- I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein's dream and discover the final theory of everything
- I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem.
- I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that's in it, including ourselves.
- Rodney A Brooks
  
  Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); chief technical officer of iRobot Corporation; author, 'Flesh and Machines'
- Brian Eno
  
  Artist; composer; producer (U2, Talking Heads, Paul Simon); recording artist
- Things change for the better either because something went wrong or because something went right.
- has shown that the overall trend is downward
- What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question - "Why is there war?" instead of "Why is there peace?"
- removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us.
- Enlightenment
- Creativity in science and the arts is open to hugely more than in the past.
- Peter Schwartz
  
  Futurist; business strategist; co-founder, Global Business Network, a Monitor Company; author, 'The Long Boom'
- I am optimistic about human relationships - in particular, about friendship.
- Enlightenment
  
  I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment.
  >

10 Mar 07

What are you optimistic about - answers by top thinkers - at EDGE - The World Question Center 2007

edge.org/q07_index.html - Preview

answers edge future predictions science thinkers

As
an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally
optimistic. Science figures out how things work and
thus can make them work better. Much of the news is
either good news or news that can be made good, thanks
to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient
and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its
frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever
better put.

What
are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!
As
an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally
optimistic.
6 more annotations...
- Science figures out how things work and
  thus can make them work better.
- Much of the news is
  either good news or news that can be made good, thanks
  to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient
  and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its
  frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever
  better put.
- While
  conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting
  worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good
  news in the coming years. That's the bottom line of an outburst
  of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists
  and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an
  ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those
  scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through
  their work and expository writing, are taking the place of
  the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper
  meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)
- The 160 responses to this year's Edge Question span
  topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth,
  cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic
  visions are a who's who of interesting and important world-class
  thinkers.
- January 1, 2007
- The Edge Annual
  Question — 2007
  
  WHAT
  ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?

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AFFECTIVE FORECASTING...OR...THE BIG WOMBASSA /w Daniel Gilbert at EDGE

What are you optimistic about ? answers by top EDGE thinkers - summary at the Independent.co.uk

What are you optimistic about - answers by top thinkers - at EDGE - The World Question Center 2007

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