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Robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da Vinci Surgical System, a device that scales down a surgeon’s hand movements in order to allow him to perform operations using tiny incisions. That leads to less tissue damage, and thus a quicker recovery for patients. Thousands of da Vincis have been made, and they are reckoned to be used in over 200,000 operations a year around the world, most commonly hysterectomies and prostate removals.
But the da Vinci is far from perfect. It is immobile and weighs more than half a tonne, which limits its deployability, and it costs $1.8m, which puts it beyond the reach of all but the richest institutions. It also uses proprietary software. Even if researchers keen to experiment with new robotic technologies and treatments could afford one, they cannot tinker with da Vinci’s operating system.
I fully support that idea because I think that 'programming thinking' is an important skill that needs to be taught. Children first need to learn to be literate, then they need to learn to be numerate and finally they need to learn to be 'algorithmate' (yes, I just made that word up)... It's obvious to most people that illiteracy and innumeracy are problems to be tackled at school, but it's not obvious that we are now living in a world where logical and algorithmic thinking are very, very important.
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There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand signatures at the time of writing. I think this issue is much more important than that.
Goldacre says "heaven knows where our successive governments think the next generation of nerds is going to come from". But that's not the point. Call us nerds, geeks, hackers or Morlocks, the technological priesthood of humanity isn't going anywhere: this stuff is so goddamn fascinating that enough people will teach it to themselves for the wheels to keep turning. I don't know any programmers who weren't at least partly self-taught. Today's proto-hackers don't have the easily-programmable 8-bit micros that programmers of my generation cut their teeth on, but they've got something much better: a full open-source software stack whose source they can read, resources like Project Euler and Hackety Hack to help them take their first steps, and a huge community of open-source hackers to learn from. The petition talks about narrowing the appalling gender gap in IT, and that's a genuinely important issue, but it's not the main reason we should be teaching coding in schools. -
I want to live in a mass-algorate society. I want to use the software that a mass-algorate society would develop: sane and hackable, because everyone would know what computers fundamentally do and how to make them do what they want. I also expect that a mass-algorate society's software would have discoverable, predictable APIs, because 99% of coders would not be specialist programmers and would have better things to do than read endless documentation. But again, that's not really the point; the point is that I expect mass algoracy to have knock-on effects at least as dramatic as those of mass literacy.
Probably no one who reads Leonardo publications needs to be convinced of the centrality of software for modern art, culture, or academia. Yet, outside these circles, I think there is demand for such books as David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. At times, software studies still gets some of the crowd squirming in their seats in academic conferences, and either slightly worried or bemused reactions from representatives of more established academic disciplines. Surely code cannot be read and written like Shakespeare, appreciated the way you do Milton or object of such cult as Austen – or the cinephilic attachment in film studies to certain genres and films? However, despite being a newcomer, software studies may not turn into another media studies, which continuously is ridiculed in the UK by the media (the irony) and politicians as a lesser discipline; software (studies) still has that aura of being closer to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects so adored by current policy makers. Yet, as Berry shows, software studies is a good way of smuggling in (my words, not Berry’s) the good ol’ humanities’ way of critically and inventively investigating philosophical and social contexts in which code is executed and executes the world. This is not to implicitly say that STEM is uninventive, and that arts and humanities are the only experimental disciplines – but it is true that we need a stronger articulation of how we can sustain some of the better heritages of arts and humanities topics.
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In the midst of the enthusiasm for the epistemologies offered by science or, for instance, the digital humanities --which too is still to me looking for its singular potential-- such books that establish continuums between traditions of philosophy and traditions of writing/reading software are exciting. Berry actually offers digital humanities as one context for this mode of theoretisation. Berry gives a quick intro to some of the background assumptions of digital humanities and visions of it as part of the future post-disciplinary universities where access to knowledge is enabled so that it is “disregarding and bypassing traditional gatekeepers of knowledge in the state, the universities and the market” (20)/ Yet, quite many would be quick to point out that in the midst of P2P enthusiasms, etc., quite a lot of reverse is happening, too, and in the midst of the public funding crisis universities are actually even more now clutching to the IP they own and use as productive force (knowledge, teaching, research). This political economic side to universities in the digital age is not so much addressed by Berry, who, however, is not unfamiliar to political economy of code (as his previous book, Copy Rip Burn, demonstrated).
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What Berry wants to propose in the midst of the subchapter on digital humanities is to use Heidegger to think about the current university environment and relations between computation and philosophy. To quote Berry: “I want to argue that there remains a location for the possibility of philosophy to explicitly question the ontological understanding of what the computational is in regard to the positive sciences. Computationality might then be understood as ontotheology, creating new ontological ‘epoch’ as a new historical constellation of intelligibility” (27). This task of assembling philosophy and computation in common key is worthwhile elaborating, indeed, even if it does not extend its critique at some of the digital humanities itself becoming a positive science, and if the place of philosophy itself is being marginalized in current university environment (not only in the UK). A positive evaluation would say that this is the task and possibility of philosophy becoming embedded in Computer Science – but institutionally, we know that it does not work that easily and, instead, university managers looking at profitability are hardly enthusiastic about adding a bit of time consuming Sein und Zeit and Was heißt Denken? to their intro to computing classes.
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Level 1 — Syntax error, such as using the wrong operator or putting a function’s arguments in the wrong order. These are totally unsurprising
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Level 2 — Implementation error, such as wrongly assuming a pointer is non-null. These require developers to revisit whatever implementation-level assumption was made that lead to an invariant violation. Implementation errors can also occur at the level of algorithm design; textbooks can contain level 2 errors. Incorrect or sloppy theorems may have to be revised in response to level 2 errors.
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HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.
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But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
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