• Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web

• AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework

• As We May Think

• "Is Google Making Us Stupid?": sources and notes
• Since the publication of my essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic, I’ve received several requests for pointers to sources and related readings. I’ve tried to round them up below.
• The essay builds on my book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, particularly the final chapter, “iGod.”
• Scott Karp’s blog post about how he’s lost his capacity to read books can be found here, and Bruce Friedman’s post can be found here. Both Karp and Friedman believe that what they’ve gained from the Internet outweighs what they’ve lost.
• study of the behavior of online researchers is here.
• Maryanne Wolf’s fascinating Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
• I found the story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter in J. C. Nyíri's essay Thinking with a Word Processor as well as Friedrich A. Kittler’s winningly idiosyncratic Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Darren Wershler-Henry’s history of the typewriter, The Iron Whim.
• Lewis Mumford discusses the impact of the mechanical clock in his 1934 Technics and Civilization.
• Mumford’s later two-volume study The Myth of the Machine.
• Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason
• Alan Turing's 1936 paper on the universal computer was titled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.
• Neil Postman's translation of the excerpt from Plato's Phaedrus, which can be found at the start of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
• Richard Foreman's "pancake people" essay was originally distributed to members of the audience for Foreman's play The Gods Are Pounding My Head. It was reprinted in Edge. I first noted the essay in my 2005 blog post Beyond Google and Evil.

11 more annotations...

• POLYTOPIA (the emergence of)

  • For example, in what way does the term polytopia differ from:
    'collective intelligence',
    
    What is its relation with utilitarianism?

  • Maybe See note 1 for the introduction
  • 1 more sticky notes...

  • • The article should start with a very short introduciont: 3 or 4 sentences that explain why a new word is necessary, why other words do not fit the meaning of polytopia
• The goal of a Polytopia is simply NOT to define the common good and by that escaping the trap of statistical interest.
• The goal of a Polytopia is simply NOT to define the common good and by that escaping the trap of statistical interest

  • Working notes: Is Polytiopia an ethical theory/system?
• A co-emergent interest let us define as:” the interest emerging out of a collaborative mind mutuality, emphasizing the unique perspective of each and every individual member, voluntarily desiring to cooperate/share/connect/interact with other minds, for the purpose of allowing : “A ‘positive – unified’ vision of transcultural diversity, as applied to sentient beings”, a Polytopia, to emerge.
• there are no end goals, no end results, in short, no end
• culture and not society
• ‘open source’ as in ‘allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities’, also as in ‘ publicly available strategic resources for critical decision making’

  • Also open source as in the true meaning?: Freedom not only to 'adhere to polytopia', but to edit it & distribute it as long as you make your contributions public & don't steal the 'code', but attribute it correctly?
• higher empathy modes, fecundity.

  • This is?
• ‘critical’ as in ‘essential’

  • Also critical as in skeptical? (I hope so)
• vast implications on the personification of the unique individual

  • And these are?
• My aim in this proposition is to emphasize that the concepts of Utopia and Dystopia are anachronistic, outdated and outright obsolete. In their stead I shall try and propose a fresh perspective on the notion of the future of humanity, a natural humanity, perpetually evolving. The future of humanity I propose is one of Polytopia, a term designating an open ended and emergent process of co-evolution and cross-fertilization considering all and any conscious aware entities

9 more annotations...

• Why Human-Level AI Won’t Change the World
• Human-level AI might possess human skills and intelligence but lack free will, making them incapable of modifying the world in any real sense.
• Humans will deliberately prevent AI from doing so.
• AIs will just exist on the virtual layer, and being virtual beings, will always have highly limited access to the physical layer.

2 more annotations...

• Research bots leverage open-source for child-like intelligence
   
     <!-- AUTHOR | PRINT EMAIL DISCUSS -->   Sunny Bains 
   (07/10/2008 6:00 PM EDT)
   URL:  http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208808365 

• Never in the field of human knowledge has so much information been available to so many. However, there is so much out there that it can tend to generate information overload and subsequent anxiety. This is usually accompanied by a tendency to snack or graze on snippets of information which, in turn, can affect attention spans and the capacity for joined-up thinking.
• It takes a very disciplined mind to resist the tendency to spin off into a digital void of unstructured meanderings(though sometimes you make the most wonderful discoveries that way). The sum of these things has the ability to reduce our capacity for sustained thinking.

• Pickering on transhumanism

     

  Russell Blackford

    

  Russell Blackford
• perhaps transhumanism, as an international cultural and philosophical movement, is too protean, too contested from within, to be defined adequately. This could make it very difficult to attack or support
• It’s not unfamiliar that cultural, social, or political movements can be like this.
• It’s worth looking closely at his language when he defines the idea of cybernetic immortality like this: “A certain timeless essence of humanity—consciousness, the mind—is to achieve immortality, with all the useless paraphernalia of humanity—the body, even the unconscious and subconscious reaches of the mind—to be sloughed off.” I’ll dwell on this, since what Pickering is describing is not just a less-than-universal transhumanist aspiration; it is an idea that I have never seen advanced by any transhumanist thinker anywhere!
• Pickering’s concern is that transhumanism (as he defines it) contains a “narrow” conception of what it is to be human, one that equates our humanity with reason and the conscious mind.

3 more annotations...

• Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion
   

  By William Grassie
• human evolution bypasses genetics and allows for intentional culturally-acquired adaptations and their cultural transmission between generations in a Lamarckian evolutionary pattern.  As humans are about to embark upon large-scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves, even as we have already engaged in large-scale environmental engineering, our biocultural evolution becomes literal and directed Lamarckism.   This new pattern of evolution now dominates all life on Earth and places the values and intentions of humans as the driving force in the future evolution of the planet. 
• There is a dynamic relationship between our biology and our culture, encoded in our genetic and neural evolution, but increasingly also projected outwards onto the environment, which we harness and transform to our perceived benefit. 

  • cfr terra-forming, urbanization, the need for a scientific ecology (compared to the present romanticized anti-scientific & anti-technologicial debate on environment & ecology)
• Many consider these dramatic changes with utopic hopes, others with apocalyptic fears.  I will return to these considerations later, but it seems more productive initially to reflect more philosophically upon the nature of these highly creative processes.   In order to do so I now introduce the concept of complex distributed systems.
• System theory argues that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and that the emergent properties of the whole also need to be studied for their dynamic properties that only manifest themselves at this integrated level.
• To realize its potential, a brain also requires co-evolution with our oppositional thumb, our vocal cords, the rest of the central nervous system and the body, the stunning intricacies of nature, and dynamic relationships to other humans in culture
• There are levels of complexity that defy modeling through computer programs.
• Computers constitute the one Kuhnian scientific revolution that has impacted all sciences over the last twenty years.  The ability to collect and analyze large datasets today is extraordinary.  Scientists are also able to create complex models and simulations of natural processes.  The computer as a tool and metaphor has dramatically transformed every scientific discipline.  The problem is that we can now easily come to understand levels of complexity, which will thwart our abilities to causally model and comprehend.  Outside a small number of sophisticated and philosophically minded computer scientists, policy makers, the public, and even many scientists do not understand the known limits of computation and complexity
• As a result, there is a profound moral ambiguity about biocultural evolution in the 21st century.  We simply cannot see beyond the horizons of certain levels of complexity.  Should we fear or celebrate this “out of control” creativity?  In the 21st century, the only remaining “wilderness” is that of wild and unpredictable modes of human cultural and technological evolution.
• The pattern of evolution exhibited by humans is more Lamarckian than Darwinian.  Through culture, acquired characteristics are passed on to future generations.
• In the rest of life processes, natural selection, the necessities of differential reproduction and survival, operates on a supposed background of random genetic drift.  In human cultural evolution, however, selection will operate on the background of intentional adaptation.

  • natural selection is more than genetic drift alone. More factors come into play, + there are other forces in evolution (for example sexual selection). But the hypothesis stays valid: culture is intentional & thus teleological(?)
• his environmental engineering also changes the background of natural selection for the rest of life, which is becoming increasingly domesticated within the new environments created by humans.  As we move towards large-scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves, we end up with a literal form of Lamarckism, in which the phenotype directs the genotype.  Intentionality now enters the evolutionary epic and with it radically new and accelerating kind of creativity.  Humans are a Lamarckian wild card. 
• Counter to this progressivist optimism, it must also be noted that the potential for disasters has perhaps never been larger:
• weapons of war
• Anthropogenic changes in the environment
• pandemic
• economic and environmental collapse

• In trying to understand human uniqueness, physical anthropologists have plotted the ratio of brain mass to body mass for a variety of species.  It seems that compared to other animals, humans have very big heads.  Dinosaurs, however, also had big brains, in many cases much bigger than human brains, but in proportion to the size of their bodies, they were too small and too far away from the action.  So the yarn goes, dinosaurs are extinct and the little mammals came to dominate.  When you put a human into an automobile, however, the ratio of brain mass to body mass goes way down.  We end up more like the dinosaurs.
  

  This whimsical story is really an invitation to see our technology as part of our new embodied humanity.

• On one level, humans have changed little over the millennia.  We are biologically and psychologically identical to our ancestors 100 or 10,000 years ago.  We are conceived in passion, born in pain, we have a long period of childhood dependency after which we are initiated into adulthood.  If we are lucky, we work, we love, we raise children, we grow old.  We still contemplate the stars above and what might lie beyond this life and this world.
  

  As a superorganism, however, we are a whole new genus.  There is little in the collective patterns in human behavior that resemble the past.
• What Huxley got wrong was his prediction that authoritarian government was going to control this reprogenetic technology.  Instead, it will be the free market that “regulates” new reprogenetic technologies.
• Silver sees the technology and market forces as so powerful, that he predicts a speciation horizon for humanity in the next century, in which genetically-enriched humans will become a separate breeding population from natural humans, whom the “Gen-rich” will also dominate (Silver 1997).  Most bioethicists today believe that this free-market reprogenetic re-evolution is a realistic scenario.  Ideology becomes historical necessity.
• Of course, in both trivial and profound ways, we are biological creatures.  We should expect to find in our genes and our behaviors patterns related to the necessities of survival and reproduction over the course of our long evolution.  What is curious about humanity today, if I am still permitted to use that term, is that the genetic leash can be long or short; it can also be elastic, irrelevant, or in the case of genetic engineering, reversed.  Genes certainly do not predict supercomputers, cell phones, and space stations, let alone symphonies and Superstring Theory.  How can we possibly predict our post-human future based on our evolutionary past?
• Bill Joy’s manifesto created a lot of debate among the so-called “Digerati”.  Whether our self-induced extinction is imminent or not, it is certainly true that robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology are fields experiencing exponential growth.  One of the more insightful commentaries came from virtual reality expert Jaron Lanier, who wrote a piece entitled “Half a Manifesto:  Why stupid software will save the world from Neodarwinian machines.” Lanier debunks Bill Joy’s thesis, but does so by substituting alternate dystopias.  In one scenario, the constraints of the software complexity will consume the efforts of every living person to maintain exponentially growing computation on “a planet of help desks.”  In another scenario, the frictionless free-market empowered by computers exacerbates socio-economic disparities, which become increasingly genetic disparities, leading to the class- caste- speciation.  The “good news” lies in the problem of complex computation, which will stymie our attempts to engineer the future.

• What disturbs Lanier is not the trajectory of the technology, but the ideology of what he calls “cybernetic totalism” that motivates so many of the high-tech enthusiasts.  Lanier concludes:
  

  So, therefore, I’ll worry about the future of human culture more than I’ll worry about the gadgets.  And what worries me about the ‘Young Turk’ cultural temperament seen in cybernetic totalists is that they seem not to have been educated in the traditional scientific skepticism.  I understand why they are intoxicated…  There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore’s law fetishizing, and the rest of the package will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their time.  Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives.  If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people…  Cybernetic eschatology shares with some of history’s worst ideologies a doctrine of historical predestination… (Lanier 1999).
• Similar to the eugenics movement in the early 20th century, which was also seen as good science in its time, Silver’s version of “reprogenetic totalism” may also contribute to future crimes against humanity, too horrendous to imagine.
• So when we talk about biocultural evolution in the 21st century, my bet is that religion broadly understood will take center stage as the most important and unpredictable variable for better or worse.

  • cfr: hot issues: stem cell research, creating life, genetics experiments
    Religion will stop this evolution. It will guide this evolution with empty symbols & horror scenarios.
• We can also evoke the concept of opportunity costs.  Not pursuing biotechnology might make it impossible to feed the world, reduce cropland and restore ecosystems, solve the energy crisis, or cure the next pandemic.
• What we should remember, however, is that religions are also part of complex distribute moral systems.  It is not just the free market s of evolution, economies, technologies, that should concern us.  Human values, beliefs, and practices are also part of the equation. 
• To do so, we will need to re-read
• the new books of nature, creating a dialectic between our cultural and biological inheritance.

  • his full 'conclusion' is too much based on faith

28 more annotations...

• Can We Be Awe-Inspired without Thinking Hierarchically?
   

  By Abel Alves
• humans, like so many other primates, have evolved in a social context that influences and perhaps even clouds our thought.
• Religion, from the Latin "religare" (to bind fast) is thereby embedded within a system of hierarchically constructed survival mechanisms-mechanisms that especially promote the survival of the individual's community through the priestly and kingly communication of rules that dare not be broken at the risk of offending supreme otherworldly power:
• "To sanctify a procedure or a statement is to certify it as beyond question and imply punishment for anyone who dares to contradict it....

  • cfr Douglas Adams speec At Digital Biota 2 on "Is there an Artificial God?" (quote: not to throw out the baby with the bathwather, we may need some of our fictions without realizing that).
• Through religion human individuals who recognize themselves as individuals with individual purpose are indoctrinated to submit to the group and its leaders.  They are bound fast by chains of social and cultural relationships, by accepted patterns of behavior.
• According to Marc Hauser, "When animals compete for resources, the number of individuals they track is small: a few competitors of higher or lower rank, two or three allies in a coalition, and a small number of potential mates."(10)  Often enough living in extremely large communities, humans may use the conceptual abstractions of culture and religion to keep track

  • What kind of religion will humanity need if we are truly one community?
    For example:
    - all minds uploaded in to one entity
    - an evolved internet (boundaries close, community grows)
    
    & What will this mean for the formations of communities themselves? (not bound by geographical limits) (cfr: internet & freak communities: every freak finds an equivalent).
• Does this propensity for the assignment of intentionality so cloud human mental processes that religion must be the search for intent and superhuman, intentional actors called gods, goddesses, ancestors, ghosts, saints, and bodhisattvas?
• In his Discourses on Livy, the early modern Machiavelli himself anticipated the biologist Edward Wilson's arguments when he argued, "where religion exists it is easy to introduce armies and discipline, but where there are armies and no religion it is difficult to introduce the latter."

6 more annotations...

• Conscious Evolution and the Emergence of Integral Culture
   

  By Thomas P Maxwell
• According to Stapp, 'the fundamental process of Nature lies outside spacetime but generates events that can be located in space-time'. It has become clear that science is not in contact with ultimate reality, that it is describing 'the waves, not the water of the ocean of reality'. Ordinary notions of space, time, and separately existent material particles are being viewed as abstractions derived from this deeper order."

• An Evolutionary Mind
   

  By Alice Andrews

• A Proleptic Vision of the Global Future
   

  By Ted Peters
• The task I have set for myself is to combine in a coherent way three interlacing strands of future oriented thinking: futurology, eschatology, and ethics. The ethical task of the present generation, as I see it, is to project future visions of a just and sustainable global community and then enlist present resources to turn that vision into actuality. Ethical activity is transformative activity, aimed at making the world a better place. What the futurist does is envision what the better place could look like and then open the gates and guide us up the paths that lead there.
• What I would like to point out is that scientific studies of the future during the heyday of futurology followed a specific formula: they sought to UNDERSTAND the trends and forces ferrying us toward the future; they sought to enjon the world community to make a DECISION regarding the kind of future we desire; and through this means we as a human race could take CONTROL of our destiny.
• The task, as the futurists saw it, was to regain control over forces--destructive forces--seemingly out of control. Regardless of one's moral assessment of such thinking, the world culture of the 1970s felt overwhelmed by uncontrollable forces hurling us toward unwanted destruction; and future consciousness became a form of optimistic survival consciousness.
• First, it stressed global wholeness.
• Futurology at this time was intrinsically ethical in a couple additional ways.
• Second, striving for economic justice became a necessary correlate of planetary survival.
• his has tended toward a romanticism that reinforces an anti-science and anti-technology posture.
• could there be a connection between secular futurology and Christian eschatology? Should there be a connection?
  
       The key to the connection, in my judgment, is the concept of prolepsis.
• The first task of proleptic ethics, then, becomes one of projecting visions of a new world order
• The second task of proleptic ethics is to draw maps showing where we are now in relation to what we can envision.
• The task of ethicists is to open doors to transformation, to inspire us by visions of a redeemed future toward which we can orient our shared action.

10 more annotations...

• Defending Openness in the European Union

• One of the most surprising recent developments in the field of openness has been the rise of Europe as a key player there. This is not the result of some grand plan, despite what the conspiracy theorists in proprietary software companies might think, but simply a natural evolution of the European Union itself, and a consequence of its attempts to become more tightly integrated. 

    

   That's simply not possible unless open standards are used, since it is plainly impractical to force every member-state to do things in exactly the same way when it comes to computing. Instead, an open framework provides the best mix of local freedom – that strange EU concept of “subsidiarity” - without sacrificing the “union” part of the entity's name. 
• This is what the European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services (EIF) has to say on the subject in its report:

1 more annotation...