“A movement in the making”
BY John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Duleesha Kulasooriya
” “Making”—the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself—is creeping into everyday discourse, with the emerging maker movement referenced in connection with topics ranging from the rebirth of manufacturing to job skills development to reconnecting with our roots. As maker communities spring up around the globe, a plethora of physical and virtual platforms to serve them have emerged—from platforms that inspire and teach, to those that provide access to tools and mentorship, to those that connect individuals with financing and customers. (…) Continue reading
“Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering a Mind” By Randal A. Koene
As fiancés know, setting a date is a double-edged sword. Goals seem more tangible and apt to plan around, but unkept promises usually end with someone looking foolish.
Pushing the envelope and making plans about the future is what was intended at Among the high-profile thinkers speaking at Global Future 2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution, Randal A. Koene delivered a speech on brain emulation:Continue reading
“The hand-held’s tale” by Joyce E Chaplin
“Whatever the finer social distinctions in pre-industrial societies, the main one divided those who worked with their hands from those who did not – ever. Anything hand-held made the bearer’s status clear. Egyptian rulers went into the afterlife clutching the flail and sceptre they had borne in real life. Sceptres and orbs would continue to represent earthly rule. Swords advertised military might. Books stood for the word of God and the ability to interpret it. Keys represented access to real or unearthly realms. These were things worth holding precisely because they symbolised freedom from quotidian effort, to which the vast majority were consigned. And yet the hand-held device is now the great equaliser. The squillionaire clutches the iPhone 6, but so might the underpaid worker who assembled it in semi-gulag conditions somewhere. The development of the hand-held’s marvellously tiny technology is interesting, of course. But our shared willingness to fill our hands openly and daily with these devices is the more important historical transformation.Continue reading
What have you been telling yourself?
Nicholas Epley’s article on Nautilus brings more evidence on Why We Can’t Get Over Ourselves. Among others: cognition biases, egocentrism, and otehr selfish reasons. This is not a core case of immanence debate, but telling of cultural landscape that seems to be a reversed cocktail-party problem: too many people talking about themselves and no one trying to listen.
And while you listen to yourself, take Shruti Ravindran’s on aeon about how ‘Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self‘.
As a society, we may also benefit from improved listening. Instead of cold forecasts, organic stories may be more effective. As Adam Frank posted on Nautilus, we need to go beyond predicting the future and begin telling the future.
“What Desires Are Politically Important?” – Bertrand Russell
From Bertrand Russell’s Nobel prize acceptance lecture
“All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
(…) man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite (…) : four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
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“Light dawns” by Sidney Perkowitz, on fundamental constants
Article published at aeon.
“We have now fixed the speed of light in a vacuum at exactly 299,792.458 kilometres per second.
Why this particular speed and not something else? Or, to put it another way, where does the speed of light come from?
(…) thanks to Maxwell and Einstein, we know that the speed of light is connected with a number of other (on the face of it, quite distinct) phenomena in surprising ways.Continue reading
“The Man Who Wasn’t there” book review by Alun Anderson
Review of “The Man Who Wasn’t There: Exploring the science of the self” by Anil Ananthaswamy.
“For ordinary folk, a unified sense of self is taken for granted. We sit comfortably inside a body we feel is ours, seeing, hearing, touching and smelling. Gloomy or happy, our feelings plainly belong to us.(…) This self appears to us seamlessly and effortlessly as a whole.
The Man Who Wasn’t There could be described as a dedication to a different group – those whose unity of self has fragmented – and to the way they have helped us understand the self through their cooperation with scientists and philosophers, and their long hours in brain scanners.Continue reading
More on how brain adapts to internet
In “How has the Internet reshaped human cognition?“, Kep-Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai move forward the debate on how cognitive processes and brain structures are adapting to our interaction with the instant access to information through internet.
They study information processing, memory consolidation, brain circuitry, multitasking, distractions, addictive behavior, and other promising lines of research. To their credit conclusions are often that more research is required. Having such broad view on the matter is welcome. There are signs of some precipitated condemnation as ‘internet is bad for people’ we expect from resistance to change.
Nicholas Carr book ‘The Shallows” was part of growing criticism on how the internet was affecting negatively our brains. One typical culprit was the excessive multitasking. When studies showed heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability those critics felt vindicated. Then as studies with shorter titles are cited more often by other scientists more people were certain: ‘even’ scientists were affected by the shallow effect.
How can we tap this shallow information pool to go deeper into our minds?
A.I. weakness: relevance
As a friend told me and we are getting used to, an AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions, and more of it is bound to come. Should we worry? If I had to guess I would say sometime in the future we will see SAT as a short-lived bad way to assess anything really relevant about humans.
What about human dominance on creativity? taking Brazilian composer Chico Science “Computers make art, artists make money” insight: SATs are an easy field to yield to computers – not sure if left to opt between money and creativity which would artists yield…
If we have an option at all. Algo trading is making money already – and Margaret A. Boden makes the point on MIT review that computers aren’t close to being ready to supplant human artists:Continue reading
“Telling Is Listening” review at brainpickings
Maria Popova on “Telling is Listening”, part of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of nonfiction writings published at “The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination”
“Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.Continue reading