PJ's Big Adventure

2010-02-16T12:39:00.001-08:00

Can you make rude jokes in programming language? If so, how and what?

2010-02-16T09:11:00.001-08:00

I'm trying ping.fm to post to my various social media. Anyone have any experience with this and opinions?

The Urge to Converge

2008-09-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

As Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Humanity Plus (an event sponsor), please excuse this interruption for a very important announcement:

Join a historic convergence of leading long-term organizations and thought leaders. Two days with people at the forefront of world-changing technologies that challenge our perception of what can and should be done – reshaping your career, body and mind.

Convergence08 is an Unconference – Each day starts and ends with an eye-opening debate or keynote to inspire us, and the remaining agenda is created by YOU.

Join in freewheeling discussions on topics below, or – better yet – convene your own group focused on exactly what you think is most important:

Neurotechnology
Artificial general intelligence
Synthetic biology
Human enhancement
Space tourism
Social software
Prediction markets
Nanotechnology
Smart drugs
Bioethics
Cleantech
NBIC startup tips
Reputation systems
Life extension / anti-aging
Accelerating change
Biotechnology
Open source everything
Sousveillance / privacy

Don't see your topics here? Add them to the Convergence08 Wiki! You just may get a new startup or film project crystallizing around your topic before the conference is over.
All this takes place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley – where new technological revolutions grow like weeds. Come help the next one get launched!

Convergence08 will be held November 15-16, 2008. I'll be there. Hope to see you there, too!

Next Nature

2008-05-18T19:59:00.000-07:00

Billed as “More than 25 visionary statements from artists, scientist, designer, filmers, writers…” the Biggest Visual Power Show presentation of “Next Nature” came to the historic Million Dollar Theater in Downtown Los Angeles this Saturday night, May 17th, appropriately across from the utopian architectural landmark, the Bradbury Building.
http://leblog.exuberance.com/2007/08/the-bradbury-bu.html

“Next Nature is the nature caused by human culture,” a very h+ concept. What initially interested me was that Kevin Kelly (Out of Control) and Erik Davis (Techgnosis) would be among the presenters. However, it turned out I had read Kelly’s presentation essay, “The Seventh Kingdom of Life” before and Davis’ talk on the mythological relationship between our conceptions of analog and digital was not one of his strongest, especially since the visuals by Niels Schrader overwhelmed Davis’ thoughts. However, what got me to stay were all the other artists, predominantly Dutch and all previously unknown to me, whose work was profound, funny, cutting edge and a thought-provoking step in understanding humanity’s relationship with nature and technology.

Our emcee for the evening was artist/scientist/organizer/curator Koert van Mensvoort, who explained why the Dutch have such a profound appreciation of the manipulation of nature. The Netherlands is a country that only exists by dint of nature-changing technology. Reclaimed from the sea, the land is a densely populated bulwark against the encroachment of the natural world. The Dutch understand perhaps better than most that people design and craft the world around us to suit our ends.

My date for the evening was Norman Gilmore, tech entrepreneur/ futurist/software architect/business analyst and fellow avantgardist. He enjoyed the show as much as I did.

My personal highlights out of over two dozen presentations were:

Joris Van Gelder’s magical interaction technology. This young man just graduated from Eindhoven University of Technology. From his early studies observing how people bring magical expectations to their interactions with technology, he developed a “magical” remote control for Bang & Olufsen which is one of the cleverest, sexiest devices I’ve seen. As Norman said, if Steven Jobs doesn’t kidnap the boy and ferry him (magically) back to the Apple kingdom, he’s crazy.
http://www.student.tue.nl/n/j.m.v.gelder/flash/#/BandORemote_Perspective/
http://www.student.tue.nl/n/j.m.v.gelder/flash/#/BandORemote_Balance/

Katinka Simonse aka Tinkebell, an animal rights artist/filmmaker, “mockumented” her slaughtering and skinning her pet cat to make into a purse. Her fabulous faux-naïveté and sweetness, her political incorrectness and the gory, graphic how-to images of the all-too-real skinned dead cat made Sarah Silverman look like a wimpy wannabe shockette.

Filmmakers Rene Daalder and Folkert Gorter, who lead Space Collective, “where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.” It looks like a fun and stimulating creative community.

Casey Alt’s fabulously slick and disturbing “Slightly Sociopathic Software” digital presentation called “Vasillogix” was a very American presentation! Part American Psycho, part Gattaca, part Dale Carnegie, I highly recommend watching it once he posts the completed film.

Floris Kaayk’s film “Metalosis Maligna" was another cute mockumentary about the spread of post implantation infection from metal implants, causing bodies to sprout chaotic metal structures like a Meccano set on acid.

Christian Bramsiepe made a snappy graphic short on intelligent design (or the lack thereof). [Click on “arbeitsproben” and it should be the first film]

Extreme Green Guerillas, a mockumentary on the ultimate green martyrs:

Even the two dozen or so interstitial videos designed by Arnoud Van Den Heuvel, depicting a generic car graphic doing clever and technologically ironic things were well executed.

I expected a bigger turn out for such a wide-reaching program, but I’m not sure how much PR was done to promote it. It deserved a bigger audience than it got. Let’s hope “Next Nature” travels and gets more exposure.

The Hardest Job in Journalism

2008-02-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

Today's Column One article is about The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, an unusual experiment in American newspapers where each andevery homicide in Los Angeles County is researched by a single reporter and documented on a website which allows readers to post comments. Often the posters are their friends and families of the victims that our culture would prefer to forget.

I have been aware of journalist Jill Leovy's website for some time nowand it's a site of great power. But why am I posting it here? Because it demonstrates how the Internet can increase empathy, as opposed to the stultifying effects of many supposed social networking sites, which often only create compatible subgroups already inclined to hold the same world views.

The Homicide Report makes the unseen seen and tells their story, even if that story is only the end of the story. It allows the unheard to grieve, their voices heard at last. Take some time and read the comments. They will make you weep.

This site flies in the face of the economics of attention, a battle newspapers wage daily in the melee with the rest of the media, ad space fighting for editorial space and the desire of advertisers overriding the desires of the community. It reverses the terrible trend that values entertainment over bearing witness. And the fourth estate does its job -- finally.

And as Leovy points out, it reveals to the public the underlying patterns of murder that our society would like to keep hidden. But why is it hidden? Because it doesn't sell advertising or papers or increase real estate values or get politicians elected.

Leovy had the hardest job in journalism. I hope the new journalist that is replacing Leovy can do as fine and empathetic a job as she has for the last year.

Co-hosting Fast Forward Radio

2007-12-14T20:41:00.000-08:00

I'm co-hosting Fast Forward Radio with Stephen Gordon on Sunday night, December 16th. Stephen and Phil Bowermaster have graciously asked me to fill in for Phil for the evening. Our guest will be Pearl Chin, president of the Foresight Institute. Not surprisingly, we'll be discussing nanotechnology.

Can I tell you what a kick I get from saying, "co-hosting" and "our guest"? What a hoot!

I hope you'll listen.

My First Podcast

2007-12-04T15:59:00.000-08:00

I had a new experience on Sunday night -- I was interviewed in my first podcast! Stephen Gordon and Phil Bowermaster of the Speculist blog have a weekly futurist radio show called, "Fast Forward Radio." I had met Phil at the Foresight Unconference in early November and he asked me at the end of the weekend if I'd be interested in being interviewed. He subsequently read my essay on empathy and technology and that became the subject for the show, as well as dipping our toes into the concept of geek culture in general. Being an unrepentant geek, I felt very at home.

Stephen and Phil were fabulous -- sweet, funny, smart, generous and I was very happy they were there to push me on my training wheels. I think we hit it off, because they've asked me to co-host on Dec. 16, when Phil's out of town. I'm looking forward to it!

The Bible Belt Paradox

2007-01-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

I had an epiphany the other night.

I was lying in bed, wondering why the most religiously devout parts of the US (call them Red States, call them Bible Belt, call them Heartland, it matters not) are statistically the places with the highest rates of divorce, domestic violence, murder, child endangerment, kidnapping, serial killers, corporate malfeasance, you name it. They got it. When I worked in the movie-of-the-week (MOW) business oh-so-briefly in the early ‘90’s (because I frankly did not have the stomach for ambulance-chasing the latest woman-in-jeopardy story), we covered the South like a rug, but especially two states that were the most notorious for the most egregious acts against fellow humans: Texas and Florida. Therefore, every self-respecting MOW producer kept track of the local newspapers out of Texas and Florida, especially Northern Florida. They were the homes of Ted Bundy, Aileen Wuornos and Gerard John Schaefer (aka the Killer Cop/the Florida Sex Beast). The Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And later, Enron and world-class vote stealing. (And let’s not forget our present administration and the Bush family’s Texas and Florida dynasties. But I digress…)

What puzzled me was that these same areas of the country were the most Bible thumping, most devout, most God-fearing parts of the country as well. How could so many people who believed that God would strike them dead if they did wrong, do wrong?

Then I thought about all my recent reading in neuroscience and psychology for my novel and my own background in marketing. One of the concepts that is often discussed in both psychology and marketing and has now been confirmed with fMRI technology in brain scans, is how a negated statement is often ignored and instead embraced as its positive. For instance, if there was a picture of you in the newspaper, accompanied by the headline, “Terrorist Suspect found Not Guilty,” the average person would see you and remember, “Terrorist… Guilty.” The “Not” disappears. Even if intellectually they remembered that you were found not guilty, they would still file you in their brains as a terrorist and reference you as such thereafter. Especially if the previous headlines had accused you of terrorism, because like your mother always said, first impressions last.

We use the principle in child rearing all the time. You don’t tell a child “Don’t run across the street!” because you know they’re only hearing “Run Across the Street!” Instead, you say “Stay with Me!” or “Hold My Hand!”

The Republicans are masters at this. They make positive statements all the time, like “We found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq” that force their critics to tell the truth and negate them, replying, “There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.” But all the public remembers is the war we’re fighting is about Weapons of Mass Destruction. They don’t hear the ‘No’ in the negated, but truthful statement. To the public, the Democrats are simply repeating what the Republicans have been saying the entire time.

And then it hit me. The Ten Commandments is a To-Do-List.

Whoever wrote Exodus clearly didn’t have a degree in Cognitive Psychology. And if God really carved those tablets from the rocks of Mount Sinai, then he needs to take Psych 101. Or Marketing 101. He’s just not getting his message across.

Because the devout have been paying, and paying, and paying for those little negated statements ever since.

They don’t hear, “Thou shalt not kill.” They hear, “Thou shalt… kill.” They don’t hear, “Thou shalt not steal.” They hear, “Thou shalt… steal.” They don’t hear, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Instead, they hadn’t even thought about coveting their neighbor’s wife, but then they think about it for the first time because the Ten Commandments tell them so and they take a good, long look at her and think, “Hey, my neighbor’s wife is HOT!” And before they know it, they’ve broken TWO commandments -- coveting and adultery.

Think about it.

If I’m wrong, do you have a better explanation for what shall hitherto be known as The Bible Belt Paradox?

Son of Sunrise Semester

2006-10-08T21:50:00.000-07:00

"In another innovative move to share its intellectual treasures with the public, the University of California, Berkeley, announced today that it is delivering educational content, including course lectures and symposia, free of charge through Google Video. Because of the quality and quantity of these video offerings, UC Berkeley will be the first university with its own page on the Google Video Web site: http://video.google.com/ucberkeley, campus officials said. The campus is making more than 250 hours of content available to the public through Google Video.”UC Berkeley Offers Courses And Symposia Through Google Video, 06/09/27, Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news78585742.html

I don’t know how many older New Yorkers/Tri-Staters are out there, but some of my fondest memories as a little kid were waking up early in the morning and padding downstairs at 6 am to watch Sunrise Semester on WCBS before my parents woke up. Produced at NYU from 1957 to 1982, each day was a continuing lesson from a chosen topic. After watching a series of episodes about Ancient Greek civilization, you could then watch Introductory French. Or Introduction to Physics. Whatever was next on their academic roster. It was the basis of a free liberal arts education for millions of working people for 25 years.

Sunrise Semester taught me lots of things, most of which I don’t think I remember consciously, but much of which provided an almost subliminal foundation to my later learning. I remember being on a school bus for a fieldtrip at the age of 5 and someone saying they bet I didn’t know where babies came from or what sex was. Ah, but I had watched Sunrise Semester on Human Biology! I proceeded to repeat what I had heard about uteruses, ovaries, sperm, etc. Of course, it was all academic to me. I understood intellectually that some of those things were inside me, by virtue of being a girl, but it lacked any visceral (!) meaning. Also, my information regurgitation was half-assed at best and had absolutely no prurient value, so my grade-school audience was completely baffled. They had no idea what I was talking about. However, by Middle School, when we were officially learning human sexuality for the first time, I realized I still remembered it. It was like a refresher course, as opposed to learning it all for the first time. There were other subjects that I somehow absorbed like this, as well.

So imagine my delight when University of California, Berkeley started posting their introductory classes and symposia on Google! http://video.google.com/ucberkeley

My son couldn’t sleep one night and I thought, “Hey, let’s watch this Berkeley video. That’ll put him to sleep!” But he watched “Integrative Biology 131 -- General Human Anatomy” with the same fascination and half-understanding that I watched Sunrise Semester all those years earlier. He was up for another 2 hours, just watching ‘episodes.’ He’d ask me to answer questions that the professor asked the class and when I got them right, he was so proud. If I didn’t know them, he told me I better to go back to school – there were gaps in my education! He’d ask me to define the words that the professors used that he didn’t understand. Not surprisingly, I was explaining a lot. He completely dug the entire experience, saying with pride, “Hey Mom, we’re going to Berkeley!”

[If only he feels this way when he’s 17 – the ‘we’ part, that is. Although as of age 10, he’s leaning towards Stanford… I told him he better work his ass off and become WAY more interesting rather quickly if either school is his goal!]

The easy, public availability of course work from Berkeley follows in a noble tradition of Sunrise Semester and I, for one, am all for the democratization of education, regardless of all the usual demarcations of society we claim democratization opposes (race, color, religion, gender, etc.). In this particular case, I’m thinking of age. Age appropriate education is highly overrated. I know I learned more from all the Age INappropriate education in my life than any proscribed “school learnin’.” If anything, ‘appropriateness’ is indicative of the fearful approach education has swung towards generally – “Don’t teach children anything they might not understand – it could hurt their self-esteem, or worse, it could give them ideas and make them think outside the box!” I’m sure most people will disagree, but to me, this is yet another sign of the fear mongering that will, in my opinion, be the end society as we thought we knew it.

And now that I’m up on my soapbox, the trend of teaching towards state testing (yet more fear mongering) has devastated the imaginations of children forced to learn these lessons at figurative ‘gunpoint’ and “No Child Left Behind” increasingly means “No Child Learns Anything Interesting or Meaningful to Them” in the race to teach increasingly denuded state curricula. (And the states fudge their results to get their Federal funds, anyway, so who’s kidding who?). It takes extraordinary, imaginative teachers to rise above the imbecilities of these new standardized systems, designed to create cogs in the corporate machine of the Information Age, instead of passionate, creative citizens. My children’s public school is excellent and has worked hard to pretend that testing is meaningless to them. Yet my kids have still been guinea pigs to such insanities as “Executive Function” and all the other snazzy-yet-meaningless catch words that only teach them how to pitch, spin and run a board meeting! At eight! (And may I add to this the state sanctioned workbooks, which appear to be written by people for whom English is a third, and not fluent, language. If you’re interested in how school textbooks are chosen by states, read Nobel Prize Winner Richard Feynman’s funny, yet tragic essay in Surely You’re Joking, Professor Feynman! I find it hard to believe the corrupt, bureaucratic process has changed at all based on their continued poor quality.) It all adds to the burden on this new generation of young people who might test well, but that’s about all they can do. Whatever you do, don’t ask them a question they didn’t prepare for. Or ask them to argue a well thought out opinion. If you think I’m exaggerating, ask older college professors, who can compare the different generations of students, what they really think. Preferably after a couple of drinks. Add the young’s computer-bred intelligence to the mix and their world is reduced to the color-and-motion entertainment force-fed to them and intellectual choices seen in black and white. Ones and Zeros. Right answers and wrong answers. A binary cognitive view that blinds them not only to the greys, but every spectrum of the intellectual rainbow, as well as the infinites, the paradoxical and most especially, the ambiguities of reality, as well as leaving them uninterested in pursuing the depth and breadth of human knowledge for its own sake. But that’s another essay for another day. ‘Cause my kid 'n me R goin’ ta Berkeley!

Singularity-Or-Bust

2006-09-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

On the Singularity talk site started recently by Ben Goertzel of Novamente, a company he heads which is attempting to create Artificial General Intelligence, he asked the following:

“I have been considering co-authoring some verbiage aimed at explaining the Singularity notion to intelligent, educated non-nerds (together with a writer I know who is more experienced and expert than me at writing for a non-technical audience). ”Of course this has been done before, e.g. it has been done excellently by Kurzweil and Broderick, but their wonderful book-length treatments are IMO too long, involved and complex for a lot of people to take the time to wade through.... And I find that Kurzweil's graph-centric approach has plusses and minuses -- there is a lot of mistrust of "lies, damn lies and statistics "out there. And, I much admire Eliezer's essay "Staring into the Singularity", but it's way too intense for most readers.... ”Anyway, I am curious if anyone would like to share experiences they've had trying to get Singularitarian concepts across to ordinary (but let's assume college-educated) Joes out there. Successful experiences are valued but also unsuccessful ones. I'm specifically interested in approaches, metaphors, focii and so forth that have actually proved successful at waking non-nerd, non-SF-maniac human beings up to the idea that this idea of a coming Singularity is not **completely** absurd...”

A lively discussion ensued, which predictably (amongst futurists) involved those who thought there was no problem with the existing information – which also meant if most people didn’t get it, then tough; those who believed Singularity wasn’t provable enough as a concept to bother translating; those who thought time would make it easier (i.e. when the Singularity gets here, it won’t be so hard to explain!); and those who thought it was a fool’s game to even try, whether it was possible or not.

Maybe I’m a fool to try, but maybe I can also turn this discussion 90 degrees and look at it from a different angle…

Below, I have talked about the issue of bilingualism (and eventual multilingualism) as pertains to futurist communication in a piece called “Are You Bilingual?” The gist of it is scientists/academics/H+rs/SFers/fellow travelers speak in a language that the rest of the world doesn’t understand anymore. They speak the logical, analytical, textual language of the scientific method and the structured argument. Unfortunately, it’s a dying language, born of Descartes, Bacon and Voltaire, but whose death knell was rung by Howdy Doody. Most of the First World speaks the newer, moving visual language taught to them by Howdy and the rest of the TV/movies/Internet nexus. It’s the emotional, visceral, narrative language of the video, the blog, the sound bite, the play-to-the-emotions rhetoric we are all confronted with daily. This is the language the mass audience speaks.

More importantly, this TV-oriented, visual language is character-based, not idea-based. The world is attracted to personalities, because we have been taught they are important by the Close Up and "Entertainment Tonight." It is the Age of Celebrity. Not the Age of Ideas. It’s why hard SF appeals to only us Enlightenment types: it’s usually idea-based, not particularly character-based and we are the few who are still think in terms of ideas.

I have read Kurzweil and Yudkowsky and all the rest. (Although I haven’t yet read Damien Broderick – but I’ve got you on the shelf, Damien – I’m going to remedy that really soon!) Only Fellow Travelers (and I consider myself one) would do likewise. This, if I am reading Ben's original query correctly, is NOT who he is trying to address. He is trying to address everyone else. To do that, he must tell a story. Speak their language. If he cannot, he must find those who can. If one is terribly clever, maybe he can guide a small handful of those who forgot they were bilingual back to the text/graph/math-based arguments.

I guess it isn’t surprising, but given what I do for a living, I think Yudkowsky misses the point completely in “Staring into the Singularity” when he discusses the role of storytelling in communicating the Singularity or transhuman ideas. (Otherwise, I think his essay is an enthusiastic and appropriately awe-inspiring primer on the subject and should be read by anyone with an interest in the subject.) He expects fiction writers to stick to his notions of what the Singularity is, all the while saying he can’t possibly know what the Singularity is!

But most writers don’t write stories because they want to convey complex concepts accurately. They write stories to communicate about whatever they think is important at the time, and pray it will resonate with their audience. For instance, Yudkowsky singles out “Flowers for Algernon,” as not accurately describing the transhuman experience. Daniel Keyes never had that in mind in the first place. It was written for a more profound reason: to explore what it means to be human. Not transhuman. Eliezer makes a good and classic point about not making your hero so smart that you can’t think for him. That is why we hobble our creations, Eliezer. We keep them human. In uplifting Charlie from mentally retarded to genius, he gets to embrace his fully conscious humanity for the first time. And as in all existential experiences, it makes him both exhilarated and depressed when he realizes the complexity, temporality and unfairness of life. When he didn’t fully grasp what it meant to be human, he was much happier. Ignorance is Bliss. This story touches everyone who reads it, because it’s not about hard SF concepts. It’s about a character whose existential concerns mirror our own, whose cause we support and yet whose fate is tragic. Each of us is Charlie, no matter where we fall on the intelligence curve. I don’t know about you, but I cry every damn time I read it. (Sorry, Eliezer, but you went gunning for my favorite short story of all time and got caught in the crossfire!)

On the other hand, Charles Stross’ Accelerando stares into the Singularity with his gimlet eye and encounters the classic problem of hard SF: the ideas are brilliant, just bloody brilliant (and I will never look at lobsters the same way again), but the characterizations are thin on the ground, sacrificed on the altar of the Big Idea. And as Eliezer predicted, once the Singularity hits, all bets are off. Character itself becomes irrelevant – which is an excellent and possibly accurate point – but there was nothing left for me to hold onto, no less the Average Joe! These are fascinating thoughts for the likes of futurists and SF geeks, but not for the great mass audience. And it clearly wasn’t written for them. Unfortunately, it means I won’t be giving Accelerando to my neighbor to explain the Singularity.

In a later post, Ben Goertzel said: Maybe most people are not ready to grok these concepts ... but yet, maybe some people would be **more** open to the Singularity idea if it were presented more in terms of human experience and less in terms of statistical curves and processing power....” All I’m proposing is Ben’s Singularity-as-human experience. In telling the story of the Singularity as a character-based narrative, you will be giving an audience what might be its only opportunity to understand, or even encounter the concept. But you’ll have your work cut out for you. Even Eliezer quotes Vernor Vinge: “Of course, I never wrote the 'important' story, the sequel about the first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John Campbell's letter of rejection began: 'Sorry - you can't write this story. Neither can anyone else.'" Unless you hobble your creation. There. I've said it twice. Which is okay. Audiences actually like that. No one really wants their hero to be too much smarter or more fabulous than they are.

In my own work – I am writing an H+ technothriller right now – I am avoiding the Singularity like the plague. I am dealing with enhancement technologies and their possibilities, but purposefully setting them in a contemporary setting that doesn’t support the Singularity (or Grey Goo for that matter). While this may be inaccurate, anachronistic or whatever, and will most likely remain so, the problem with the alternative was pointed out very well by Ben – if transhumanism and the Singularity happens too far in the future, no one cares, because it won’t happen on their watch. They dodged the bullet and they’d rather watch “Fear Factor” and crack a brewski in the Lazy Boy than think about what the Singularity means to them. But take selected issues that can be comprehended and put them in the here and now and you’ve got something your audience can relate to. I really want people to think about issues of more-than-human consciousness and perception and reality and such, as baby steps to the Singularity. And BTW, my hero is hobbled mightily. And I think the audience will like him all the more for it.

Maybe that’s the real point about how you explain the Singularity. Do you remember the movie, What About Bob? “Baby steps, Bob. Baby steps.”

Sisyphus in Mississippi

2006-09-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

The Los Angeles Times published a great “Column One” story yesterday, entitled “For Delta Librarian, The End.”

In it, Ronnie Wise retires as the chief librarian of Bolivar County, Mississippi, which has one of the highest illiteracy rates of any county in the US. Guess how high? 41%. Yes, you read that correctly. And the reason it isn’t higher is because of Ronnie Wise and the library system-sponsored literacy classes he created. The Sisyphusian struggle he and his coworkers wage against poverty, indifference, politics, racism, crime, etc. is the most important social work I have seen done anywhere in the US. And for some reason that Ronnie Wise refuses to share, he has chosen to stop. He has had enough.

The article brings up three issues that interest me.

1) Books are not a dead technology. Literature and reading are vitally important. The irony is that these people are not living in the 21st Century. They’re not even in the 20th. For them, like those who lived from the 15th to the 19th Centuries, books still hold the keys to escape, entertainment, knowledge and self-sufficiency. For these descendents of slaves, they hold the keys to freedom. The “Neil Postman” side of me loves that. Freedom isn't given to you courtesy of MySpace or Google. Freedom is the ability to take your mind elsewhere, using only your own imagination and intelligence and some wood pulp. This is what creates the potential for informed citizens and participatory democracy. And happiness. Not the Internet.

2) It also ties in with the theory of literature developing social empathy (see my essay “Empathy in the Time of Technology” on my website). Illiteracy is the mind killer, as much as fear. In fact, the former begets the latter.

3) How can we ‘talk the talk’ of new communication technologies if people can’t read? Computers are still text-dependent and $100 MIT laptops to developing countries are meaningless if you can’t read the text. (And what about the poor this country???) We need to ‘walk the walk’ first with universal literacy or the haves/have-nots gap widens to a chasm.

I realize I mention Neil Postman a lot. That’s because he’s really important to the entire debate of the role of technology in society. If you haven’t read “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” and/or “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” then you should. They should be required reading for every college-educated person, but if you are a scientist/technologist, you should read “Technopoly” right now. Don’t wait. You can’t consider yourself ethically or morally consistent if you don’t grok his message. You don’t have to like him, because you probably won’t. He’s the archetypal academic curmudgeon. You don’t have to agree with him, although I’d be surprised if you didn’t at some level. I personally think he’s right on the money. You just have to “get it” and apply a level of self-consciousness to your work (and life) that I believe is avoided in science education and industry, generally. If I were to recommend either one to a general reader, I’d still say read “Technopoly” since both books cover much the same philosophical ground, but “Technopoly” is broader in scope, more recent and its thesis is more powerful. Then for fun, read “Amusing…” and see just how remarkable and prescient his book is, over 20 years after he wrote it, in dissecting how television has destroyed American political, social and cultural discourse. What is chilling is how so much of the book could simply replace the word ‘television’ with ‘Internet’ and continue to be true…

Are You Bilingual?

2006-08-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

In a discussion regarding recruiting more women to H+ sites and causes on Michael Anissimov’s blog:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=135,
I realized in the midst of my own argument that the discussion over what kind of women did participate, whether other women could be encouraged to participate, etc., was really irrelevant. The real discussion is about how H+ ideals are communicated to all people, everywhere, regardless of gender.

The hoped-for recruitment will fail because transhumanism is not offering those on the outside of the cause anything they think they want, because H+ers don’t bother to communicate in a language that our great, big, diverse world can understand. There is rich irony that the transhumanist world, a world dedicated to positing the technological future, is stuck communicating to the infosphere with the printed word, often through academia, which could be defined as the dying communication/educational paradigm. I’m not saying its dying is a good or a bad thing. It’s simply happening. The language H+ers speak is intellectual, logical, dispassionate, scientific, disciplined, and philosophical. (They also think they’re objective by virtue of the application of the scientific method, but of course, that’s an illusion, if not an arrogance, because there is no objectivity in human perception. But that's another topic for another day.) But the great big world out there was formed by 20th C. media – mostly television – and the language its denizens were taught to speak is moving visuals, aural, emotional, subjective, intimate, instant, and most importantly, in a narrative.

The question of recruitment is not really one of male vs. female. The question for H+ers is: Are you bilingual? Can you speak to humanity in a language they can understand?

And the next wave of media technology? What language will that technology teach us to speak? And will those who think about and discuss the future need to be multilingual in multiple communication paradigms to bridge the many gaps from humanity’s uneven acceptance of communication technologies?

Am I a child of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman? You bet your boots I am. But then, so are you, whether you know it or not. Because the medium will always be the message and what we call humanity will always be molded by our technologies. Whether we want to be or not.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

2006-08-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about the need for increased empathy in an age of increasing technology and not surprisingly, the issue of narcissism is relevant, because a narcissist often lacks the ability to empathize. And lo, AlterNet has a fascinating article about our culture's love affair with narcissism. It details sociologist Christopher Lasch's groundbreaking 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations.

"Lasch, in a 1990 afterword to The Culture of Narcissism, wrote, 'The best hope of emotional maturity, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own.'

"Most importantly, Lasch said, 'The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires.'

"True words, indeed. And now, to heed."

Sounds like required reading for the Boomer, Me, X, Y and Z generations. That is, if the younger ones can tear themselves away from MySpace.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/40334/

The Future is Now... Finally!

2006-08-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog. I know I'm rather late at entering the blogosphere, considering I supposedly think about the future, but I figure the 50+ million blogs (if Technorati is correct) that have blazed a trail before me have made the path a more comfortably worn one by now. Usually, I take the path less traveled by (because it does make all the difference), but in this case, considering my ambivalent relationship with computers, the more user-friendly those pathfinders have made the blogosphere, the happier I'll be.

My website went live today. You can find it (and me) at www.pj-manney.com. Neither my website nor my blog would have existed without the hard work and patient guidance of Russell Rukin, my net sensei, artist extraordinaire and friend. Thanks, Russell!!!

So why have I joined every man, woman and dog on this planet by adding yet another website and blog to the net noise? Because I need a venue to write and correspond about the things that fill my head regularly: futurism, human enhancement, accelerating technology, the singularity, as well as literature, movies, television, fine and decorative art, social and political issues and the interplay between them all. And because, for my sins, I'm writing a great big, bloody book and input is output.

To sum up, I am not afraid of what the future holds. Life will unfold as it will. However, I do think we need to be proactive about what we want the future to be if we hope to get as much out of own 'big adventures' as we might wish. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I do.