Poetry Helps as Pace Accelerates

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
by Richard Brautigans

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

First Published
San Francisco: The Communication Company, 1967.
8.5" x 11" mimeographed broadside with hand-lettered title and imprint (Communication Company). All else type-written.
Reprinted here with permission.

Google Making Us Stupid

In his article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr talks honestly about his own concerns on how the act of reading may be changing. I think what Carr is seeing, is what others like Harry Pence call burrowing or browsing. Honestly, the exponential growth in published papers, blogs, wikis, etc. has forced all of us to skim more than read deeply. I know I do. Anyone concerned about education should read Carr's article and think about what students need to know to be successful. Do they need content or do the need connectivity? If you think the latter, then shouldn't we be teaching them how to use the connectivity tools of today (and tomorrow?) Are we? What do you think?

You can also listen to NPR's program on this at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91543814

Moore's Law and 35nm

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the chip maker's Justin Rattner and Michael Garner talk about materials and processes that will be used in the next 40 years to increase chip performance and advance production. You can watch the video here.

Of course it is in Intel's best interest to believe this - but it still seems probable.

Twitter, Delicious, Bush's Memex and The Construction of Truth

As I've delved into Twitter, Wiki's and social bookmarking sites like Delicious more and more over the past two years, it was important that W. Gardner Campbell give me perspective on these tools by reminding me of Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and his vision of the Memex. In his outstanding keynote at SUNY CIT 2008 in Batavia, NY, Campbell reminded me of how Bush's vision (along with Alan Kay's Dynabook) may now be, at least in hardware and software, a reality. Bush's thoughts just after WWII are eerily on target as I wade through my Twitter updates, delicious bookmarks and Second Life worlds. What is "necessary and certain" Truth (capital T) and how do we come to know it? My recent study of Steve L. Goldman's Science Wars lecture series has me serious thinking about how we come to know things and how these social networking technologies may be changing them.

Peter Thiel Speaks on PayPal the World and Bill Joy

"One of the things that’s very misleading about acceleration and exponential growth is that it’s slow at first and then it’s fast, and so the future happens more slowly than people expect and then it happens more quickly." Peter Thiel in a May 2008 interview by Reason Magazine.

Take a look at the Peter Thiel interview linked to above done by Ronald Bailey, Science Correspondent for Reason Magazine. Thiel talks a bit about things like PayPal and why Bill Joy's got it wrong in his Wired interview, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". More importantly for me is Thiel's description of exponential growth and singularity where he makes the important observation (IMHO) quoted above.

Bits The Size of Atoms (or smaller)

"The end point of Moore's Law (which holds that computers get faster by a factor of two every year and a half or so) is a computer so powerful that it uses individual atoms to store bits of information: one atom, one bit. If we were able to work at subatomic scales and store bits on electrons or quarks, we might go further. But let's stick with what we know we can do.

If current rates of miniaturization persist, your PC will store one bit on one atom sometime around 2050. But it's natural to ask whether we can, in fact, achieve a bit-to-atom correspondence. Remarkably, prototype computers that store bits on individual atoms already exist in the laboratory. These computers are called quantum computers, because they store and process information at scales where the laws of quantum mechanics hold sway."

Loyd, Seth, Riding D-Wave, Technology Review Inc., May/June 2008, accessed on web at: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20590/ on April 25, 2008.

A read of this article makes one aware that there is still plenty we don't know and are not sure of, but the fact that so much money and interest are generated by this approach suggests one way or another we will get there. The question is how soon?

Moore's Law and the End of Democracy

Cass Sunstein's book republic.com, from Princeton University Press is a good read about information technologies role in the fragmentation and extremism in society. If you are interested in the idea that technologies enable the filtering of information at the individual level, thus allowing us to only be exposed to those ideas we like, which in turn leads to fragmentation and extremism then pick yourself up a copy and read it. Good book!!

To me, Sunstein supports Neil Postman's notion that technology is destroying our culture's defenses.