Question Technology

Techno Tuesday: Reminders

Apologies for not posting any real content here for a long time. In the meantime here's another Techno Tuesday by Andy Rementer.

New Books

Some recent books I've bought or spotted:

Hal Niedzviecki's The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors looks at oversharing in the digital age. Naturally he has a blog, a twitter account, a webcam, a forthcoming documentary, and much more at the book's site.

From the book description:

We have entered the age of "peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security, and even humanity. Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, over-the-counter spy gear, blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn, surveillance technology, Dr. Phil, Borat, cell phone photos of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and more. In the age of peep, core values and rights we once took for granted are rapidly being renegotiated, often without our even noticing.

[...] Part travelogue, part diary, part meditation and social history, The Peep Diaries explores a rapidly emerging digital phenomenon that is radically changing not just the entertainment landscape, but also the firmaments of our culture and society.

Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, just out in paperback, seems like a broad hybrid of sociology, psychology, history, cultural studies and philosophy. I've only read a couple chapters, and while it's not the quickest read, I'm finding it compelling as it combines a lot of things I'm interested in. In the book's prologue (about half of which you can read in the Amazon preview) he says that the book is the first of a planned "Pandora" trilogy. It sounds ambitious, though he seems mightily prolific. He writes:

This is the first of three books on material culture, all related to the dangers in Pandora's casket, though each is intended to stand on its own. This book is about craftsmanship, the skill of making things well. The second volume addresses the crafting of rituals that manage aggression and zeal; the third explores the skills required in making and inhabiting sustainable environments. All three books address the issue of technique--but technique considered as a cultural issue rather than as a mindless procedure; each book is about a technique for conducting a particular way of life. The large project contains a personal paradox that I have tried to put to productive use. I am a philosophically minded writer asking questions about such matters as woodworking, military drills, or solar panels.

Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper's and apparently the inventor of the flash mob, has a new book called And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. From the description:

And Then There’s This is Bill Wasik’s journey along the unexplored frontier of the twenty-first century’s rambunctious new-media culture. He covers this world in part as a journalist, following “buzz bands” as they rise and fall in the online music scene, visiting with viral marketers and political trendsetters and online provocateurs. But he also wades in as a participant, conducting his own hilarious experiments: an e-mail fad (which turned into the worldwide “flash mob” sensation), a viral website in a monthlong competition, a fake blog that attempts to create “antibuzz,” and more. He doesn’t always get the results he expected, but he tries to make sense of his data by surveying what real social science experiments have taught us about the effects of distraction, stimulation, and crowd behavior on the human mind. Part report, part memoir, part manifesto, part deconstruction of a decade, And Then There’s This captures better than any other book the way technology is transforming our culture.

Wade Rouse's (third) memoir At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life tells the story of his trying to become a self-described “modern-day Thoreau.” Sounds fairly amusing, and I like the cover.

In a slightly similar vein is One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World by Gordon Hempton. Hempton is an "acoustic ecologist" and writes about his experiences recording the quietest places in the country. The book comes with a CD and is an outgrowth of the One Square Inch project, which seeks to preserve a quiet space in Olympic National Park.

Dan Lyons on Singularity Man Ray Kurzweil

Dan Lyons (formerly Fake Steve Jobs) has an article about Ray Kurzweil, who is behind the new Singularity University and whose book The Singularity is Near will soon be a movie, in Newsweek. Excerpt:

Ray Kurzweil's wildest dream is to be turned into a cyborg—a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream. And there's a moment, halfway through a conversation in his office in Wellesley, Mass., when I start to think that Kurzweil's transformation has already begun. It's the way he talks—in a flat, robotic monotone. Maybe it's just because he's been giving the same spiel, over and over, for years now. He does 70 speeches annually at $30,000 a pop, and draws crowds of adoring fans who worship him as a kind of prophet. Kurzweil is a legend in the world of computer geeks, an inventor, author and computer scientist who bills himself as a futurist. The ideas he's espousing are as radical as anything you've ever heard. But the strangest thing about Ray Kurzweil is that when you sit down for a one-on-one chat with him, he's absolutely boring.

Listen closely, though, and you may be slightly terrified. Kurzweil believes computer intelligence is advancing so rapidly that in a couple of decades, machines will be as intelligent as humans. Soon after that they will surpass humans and start creating even smarter technology. By the middle of this century, the only way for us to keep up will be to merge with the machines so that their superior intelligence can boost our weak little brains and beef up our pitiful, illness-prone bodies. Some of Kurzweil's fellow futurists believe these superhuman computers will want nothing to do with us—that we will become either their pets or, worse yet, their food. Always an optimist, Kurzweil takes a more upbeat view. He swears these superhuman computers will love us, and honor us, since we'll be their ancestors. He also thinks we'll be able to embed our consciousness into silicon, which means we can live on, inside machines, forever and ever, amen.

Link: Ray Kurzweil Wants to Be a Robot.

See also this companion article by John Horgan: Ray Kurzweil's Science Cult.

Dispatches journal - free copy

I've got a spare copy of the latest issue of Dispatches that I will mail to anyone interested (just email me your address -- US only, please). This is volume 1, issue 4 with the theme "out of poverty" (table of contents).

Dispatches is a quarterly political/cultural journal with long-form articles that launched last year with headlines like "Dispatches magazine prefers print over Internet" (see previous post). That was enough to warm luddite hearts like mine, so I gave them a try and bought a subscription. I read the first issue all the way through and I liked it, but I'm probably not going to renew. I appreciate what they're trying to do, but it's pricey at $100/year and they seem to have big distribution problems (issue 2 didn't get sent to some or all subscribers, including me, and everybody apparently got two copies of issue 4, thus the giveaway). I also just have way too much other print piling up to read.

My wavering support notwithstanding, I do like that there are magazines like Dispatches and Lapham's Quarterly keeping high quality nonfiction alive in print magazine form (if only barely).

Galileo Goes To Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion

Interesting new book edited by historian Ronald L. Numbers: Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. From the publisher's page:

If we want nonscientists and opinion-makers in the press, the lab, and the pulpit to take a fresh look at the relationship between science and religion, Ronald Numbers suggests that we must first dispense with the hoary myths that have masqueraded too long as historical truths.

Until about the 1970s, the dominant narrative in the history of science had long been that of science triumphant, and science at war with religion. But a new generation of historians both of science and of the church began to examine episodes in the history of science and religion through the values and knowledge of the actors themselves. Now Ronald Numbers has recruited the leading scholars in this new history of science to ­puncture the myths, from Galileo’s incarceration to Darwin’s deathbed conversion to Einstein’s belief in a personal God who “didn’t play dice with the universe.” The picture of science and religion at each other’s throats persists in mainstream media and scholarly journals, but each chapter in Galileo Goes to Jail shows how much we have to gain by seeing beyond the myths.

What's troubling about WolframAlpha

From an AP review (dated May 13) of WolframAlpha by Brian Bergstein:

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I'm troubled by the potential for WolframAlpha. I fear the implications of an information butler that is considered so smart and so widely applicable that people turn to it without question, by default, whenever they want to know something.

What's that, you say? We already have such a service?

Well, for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.

Unlike search engines that deliver links that match keywords in your query, WolframAlpha is more of a black box. If you have it perform a calculation, it gives you an answer, along with a small link for "source information." Open that and you'll generally be told the data was "curated"—found and verified—by the company behind WolframAlpha. In other words, "trust us."

The site does suggest ways to track down similar information from other sources, including government statistics, proprietary databases, almanacs and the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. To confirm WolframAlpha's data I went a suddenly old-fashioned route—through Web searches on Google and Yahoo. I didn't find any errors, but taking that step made me wonder why I didn't just use Google or Yahoo to begin with.

Link: Review: Flaws in Web's much-touted WolframAlpha.

Rory Litwin has posted similar comments at Library Juice: Wolfram Alpha: Bad Idea!

Technology to help you compose inane chatter

Rob Walker writes in the New York Times about Plinky, a tool to help you think of stuff to write online. Heaven forbid you let your tweet stream (or your Wave) go silent while you think of something worthwhile to say. That's for old people!

Excerpt:

It has never been easier to express yourself in public. Whatever you might want to say, the online tools to let you say it to a (theoretically) worldwide audience are innumerable. Say it long, say it short, say what you want, when you want and how often you want. As the title of a forthcoming book about blog culture puts it: “Say Everything.” You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express?

Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you. Plinky.com, which officially went online in January, exists specifically to offer what it calls prompts, meant to inspire interesting thoughts to share with the world.

[...]

Thus Plinky’s daily prompts: Which movie’s characters would you befriend in real life? What will you do when the zombies come? Who would win a fight between a bear and a shark? Plinky users responded to that last question by the hundreds. A prompt about songs for a road trip got more than 2,000 replies, making it the most popular query to date. The intentionally innocuous nature of the prompts makes them reminiscent of canned cocktail-party conversation starters. The difference is that while a tongue-tied party guest can at least try to cultivate an air of brooding mystery that might lead someone else to start the conversation, the Internet wallflower is totally invisible. Chime in, or you’re forgotten. Thus a Plinky slogan: “Hey, didn’t you use to have a blog?” Poignant.

Link: Say What? (I like the accompanying comic too)

I bet some Google engineers are already working (in their 20% time) to add similar semi-automated chatter features into Wave so your conversations can be self generating. Call it Standing Wave (tm).

I hope to write more about Google Wave later... I'm not sure yet what I think of it. I watched part of the presentation and it looks impressive, but I'm not convinced it's necessary. It's telling for me that their goal was simply to create "what email would look like if it were invented today." That seems odd to me (but typically Google).

Update: Just noticed that Scott Rosenberg (author of the above mentioned book about blogs) posted a nice analysis of Wave at his site: Do you prefer Google Wave's swirl or a clean river?

Dave Eggers Defends Print and Reading

Novelist Dave Eggers, in a speech excerpted in the New Yorker:

To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. …

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

Link: Dave Eggers will prove you wrong (The New Yorker via MobyLives).

"826" is 826 National, a fantastic nonprofit that runs writing and tutoring centers for kids. Eggers was being honored for the project at this event.

NYT on "The Coming Superbrain"

John Markoff writes about AI, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity, and other such things in a New York Times article. Excerpt:

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technologymight be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly. [...]

Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.

That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion. [...]

“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”

Link: The Coming Superbrain

Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Comic

Stuart McMillen has created a nice graphic adaptation of Neil Postman's comparison of Orwell vs. Huxley in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Link to comic: Amusing Ourselves To Death.

(via Josh Sowin)

Techno Tuesday: Still Charging

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer and is posted with permission.

Revisiting Snow's Two Cultures

New Scientist asked several prominent people for an update on C.P. Snow's Two Cultures: Science and Art: Still Two Cultures Divided?  I finally got around to reading Two Cultures a few months ago. What I liked best was Stefan Collini's historical introduction (which takes up about half the book and is worth the price).

Collini is the first respondent in New Scientist's article:

C. P. Snow intended to call his lecture "The Rich and the Poor" - and regretted not doing so. This title points to what remains valuable about the essay now. Helping the world's impoverished majority meet their basic needs remains an obligation of richer societies, and applied science is a vital tool.

In other ways, though, Snow's lecture is superficial and misleading. Despite its subsequent reputation, it does not make useful distinctions between types of enquiry or discipline, making a thin contrast between "physicists" and "literary intellectuals" (mostly modernist poets and novelists, not scholars in the humanities). It also identified a rather outdated element of English cultural attitudes and snobbery, rather than a true divide between disciplines. It makes better sense to talk of "two-hundred-and-two cultures" than of "two cultures". [...]

The more damaging influence of Snow's lecture has been to encourage the prejudice that natural science is the only reliable source of "objective" knowledge, and to support the misguided belief that science and technology are undervalued in the UK and so should receive preferential treatment.

Update: Seed Magazine has a similar feature about Two Cultures, but theirs is video  because Seed is all hip and youthful: Are We Beyond The Two Cultures?

The Complexities of Dying in a High-Tech Era

I thought this recent Fresh Air interview with Robert Martensen was very good: End of Life Care in America, A Doctor's Diagnosis. Martensen discusses the problem of medical intervention in the very final stages of life.

He has written a book called A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era.

From the book description:

Critical illness is a fact of life. Even those of us who enjoy decades of good health are touched by it eventually, either in our own lives or in those of our loved ones. And when this happens, we grapple with serious and often confusing choices about how best to live with our afflictions.

 

A Life Worth Living is a book for people facing these difficult decisions. Robert Martensen, a physician, historian, and ethicist, draws on decades of experience with patients and friends to explore the life cycle of serious illness, from diagnosis to end of life. He connects personal stories with reflections upon mortality, human agency, and the value of “cutting-edge” technology in caring for the critically ill. Timely questions emerge: To what extent should efforts to extend human life be made? What is the value of nontraditional medical treatment? How has the American health-care system affected treatment of the critically ill? And finally, what are our doctors’ responsibilities to us as patients, and where do those responsibilities end? Using poignant case studies, Martensen demonstrates how we and our loved ones can maintain dignity and resilience in the face of life’s most daunting circumstances.

Novelist Jim Harrison's blurb gets to the heart of the matter:

“A Life Worth Living is a deeply engaging book. It can be read as a self-defense manual. In fact it should be read by, say, anyone over forty-five because we are all destined to do battle with the medical industrial complex which seems quite confused about helping us out of life. Martensen, who is both an M.D. and an historian of medicine, gracefully illumines the problems we all face.” – Jim Harrison, author of Returning to Earth

In Mortal Hands

This new book sounds very interesting: In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age by Stephanie Cooke. From the book description:

This provocative history of nuclear power is perfectly timed for today, when Americans are gravely concerned with nuclear terrorism, and a nuclear renaissance is seen as a possible solution to global warming. Few have truly come to terms with the complexities of an issue which may determine the future of the planet. Nuclear weapons, it was once hoped, would bring wars to an end; instead, they spurred a massive arms race that has recently expanded to include North Korea and I ran. Once seen as a source of unlimited electricity, nuclear reactors breed contamination and have been used as covers for secret weapons programs, from India and Pakistan to Iraq and Iran. 

The evolving story of nuclear power, as told by industry insider Stephanie Cooke, reveals the gradual deepening of our understanding of the pros and cons of this controversial energy source. Drawing on her unprecedented access, Cooke shows us how, time and again, the stewards of the nuclear age—the more-is-better military commanders and civilian nuclear boosters—have fallen into the traps of their own hubris and wishful thinking as they tried to manage the unmanageable. Their mistakes are on the verge of being repeated again, which is why this book deserves especially close attention now.

The author has a web site for the book at In Mortal Hands.

Twitter, Books and Reading

A few interesting items I spotted in the cyberstreams today related to twitter, books, and reading:

Seth Finkelstein has a nice post summing up what Twitter is all about (in short, ego): Twitter -- I'm not getting suckered again.

Nicholas Carr wrote a very funny piece (Tim Writes a Book) about Tim O'Reilly's new simplified book for the twitter set called The Twitter Book. O'Reilly has said it "reinvents the book in the age of the web" by omitting such troubling things as "a sustained narrative." This book does sound silly and a bit pointless, but to his credit, O'Reilly has also published Steve Talbott's thoughtful critiques of technology (and they're nothing if not sustained narratives), so maybe it balances out.

Meanwhile, in that alternate reality where people still read complicated works of fiction, Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas puts out a call not just for more readers but for new, active "readers of talent":

"In the flames of this dream of mortgages and the golden calf of the gothic novel, the stupid legend of the passive reader was forged. This monster’s fall is giving way to the reappearance of the reader of talent, and the terms of the moral contract between author and the public are being reframed. Those writers breathe once more who are desperate for an active reader, for a reader open enough to permit into her mind the figure of a conscience radically different from her own."

Link: Vila-Matas Calls for Readers of Talent (Conversational Reading)

If you read Spanish (I don't) you can follow that link to the whole column. Two of Vila-Matas's books are available in English and I highly recommend them. I liked Bartleby & Co. so much I accidentally bought it twice.