I know I’m coming to this late, but I just saw this for the first time yesterday. It raises pretty compelling questions for anyone interested in the world and economy we’re going to be living with in a few years, and that our children will grow up in.
Here’s a related wiki.
Where’s the boundary between you and machine, between the gray matter in your skull and the digital technology that governs the Internet and so much else in modern life? It may be harder to find than you think.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Link.
This is like something straight out of a William Gibson novel:
Yes, I blog from a sailboat and cruise the azure waters of the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Mexico. “Call me Slogger,” to borrow from the opening line of that saga of the sea, Moby Dick.
But whales are not my game. I chase lesser creatures. Specifically the men, women and issues involved in the $3 billion California state stem-cell agency — the world’s largest single source of funding for human embryonic-stem-cell research.
David Jensen, a former newspaper reporter and editor and political PR guy blogs from his sailboat off the coast of Mexico. This Wired first-person piece is mostly about the struggle to find Internet access while living on a sailboat. But the fact that he writes mostly about stem cell research and policy makes it all the more remarkable. Ten years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible.
How the world is changing.
A Swedish computer security researcher has discovered that users of the TOR Internet service (which makes your Internet traffic more or less anonymous) apparently thought it also encrypted their computer traffic and made it secure — which it doesn’t.
Wired News reports:
A little over a week ago, Swedish computer security consultant Dan Egerstad posted the user names and passwords for 100 e-mail accounts used by the victims, but didn’t say how he obtained them. He revealed Friday that he intercepted the information by hosting five Tor exit nodes placed in different locations on the internet as a research project.
Egerstad was able to get email accounts and passwords and read emails sent by the worthies at the Iranian embassy, among other groups. Even though Egerstad is in Sweden and there were no U.S. government agencies whose Internet traffic he intercepted, the Web host that hosts his blog apparently got a take-down notice from some unnamed U.S. law enforcement agency. I wonder if Egerstad has revealed a U.S. intelligence gathering mechanism.
There’s another lesson in this, of course: This computer security stuff shouldn’t be taken lightly, and there’s a big dangerous world out there. Use good passwords. And use ‘https’ when you’re doing anything online that involves passwords or email you want to keep confidential.
It seems that people in Second Life behave, at least in economic terms, very much like they do in the real world. They buy goods for the status those things confer and work to earn money.
When people are given the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature. Players in this digital, global game don’t have to work, but many do. They don’t need to change clothes, fix their hair, or buy and furnish a home, but many do. They don’t need to have drinks in their hands at the virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right, to feel comfortable.
Second Life residents find ways to make money so they can spend it to do things, look impressive, and get more stuff, even if it’s made only of pixels. In a place where people should never have to clean out their closets, some end up devoting hours to organizing their things, purging, even holding yard sales.
So virtual human nature seems to be very similar to real human nature. The economic life of Second Life and the real world intersect in other ways, as well.
Italian employees of IBM are planning a strike in the virtual world, and a SL bank has experienced a run on its deposits that forced the firm to shut down.
Author Ray Bradbury says his landmark novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” is not about censorship.
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
Link.
(via SF Signal)
Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield is writing a book online titled “Listen.”
Because it turns out that all those guys with the PowerPoint presentations you’ve been sitting through for the past three years – you know, the ones insisting “The consumer is in control” – are absolutely right. The consumer (and voter and citizen) is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsover or to make your life a living hell. This might be an excellent time, therefore, to listen to what she has to say. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to make her your friend.
Introduction to the project here, first installment, and second installment.
Warren Ellis has a short, but insightful, set of points on what he’s calling ‘burst culture.’ None of this, as he points out, is new. But many, many people in traditional print media still don’t get it. It’s all basic economics: low barriers to entry, easy monetization, etc.
I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?
Despite the success of magazines like the New Yorker in the last few years notwithstanding, many print publishers seem to believe the future is in imitating the kind of content the Web does best. Maybe we should be rethinking that approach.
Link.
Are you dreaming of a vacation in space? This doesn’t sound so fun:
For starters, any prolonged flight outside the atmosphere risks exposure of cells to sickening levels of radiation. The skin of a spaceship is not much safer. Space is littered with lithic debris, and a collision with a particle no bigger than a pebble could well be catastrophic. (Pockmarks from thousands of tiny impacts slowed the orbit of the Salyut 7 space station so much that it fell from the sky.) A state of microgravity for years will also take its toll on physical and psychic health. Between 3 and 13 percent of personnel on any space mission are likely to show signs of mental illness from claustrophobia, homesickness, chronic boredom and inactivity. The bacteria that causes tooth decay may grow faster in outer space, where dentists are scarce. Food will taste worse and be harder to digest.
Link.
Journalist Michael Pollan explains how U.S. government agricultural subsidies affect the health of Americans, immigration and the environment. The farm bill is a massive a piece of legislation that comes around every five years or so and sets how $25 billion in government subsidies are doled out to farmers, especially those raising corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice (a wag might dub this “socialized farming”).
To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.
And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.
Link.