wrote:
>
> Technology doesn't have to take away our humanity. It changes us
>which is fine IF the change is to empower us - a la Case's implants and
>Molly's claws - but I want to bring up the potential of problematic changes.
>I will grant that Case and Molly were fine with their toys but surely you
>will concede that Molly as a meat puppet (or any of my examples which you
>did not address) was disempowered and entirely not human.
>
I have a very good paper by Jaron Lanier that discusses the
inhumanizing effects of "intelligent agents' and also such pothetic
manifestations of them as PDAs(Aplle Newton) in which you change your
schedule, your thinking patterns in ways to make the softwre look
smart. Instead of making normal human associations, you limit your
association sot those that can be interpreted by the
software(intelligent agents) such as when your investigating a
particular topic you may find yourself limited to searching only key
phrases, rather then large "ideas" sicne search engines can't
comprehend large phrases like "give me something that is sorta like
this, but is more dense, possible has a touch of that), rather your
associative thinking takes on patterns easily translatable into the
language the intelligent agent uses.
One example is the filter, the kill file is very very mundane,
it just searches for matching phrases, an intelligent agent is
something that would follow your selections adn then build an idea of
what you do and don't like, the problem is, that there is very litle
software available capable of making such "analogs" of your likes and
dislikes and habits, since the human machine is so diverse compared to
what we now have in "machine intelligence." Jaron argues that it is
better to develop skils within your own machine, sicne that human mind
is so much better at drawing associations adn making qualitative and
relational judgments, rather then relying ona peice of software to do
it for you. It's the dumbing of the human, in order t make the
interface to computer look better.
The PDA is a perfect example. I have several freidns who
purchased them, and then watched as they went thru grueling months of
trying to structure their lives around it to make it appear useful,
they woudl do such idiotic things as force themselves to use it to
write down addresses and such, when apaper notepad was much more
efficient. now all of their nice toys sit and gather dust, because
the toys were basically trying to make them conform to the designers
idea of "eficiency and ease of use' rather then their own. each of us
works in vey different ways, we gather info, and proccess it a little
bit differently than anyone else, trying to modify these routines in
your brain, which are higly optimized in order that they coincide with
soem peice of extrenal hardware is what i woudl call "de-humanizing."
The key I think, and the one that Lanier puts forward, is nto to
design better "intelligent agents' but rathe to design better
interfaces so that the work is done by that which si best at it, your
own mind. Gee, I wonder why Jaron is so into VR? Could it be that a
good VR environment woudl provide a magnificent interface to
computers/ Perhaps something along the lines of Cyberspace itself is
really nthing mroe than an attempt to get an interface to informationa
n computers that is easier to proccess fo the human mind which
normally works much bette then machines at making qualitative
judgments about ifnormation.
For awhile I was enamored with the idea of making my own
software agent, and I am still working on it(using a combination fo
python and C and some existing search engines) but nwo I wonder if m
tiem woudl be better spent designing a better interface for myself,
like perhaps getting those V IO glasses I want, adn then designing the
interface for it. Interface work is IMO, much harder than "software
agent' work, cause the software agent allows you to structre the
response you will get from the human side into smoething your machine
can read, the real goal is to move the machines side toward being able
to recieve somethign from the human side in a less "machine" like
manner. Keyword searches can only go so far.
The MIT WebHound si one nice idea tho, it lets you rate pages
and then makes reccomendations of pages you may also like depending on
hwo yu, and your neighbors rates them. it's really pretty nice
actually. I have used it a few times myself, and it does a decent job,
about one out of three pages it reccomends brings me something of
interest. The hard part is building th database of pages within the
WebHound and giving it a good idea of what you like. This is OK, but
what I would prefer a interface that allows me to see ALL of the data
available, adn then make t easier for my mind to do the work of
picking what I like. our mind is uch better at making these judgements
than any algorithm AI can think of to represent them.
>Again, thinking of the meat puppets or the meaties or any of the other human
>bodies but not minds makes me think that technology may transform us to a
>point where language will apply different terms to us.
It already has done that. face it, at least for myself I always put
people into little "catagories" when I see them, or associate them
witha givin media generated image. Fuck yah I'm controlled by what I
see, and what media gets into my head. For instance Omar, like I
described you in the other post, I see you as a college kid, slightly
snobbish and a litle out of touch for where I come from, walking into
a bar that was right next to the coffee shop you meant to hit. That's
my image of you, be it good or bad, I don't know, it just is. And I
develop images liek tht for all the people I meet, or hear about. It
may or may nto be the best way of organizing all of the input I get,
but it's waht I use now, and yes I am developing some other methods.
--
Nesta Stubbs "Betsy, can you find the Pentagon for me?
Cynico Network Consulting It has five sides and a big parking lot"
[email protected] -Fred McMurray-
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