Kevin Kelly, speaking at TED on the next 5,000 days of the Web:
Everything will have embedded in it some sense of connecting to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of Things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels. […] A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms. But in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two, where we embed the information, and the digital nature of things into the material world. That’s what we’re looking forward to. That is where we’re going—this union, this convergence of the atomic and the digital.
Simply put: when the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment. This brew—oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical master, neutrality of a condition of academic integrity—is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom […].
On how and why to change it:
[… The] point is not to treat these topics [equity, education, the environment, governance, the uses of force, health] as topics of study, but as frameworks of action. […] A new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge. Rhetoric: the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect. Design: the art of organizing the world of things. Mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon. Quantitative reasoning takes its proper place at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurment is crucial, as is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery. And when making connections is of the essence, the power of technology emerges with special intensity. But so does the importance of content. […] When improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists at long last take their place at the table when strategies of action are in the process of being designed.
3) On the price of standing idle:
There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.
In this TED talk, Renaissance man Howard Rheingold manages to synthesize a lot of things that I’ve discussed before on L&UL through a lens that’s pretty new: collaboration.
The beginning of Rheingold’s talk focuses on one of the products of collaboration: wealth. This is a key feature of gift economies as well. There is some worth that resides exclusively in the group and is not divisible among or attributable to any its individual members. As tribes of humans farmed and hunted in larger groups, the result was more food than individuals could eat and greater wealth than they could produce on their own. With this new wealth comes specialization, trade, and, ultimately, counting and language. When the printing press emerged, it made language easier to produce and the goal of widespread literacy more possible to obtain. With more people reading, writing, and circulating their ideas, major shifts in thought occurred: the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and constitutional democracy to name just a few. Rheingold’s point is that new wealth always results from new forms of collaboration, and new ways of managing that wealth are then necessarily devised. In this case, simple commerce morphs into Capitalism, a brand of commerce with its own, more institutionally collaborative instruments like insurance and incorporation.
Jonathan Hoefler (whose surname, fittingly, could include not one but two consecutive ligatures, œ and fl) recently pointed to Louis von Ahn’s reCAPTCHA project, which I think is pretty incredible. A CAPTCHA is one of those graphically-distorted bits of text you’re asked to enter before submitting a comment or form on the internet to prove you’re a human being and not some bot or wayward spammer. But reCAPTCHA repurposes that intelligence by not only filtering out bots but also filtering in random words from scanned texts that humans can decipher but computers can’t. Von Ahn explains, “Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one.” 60 million CAPTCHAs per day x 10 seconds per CAPTCHA = About 150,000 of labor per day. As von Ahn suggests, “What if we could make positive use of this human effort? […] Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.” Clay Shirky is definitely onto something.
One of the most fascinating scientific findings I’ve come upon in awhile relates to a group of cells in our brain known as mirror neurons. These neurons were discovered almost by accident in a lab in Parma, Italy when researchers studying neurons relating to motion noticed that a monkey’s neurons fired almost identically when either performing an action or watching an identical action being performed. This simple observation has dramatic consequences, basically allowing us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, and their role in the brain has been tied to the understanding of intentions, empathy, gender difference, and language acquisition, as well as to certain disorders like autism and the phantom limb pain that follows an amputation. More in this NYT article (complete with beautiful illustrations by Leigh Wells) and in this hugely informative short clip from PBS’s Science NOW featuring RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich. Interviewed for the Science NOW segment is the very colorful Vilayanur (or V.S.) Ramachandran, who has done some of the most inventive and groundbreaking work on both mirror neurons and the human brain as a whole. His lecture from last year’s TED Conference is well worth checking out.
I just spent an intense few minutes watching architect Joshua Prince-Ramus’s presentation from the 2006 TED Conference. The way he breaks down design problems and presents his work so simply and directly is admirable.
