Last month I wrote about good design. Some of my research for developing world designs took me to a crowdfunding site called “The Unreasonable Institute” where I found One Earth Designs and Cal Sol Agua. That intrigued me. In the manner of synchronous events, I saw a tweet from Neil Gaiman that day about a project on the crowdfunded art site Kickstarter. Which is how I started down the path of the changing (and growing) power of the crowd for this month’s column. Continue reading Crowd Power
Monthly Archives: March 2011
You can write your own connective gag for these two links
Via Hack-A-Day, the oddballs at Backyard Brains demonstrate a prototype technoexoskeletal assembly for the remote control of insect pests on the move. Shorter version: RoboRoach!
And via Kyle Munkittrick, (software) RoboLawyers:
The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”
The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.
Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.
For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.
I should probably stop being so publicly disparaging about the legal industries, really, lest these expert systems crawl all my online witterings and decide to set me up for a fall…
Mind Map of the History of Science Fiction
Does what it says on the tin… and does it gloriously, too. What a super piece of work! Can’t tell you much about it beyond that it’s signed by someone called Ward Shelley (if I’ve read the handwriting correctly)*, and that I saw it via the tweetings of Adam Rothstein and Justin Pickard. Click through for the huge original version, and prepare to lose twenty minutes of your day in sheer wonder.
[ * Addendum: it’s an entry to the seventh iteration of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science contest, which looks like it contains all sorts of other interesting stuff. ]
Schismatic transhuman sects
Ah, more fuel for my puny brain-engine as it flails desperately to put together a coherent position for the H+ UK panel in April. Having already set myself up as a fellow-traveller/fence-sitter, the landscape surrounding the “transhumanist movement” is slowly revealing itself, as if the “fog of war” were lifting in some intellectual real-time-strategy game. What is increasingly plain is that there is no coherent “transhumanist movement”, and that this incoherence will increase – as entropy always does – under the grow-lamps of international media attention, controversies (manufactured and actual), radically perpendicular or oppositional philosophies and bandwaggoning Jenny-come-latelys. In short, interesting times.
For instance: the Transhuman Separatist Manifesto, which prompted a swift counterargument against transhuman militance. A co-author of the former attempts to clarify the manifesto’s position:
We Transhuman Separatists define ourselves as Transhuman. Other Transhumanist schools of thought view H+ as a field of study. While I am fascinated by the field of Transhumanism, I would argue that H+ is most fundamentally a lifestyle — not a trend or a subculture, but a mode of existence. We are biologically human, but we share a common understanding and know that we are beyond human. We Transhuman Separatists are interested in making this distinction through separation.
Do we wish to form a Transhumanist army, and kill the humans who aren’t on our level? My answer here is an obvious no. Do we advocate Second Amendment rights? Absolutely. If anyone attempted to kill me for being weird, I would need to be able to defend myself. There may not currently be people out there who are killing anyone who is H+, but stranger things have happened in our society. If nobody was to attack us, we would not commit violence against anyone. We have no desire to attack the innocent.
I think there is a class distinction in the H+ community. Those of us in the lower/working classes have been through a lot of horrible experiences that those of us in the middle/upper classes might be unable to understand. We have our own form of elitism, which is related to survival, and many of us feel the need for militance. We feel like we have become stronger through our trials and tribulations. Think of us as Nietzschean Futurists. Our goal is to separate from the human herd and use modern technology to do it.
When Haywire claims that transhuman separatism is merely a desire to escape the tyranny of biology, I believe hir. I also know very well – as I expect zhe does, even if only at a subconscious level – that not everyone will see it that way. The most important word in those three paragraphs is the opening “we”; it’s the self-identification of a group that are already aware their goals will set them aside from (and quite possibly at ideological opposition to) a significant chunk of the human species. They may not desire militancy, but it will be thrust upon them.
More interesting still is the way the transhumanist meme can cross social barriers you’d not expect it to. Did you know there was a Mormon Transhumanist Association? Well, there is [via TechnOcculT and Justin Pickard]; here’s some bits from their manifesto:
- We seek the spiritual and physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies, as well as communities and their environments, according to their wills, desires and laws, to the extent they are not oppressive.
- We believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable such exaltation, including realization of diverse prophetic visions of transfiguration, immortality, resurrection, renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end.
- We feel a duty to use science and technology according to wisdom and inspiration, to identify and prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances, and to persuade others to do likewise.
So much for the notion of transhumanism as an inherently rationalist/atheist position, hmm? (Though I’d rather have the Mormons dabbling in transhumanism than the evangelicals; the thought of a hegemonising swarm of cyborg warriors-in-Jeebus is not a particularly cheery one for anyone outside said swarm.)
And let’s not forget the oppositional philosophies. For example, think of Primitivism as Hair-shirt Green taken to its ultimate ideological conclusion: planet screwed, resources finite and dwindling, civilisation ineluctably doomed, resistance is futile, go-go hunter-gatherer.
The aforementioned Justin Pickard suggested to me a while back that new political axes may be emerging to challenge or counterbalance (or possibly just augment) the tired Left-Right dichotomy, and that one of those axes might be best labelled as [Bioconservative<–>Progressive]; Primitivism and Militant Transhumanist Separatism have just provided the data points between which we might draw the first rough plot of that axis, but there’ll be more to come, and soon.
It’s International Women’s Day
Did you know that International Women’s Day has been celebrated for over a century? I didn’t know that, and it shames me to say so, but it’s never too late to learn (or so I hope). I’m sure someone will decide to tell us how we don’t overlook the achievements and freedom of women at all, which will be frustrating… but will also demonstrate the presence of the very blindspot it attempts to deny. And so it goes.
All I can say in response is that the feeling that comes from having this particular cultural myopia pointed out to oneself – which always feels to me a little like being debagged in a public space, though less severe each time – is perhaps best looked at in the same way as the muscular pain that comes from unaccustomed heavy exercise, or that brain-stretched sensation that comes with learning something challenging and new. Does it feel like an unwarranted personal attack? Well, welcome to how a lot of women feel. All. Of. The. Time. Your mother, your wife or partner, your sister, your friends.
Oh, they haven’t told you that they felt that way? Well, perhaps there’s a reason for that. Give it some thought.
Anyways, here’s Annie Lennox and a bunch of successful British women discussing the meaning of feminism in the 21st Century. A quote from novelist Monica Ali:
There’s a perception that as countries develop economically issues of gender and inequality will automatically get better, whereas the whole thing needs to be stood on its head so that gender inequality is at the very centre of it all. A lot of studies show that if you focus on women’s rights that in itself is an engine for development. Female literacy rates strongly correlate with fertility rates, so if you educate women you will have fewer and healthier children. If you invest in women, the money they make will then be more likely to be invested in their families and local communities. Gender isn’t something to be dragged along behind.
As we look to the changes in the Middle East, and as our governments ponder what sort of intervention methods will best suit their long-term interests there, let’s at least all spare a moment to imagine the difference that investing in education and literacy could make to the lives of the less-fortunate, and speak in favour of it. Silence is complicity. And remember that while the situation for women in the West is much improved by comparison to those in developing nations, equality gets more lip-service than air-time. I am guilty of this, too, but I am working to do better. Perhaps you will, too.
Every woman is your sister. Every one.