Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Cynthia Haven, The Book Haven (Standford University)

Remember a few days ago we promised that we’d have a lot more to say about the links between our hotshot social media and the information explosions that rocked previous centuries?

Well, here goes, my article earlier today:

If you feel overwhelmed by social media, you’re hardly the first. An avalanche of new forms of communication similarly challenged Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries.

“In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” said Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of Stanford’s BiblioTech program. “It was an early modern version of information overload.”

The Copernican Revolution, the invention of the printing press, the exploration of the New World – all needed to be digested over time. There was a lot of catching-up to do. “It was a dynamic, troubling, messy period,” she said.

Public postal systems became the equivalent of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and smartphones. Letters crisscrossed Paris by the thousands daily. Voltaire was writing 10 to 15 letters a day. Dramatist Jean Racine complained that he couldn’t keep up with the aggressive letter writing. His inbox was full, so to speak.

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Image: Voltaire Writing, via bookhaven.stanford.edu

Namit Arora, Philosophy Now

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent – meaning, possessing the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots’. Neural network research was hot, and one of my professors was a star in the field. A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise. I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of life: how much we subconsciously acquire and call upon to get through life; how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living; and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined these things are with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the Turing test, so that we couldn’t distinguish its responses from those of a human? How could a machine that did not care about its own existence ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that although extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter amenable to the laws of physics. They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. (Recently Dennett declared, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.” – see ‘Daniel Dennett Explains How People Are Like Robots’, Bigthink.com, 9 Mar 2009.) Our intelligence, and everything else that informs our being in the world, had to be somehow coded into our brain’s circuitry – including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we rely on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t decode this, and reproduce intelligence in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us?

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