More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits. Since people will be inexorably connecting to one another through computers from here on out, we must find an alternative.
pretty vague and silly
Ideas that were once tucked away in the obscure world of artificial intelligence labs have gone mainstream in tech culture. The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system. That doesn’t mean we are condemned to a meaningless existence. Instead there is a new kind of manifest destiny that provides us with a mission to accomplish. The meaning of life, in this view, is making the digital system we call reality function at ever-higher “levels of description.”
I don't know who believes this...
Instead, it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves.
Microsoft word deciding that you are creating a list??
Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.
did not know about the parlor game
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
not a bad point
in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity.
except people give strictly *less* authority to a wikipedia article as an article in a traditional encyclopedia?
yet we don’t hold sentence-comprehension tournaments,
speed reading tournaments exist. Also, literature departments
Kasparov seems to have allowed himself to be spooked by the computer, even after he had demonstrated an ability to defeat it on occasion. He might very well have won if he had been playing a human player with exactly the same move-choosing skills as Deep Blue (or at least as Deep Blue existed in 1997).
Maybe?
People already tend to defer to computers, blaming themselves when a digital gadget or online service is hard to use.
yeah this seems fair
The borders of personhood remain variegated and fuzzy.
not for me
Daniel Dennett
Kevin suggested that it was not just a good thing, but a “moral imperative” that all the world’s books would soon become effectively “one book” once they were scanned, searchable, and remixable in the universal computational cloud.
this feels like a silly straw man
people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments.
this feels right
One percent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. So how many seconds of salvaged erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein?
oh come on. "Genius is 99% perspiration"...
The idea of friendship in database-filtered social networks is certainly reduced from that.
Does listing your book in a library catalog "reduce"
the book?
There’s an odd lack of curiosity about the limits of crowd wisdom.
This feels right
new. If the same researchers had done something similar without digital technology, they would at the very least have lost their jobs. Suppose they had spent a couple of years and significant funds figuring out how to rig a washing machine to poison clothing in order to (hypothetically) kill a child once dressed.
this analogy doesn't seem fair, don't know why
this doesn't really feel like a fair analogy
The reason that computer viruses infect PCs more than Macs is not that a Mac is any better engineered,
is this so?
Just as the idea of a musical note was formalized and rigidified by MIDI, the idea of drive-by, trollish, pack-switch anonymity is being plucked from the platonic realm and made into immovable eternal architecture by software.
what a terrible sentence
Medicine is on the verge of mastering some of the fundamental mechanisms of aging.
i doubt it
great word
only toil within the foundation layer of Maslow’s
There was a discernible ambient disgust with advertising in an earlier, more hippielike phase of Silicon Valley, before the outlandish rise of Google. Advertising was often maligned back then as a core sin of the bad old-media world we were overthrowing. Ads were at the very heart of the worst of the devils we would destroy, commercial television.
dollar projector can be set up anywhere, in the woods or at the beach, and generate as good an experience. That is the world we will live in within a decade.
Patrons gave us Bach and Michelangelo, but it’s unlikely patrons would have given us Vladimir Nabokov, the Beatles, or Stanley Kubrick.
patrons all the way?
you are young and childless, you can run around in a van to gigs, and you can promote those gigs online. You will make barely any money, but you can crash on couches and dine with fans you meet through the web.
When were there better opportunities than this?
I’ll be an optimist and suggest that America will somehow convince the world to allow us to maintain our privileged role.
a good prediction so far
In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money.
?
(which I discuss more fully in Chapter 14). Many a lecture I gave in the 1980s would end with a skeptic in the audience pointing out loudly and confidently that only a tiny minority of people would ever write anything online for others to read. They didn’t believe a world with millions of active voices was remotely possible—but that is the world that has come to be.
is it? I don't think anywhere near the majority are creators
other cases where consensus will be needed. One online requirement that hurt newspapers before they gave up and went “open” was the demand that you enter your password (and sometimes your new credit card numbers) on each and every paid site that you were interested in accessing. You could spend every waking minute entering such information in a world of millions of wonderful paid-content sites. There has to be a universal, simple system.
yes
I’m also glad we only have one currency, one court system, and one military. Even the most extreme libertarian must admit that fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government.
Who is "we?"
you chose to switch, you would have the potential to earn money from your bits—such as photos and music—when they were visited by other people. You’d also pay when you visited the bits of others. The total you paid per month would, on average, initially work out to be similar to what you paid before, because that is what the market would bear. Gradually,
Sound's like Brave's "basic attention token"
Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from.
Ha
If canned content becomes a harder product to sell in the internet era,
nope, hollywood is fine. Netflix is great
A songle is a dongle for a song.
yeah. no
But highly inventive contracts, such as leveraged default swaps or schemes based on high-frequency trades, would be created in an entirely new way. They would be denied ambiguity. They would be formally described. Financial invention would take place within the simplified logical world that engineers rely on to create computing-chip logic.
A legitimately interesting idea. I've only heard of "smart contracts" in the context of (stupid) cryptocurrency, has this idea had any traction in traditional finance over the past 15 years?
Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk raised the bar for musical intelligence
eww
The Beatles’ recordings were in part a rapid reconnaissance mission into the possibilities of multitrack recording, stereo mixes, synthesizers, and audio special effects such as compression and varying playback speed.
let's be real, the Beatles are 90% about catchy tunes
popular music created in the industrialized world in the decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s doesn’t have a distinct style—
sure, dude
realize the whole point is to get a lot of free content out there, especially content that can be mashed up, but why won’t Creative Commons provide an option along the lines of this: Write to me and tell me what you want to do with my music. If I like it, you can do so immediately. If I don’t like what you want to do, you can still do it, but you will have to wait six months. Or, perhaps, you will have to go through six rounds of arguing back and forth with me about it, but then you can do whatever you want. Or you might have to always include a notice in the mashup stating that I didn’t like
...more
love it
It seems to me that if Wikipedia suddenly disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors and with a greater sense of style and presence—though some might counter that the non-Wikipedia information is not organized in as consistent and convenient a way. The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy. There really is no longer any technology behind the choice of the first result for a great many searches. Especially on mobile
...more
this is fair
Douglas Hofstadter, though each has his own ideas about what the special features should be. Hofstadter suggests that software that includes a “strange loop” bears a resemblance to consciousness. In a strange loop, things are nested within things in such a way that an inner thing is the same as an outer thing.
Pretty sure this is not what Hofstadter means
