The Singularity University fight cheer
November 12, 2009
Singularity University appears to be in full swing now, which is a great comfort to me. Already I feel much less fearful about being turned into a sex slave for a gang of immeasurably brainy robots.
Ted Greenwald, from Wired's Epicenter blog, has been hanging out at the Sing U campus - it feels, he says, like "a top-secret installation out of a James Bond movie, crowned with strange domed buildings and adorned by sculptures of airships" - and auditing some classes. You can find a rundown of his reports here.
It bothers me, though, that Sing U doesn't appear to have a school mascot yet. I certainly understand that the university is unlikely to be a sports powerhouse, but, still, it's bound to have a few teams - fencing and mental gymnastics, at least - so it really needs a mascot to rally the student body. I've been doing some brainstorming and have come up with a few ideas:
The Exponential Curves
The Uploaded Brains
The Odd Ducks
The Supplements
The Transhumans
But these pale beside what I've come to consider to be the obvious choice: The Singularity University Methuselahs.
Of course, you can't have a school mascot without a school fight cheer. I've come up with one of those too:
Sing! U!
Me! thu! se! lahs!
Never say die!
Never say die!
Sing! U!
Me! thu! se! lahs!
Outlast 'em!
Does my tweet look fat?
November 10, 2009
As the velocity of communication approaches realtime, language compresses.
Think about it. When people originally started talking about Twitter, the first thing they'd always mention was the 140-character limit that the service imposes on tweets. So short! Who can say anything in 140 lousy characters? Crazy!
And it's true that when a person who is used to longer forms of writing starts emitting tweets, keeping to just 140 characters can be a challenge. You actually have to think a bit about how to squeeze your thoughts to fit the format. It doesn't take long, though, for a twitterer to adapt to the new medium, and once you're fully adapted something funny happens. The sense that 140 characters is a constraint not only disappears, but 140 characters starts to seem, well, long. Your own tweets shrink, and it becomes kind of annoying when somebody actually uses the full 140 characters. Jeez, I'm going to skip that tweet. It's too long.
The same thing has happened, of course, with texting. Who sends a 160-character text? A 160-character text would feel downright Homeric. And that's what a 140-character tweet is starting to feel like, too.
I think our alphabetic system of writing may be doomed. It doesn't work well with realtime communication. That's why people are forced to use all sorts of abbreviations and symbols - the alphabet's just too damn slow. In the end, I bet we move back to a purely hieroglyphic system of writing, with the number of available symbols limited to what can fit onto a smartphone keypad. Honestly, I think that communicating effectively in realtime requires no more than 25 or 30 units of meaning.
Give me 30 glyphs and a URL shortener, and I'm good.
This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
Be everywhere now
November 09, 2009
The BBC has recently featured two thoughtful takes on how the Net is altering people's experience of popular music. What's particularly interesting (to me, anyway) is how the two articles examine the same phenomenon - the ability to listen to pretty much anything that's ever been recorded, immediately and for free - but see very different consequences.
In an article that appeared a week or so ago, John Harris proclaimed a new "golden age of infinite music." And he made a compelling case:
I [recently] had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled. At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer.
Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity - whether illegally or not - to indulge it. He is a paid-up fan of bands it took me until I was 30 to even discover - and at this rate, by the time he hits his 20s, he'll have reached the true musical outer limits ...
As the great digital revolution rolls on, bands are no longer having to compete for people's money. Instead, they're jockeying for our time. And the field is huge, crossing not just genres, but eras. Who do you want to investigate today: TV On The Radio or Crosby, Stills and Nash? Do you fancy losing yourself in the brilliant first album by Florence And The Machine, or deriving no end of entertainment from how awful The Rolling Stones got in the 1980s? Little Richard or La Roux? White Lies or Black Sabbath?
As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there's no longer any past - just an endless present ... Really: what's not to like?
Today, the BBC is featuring an equally compelling article by John Taylor - yes, the Duran Duran bass player. "Something the internet has most definitely done," he writes, echoing Harris, "is bring more music from more places and more eras into the hearts and minds of us all, but young people in particular, which is great ... My stepson is at New York University (NYU) and he was telling me how he's currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s. So the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible, and I applaud anything that can inspire interest or curiosity in anyone."
But rather than simply heralding this as the arrival of an endless and endlessly bountiful "present," Taylor takes a more nuanced view. He wonders whether such easy abundance doesn't lead to a flattening of experience: When everything's present, nothing's new.
He recalls a formative experience from his own youth:
In September 1972, Roxy Music appeared on prime time TV in the UK. It was their first national TV exposure, a three-minute appearance performing their first single. And the way they looked and sounded stunned me, and a generation of mes.
But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance again, however badly I wanted to. And the power of that restriction was enormous. The only way I could get close to that experience was to own the song. I lived in the suburbs, so I had to ride my bike for miles before I could find a store that sold music, let alone one that had the record in stock. It was a small trial of manhood and an adventure.
But once I had that song, I could play it whenever I chose. I had to go on a quest of sorts to get it, but my need was such that I did it.
The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix. I believe there's immense power in restriction and holding back.
That "immense power," which in an age of abundance can easily be misperceived as mere constraint, is draining from culture.
I have sympathy for both views. Like Harris, I appreciate, and certainly indulge in, the ability to leap easily from song to song, artist to artist, with no temporal or physical limitation on the experience of music. There is a sense of liberation in being able to be everywhere now - to be able to indulge in what Harris terms "completely risk-free listening." But I have also shared Taylor's experience of, quite literally, going on a ten-mile bike ride to a record store to purchase a yearned-for record, which would then spin for weeks on my turntable, pulling me ever further into the depths of the music. Taylor's right: it was "a quest of sorts." And as with all quests, there were risks involved.
There are those who, in their desire to sell themselves and others an idealized version of progress, are quick to dismiss all fond personal memories as nostalgia. But some of those memories are not sentimental distortions of the past but accurate records of experience. Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our "endless present" is the loss of a certain "magical power" that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he's right.
The informavore in its cage
November 06, 2009
Edge is featuring, in "The Age of the Informavore," a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."The question I am asking myself," Schirrmacher says, "[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life ... And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on."
Tell me about it.
Later in the interview, Schirrmacher wonders what the effects will be as companies collect ever more behavioral data and apply ever more sophisticated predictive algorithms to it:
You have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which [is adapting] to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, [but] which [go] farther and farther in [predicting] certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.
What will this mean for the question of free will? Because, in the bottom line, there are, of course, algorithms, who analyze or who calculate certain predictabilities ... The question of prediction will be the issue of the future and such questions will have impact on the concept of free will. We are now confronted with theories by psychologist John Bargh and others who claim there is no such thing as free will. This kind of claim is a very big issue here in Germany and it will be a much more important issue in the future than we think today. The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives. And, of course, this will play out in the work force — the new German government seems to be very keen on this issue, to at least prevent the worst impact on people, on workplaces.
It's very important to stress that we are not talking about cultural pessimism. What we are talking about is that a new technology which is in fact a technology which is a brain technology, to put it this way, which is a technology which has to do with intelligence, which has to do with thinking, that this new technology now clashes in a very real way with the history of thought in the European way of thinking.
The interview has drawn many responses (including one from me), the most recent of which is from John Bargh, who heads Yale's Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation Lab. He picks up on Schirrmacher's comments on prediction and describes how recent research in brain science is opening up powerful new possibilities for manipulating human behavior:
Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do. And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings). It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses. ...
It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students. This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment. And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we [are] so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate. ...
More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes.
The Web has been called a "database of intentions." The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.
Atmospherics
October 30, 2009
Google held a one-day conference on cloud computing in London last week, called Atmosphere, and they asked me to give a talk on the historical and economic context of the development of the cloud. All the presentations from the event are now up on YouTube, including mine, which if you have a half hour to kill you can watch here:
The other presenters included Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Geoffrey Moore, and various Googlers and their clients.
"The Shallows": publication details
October 28, 2009
I've completed my next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and the manuscript - actually, the wordprocessingscript - is with the publisher, W. W. Norton, for editing and production. (The cover image below is provisional. It will be used in the publisher's catalog, but probably won't be the actual cover of the book.) The Shallows is slated to be published in North America on June 1, 2010, and if you're antsy you can preorder a copy from Amazon today. The English version of the book will also be published in the UK by Atlantic Books, and translations are currently in the works from Blessing in Germany, Seido Sha in Japan, Chungrim in Korea, Ediouro in Brazil, and CITIC in China.
The eternal conference call
October 12, 2009
What goes around comes around, if always a little faster.
Remember when we first started using email, back in the foggy depths of the twentieth century? The great thing about email, everyone said and everyone believed, was that it was an asynchronous communications medium. (Yes, that's how we used to talk.) Email cured the perceived shortcomings of telephone calls, which dominated our work lives. The ring of your phone would butt into whatever you happened to be doing at that moment, and you had no choice but to answer the damn thing (it might be your boss or your client, after all), and then you had no choice but to respond immediately to whatever the person on the another end was saying or asking. The telephone was realtime and it was synchronous, and those were bad things. One of the major roles of the traditional secretary was to add a buffer to the endless stream of phone calls: paying someone to screen your calls was a kludgy way to make a synchronous medium act sort of like an asynchronous one.
When voicemail entered the scene, people cheered at first, but it actually only made matters worse. The phone became an even more demanding medium. The voicemail light was always blinking, and when you listened to a voicemail, you felt compelled to respond immediately. There was a reason we called it "voicemail hell."
And don't even get me started about conference calls.
Email delivered us from the telephone's realtime stream. Suddenly, we controlled, individually, our main communications medium, rather than vice versa. We could choose when to read our email, and, more important, we could choose when to respond - and whom to respond to. The buffer was built into the technology. Even taking just a few minutes to think about a message often led to a more thoughtful response than an immediate, halfbaked phone reply. After email took hold in offices, you always had a few doofus laggards who continued to rely on the phone and voicemail. They were widely despised: synchronous dinosaurs lumbering through the pleasant pastures of asynchronous Internet communication.
But email also did something else, the consequences of which we didn't fully foresee. It dramatically reduced the transaction costs of personal communication. You had to think at least a little bit before placing a phone call, not just because it might cost you a few cents but because you knew you were going to interrupt the other person. Is this really necessary, or can it wait? Email removed that calculation from the equation. Everything was worth an email. (As direct marketers and spammers also soon discovered.) And there was the wonderful CC field and the even more wonderful Reply All button. Broadcasting, cumbersome with the phone, became easy with email.
Goodbye voicemail hell. Welcome to email hell.
Turns out, we were mistaken about email all along. Asynchrony was never actually a good thing. It was simply an artifact of a paucity of bandwidth. Or so we're told today, as the realtime stream - texts, tweets, Facebook updates - o'erbrims its banks, and out on the horizon rises the all-consuming Wave. In "Wave New World," an article in the current edition of Time, Lev Grossman writes:
Keep in mind that until the mid-1990s, when e-mail went mainstream, the network environment was very different. Bandwidth was a scarce resource. You had your poky modem and liked it. Which is why e-mail was created in the image of the paper-postal system: tiny squirts of electronic text. But now we're rolling in bandwidth ... And yet we're still passing one another little electronic notes. Google Wave rips up that paradigm and embraces the power of the networked, collaborative, postpaper world.
Jessica Vascellaro makes a similar point in heralding "the end of the email era" in today's Wall Street Journal:
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun. Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? [Email] seems boring compared to services like Google Wave.
The flaw of synchronous communication has been repackaged as the boon of realtime communication. Asynchrony, once our friend, is now our enemy. The transaction costs of interpersonal communication have fallen below zero: It costs more to leave the stream than to stay in it. The approaching Wave promises us the best of both worlds: the realtime immediacy of the phone call with the easy broadcasting capacity of email. Which is also, as we'll no doubt come to discover, the worst of both worlds. Welcome to the conference call that never ends. Welcome to Wave hell.
This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
Cloud koan
October 01, 2009
Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.
Work in progress:
The Shallows
Nick's new book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
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