Category: Future

  • Your next avatar

    There was a good debate at Slate on how far (if at all) we should go in augmenting what we have been biologically endowed with. I’d noted earlier the three tracks of speciation, and how we are already on two of the tracks. (prosthesis and cell/tissue engineering) The debate introduced me to the word ‘transhumanism’, and its proponents believe that nature has done all it can do in terms of human evolution, and we should now take the ownership of driving our evolution forward. The opposing view (that’s not religion based) is that by manipulating all this, we might lose track of ‘being human’. There is a middle path that advocates augmentation to the “species’ typical best”, so that everyone would be ‘maximum humans’.

    One of the conclusions of this debate is that it will happen to us slowly. This is one of the fears I’d expressed in that earlier post – that we won’t realise when it happens to us. One of my other fears on account of increasing lifespans is the economics of it all, again something I’d written earlier. In yet another post, I’d wondered if we would speciate on the basis of whether we want to keep up with the information deluge or not. Those who choose to, would most likely need augmentation of the mind.

    ‘Evolution on Steroids’ is the theme of this article in BBC News (via Vedant), in which Prof. Church would now like to write/edit DNA, now that we have started reading it, with devices that will monitor internal and external environments, warn us, and then change our body accordingly. It’s probably an inevitable reality, with the only real question being ‘when’ and not ‘if’.

    ‘The Cyborg in us all‘ is another excellent read, this time from the NYT, in which I learned of scientists who are working on controlling computers via thoughts. In one of computer engineer Schalk’s experiments, on the effect of Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall – Part 1” on human brains, a particular brain created a model of what it expected to hear, after the music had been switched off in between. What the guys are really working towards though, are neurons and language – eg. thinking ‘cat’ and the image popping up on screen. Towards the end of the article, there is the NeuralPhone – which lets you pick a name from the phone contact list, telepathically.

    That brings me back to the Slate article which mentions this argument against trashumanism -increased lifespans would cause us to be more fearful, because we have more to lose. That would cause us to opt for “safe but shallow digital experiences, leading to long, ultimately empty lives”. This debate on enhanced and extended humanity reminded me of a post by Scott Adams, in which he writes about programmable avatars, which over time, would pick up our preferences and memories so well that they could live on as us even after we die, thereby extending our mortal lives into the infinite. And in ‘Hitchhiker’ style, he wonders if this has already happened. We are avatars of those who came before us – a premise not dissimilar to one I had reached via a different path. So much for humanity, and the debate about it. 🙂

    until next time, Google Human+

  • Memories Unlimited

    I was thinking about memories one day, and suddenly decided to figure out my earliest memory. I was dismayed to find that the earliest one I could remember was 1st Standard, the colour of the round badge I wore on my tie and the bus I went to school in.

    I looked at old photographs of mine, and tried to figure out if I could remember what was happening while the picture was being taken. I saw the badge and the uniform, and wondered if my mind was playing a trick on me by ‘creating’ a memory from the raw material available. ( since I must have seen this photo earlier many times) As the photos became more recent, I could remember more and more, and recent photos, especially the travel ones, still seem fresh. But for how long? I began to wonder if all those vacation photos and the lifestreaming is a wasted effort. Thankfully, I document a lot of things, creating as many memory aids as possible. Videos help too, and yet…

    A relative is traveling to the Czech Republic. A couple of decades ago, the currency and capital would’ve been ‘delivered’ (in my mind) without prompting, or being asked for. Now I probably have to google for that data. But I remember the prayers I used to say daily then, and from the order in which I can chant them, I can even remember the way the deity pictures were hung in the room, though I haven’t said those prayers regularly in years. Ditto for certain Carnatic music kirtanams.  Practice may or may not make perfect, but it certainly fixes it to memory, along with a ton of associated memories from another age. 🙂

    I wanted to augment this post with something Anu had shared a while ago on Twitter – a post titled ‘The unaugmented mind‘, which is on the same topic. The irony was that I remembered that she had shared it, but had no idea on the source itself. Thanks to my own twitter backup and a third party search tool, that was remedied soon. When she shared this, I remarked that I remember weird things I mostly found unnecessary and said I wished we could choose the things we wanted to store in our memory, like virtual world filing systems. Sometime soon, I hope, but I doubt whether even the perfect documentation would capture the way we felt then, because we will have changed. But maybe the augmented human will change that too.

    until next time, what’s your earliest memory? 🙂

  • God Plus

    The thread that interested me most in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (Volume One of The Baroque Cycle) was on Predestination vs Free Will, something I’ll continue to read up on. The book has a conversation between Daniel Waterhouse, a fictional character and Gottfried Leibniz, in the chapter Daniel and Leibniz Discourse (II), in which Leibniz puts forward a thought that there is an incorporeal organising principle, which organises and informs the body. He calls it the Cogitatio, and later uses it interchangeably with Mind, but different from brain, which is a mechanical phenomenon. With this, he attempts to find a middle ground between free will and predestination by stating that Mind and Matter grew out of a common centre and “I have complete freedom of action… but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is in my nature to act in harmony with the world..” (seems close to Molinism)

    While the recent exploits of humans would dispel this last thought in a jiffy, it did set me thinking on another subject of fascination – Singularity, “the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence.” I still wonder whether it would be a ‘Skynet’ version (a superb post by Chris Anderson) or a an augmented human. (something I wrote earlier)

    The thought is whether God’s design had anticipated a Singularity for humans. A state in which the human being will understand and create things far more ‘advanced’ than God can? What would be the relevance of the idea of God then? And in parallel, what would be the human’s role if machines are the way to technological singularity?

    On the flip side, as i wrote in the earlier post, if augmented humans are the way to singularity, would the human mind as we know now exist then? Most probably not, and that would explain why if indeed God did make us in his form, we have no recollection of him or his idea of Singularity.

    Or maybe, some among our species already have reached it, without artificial augmentation, and that’s what we call nirvana, when you can bend the spoon, if it exists. 🙂

    until next time, the God complex is also a possibility 🙂

  • A People Person?

    Scott Adams’ post titled “People who don’t need people” (via Surekha) reminded me of Asimov’s Spacers, the first humans to emigrate to space, and their life on Aurora, the first of the worlds they settled. Scott Adams predicts that “we will transfer our emotional connections from humans to technology, with or without actual robots. It might take a generation or two, but it’s coming. And it probably isn’t as bad as it sounds.“

    In the huge canvas that Asimov had created, the Spacers chose low population sizes and longer lifespans (upto 400 years) as a means to a higher quality of living, and were served by a large number of robots. As per wiki, “Aurora at its height had a population of 200 million humans and 10 billion robots.“

    These days, as I experience the vagaries of the cliques and weak ties – not just Malcolm Gladwell’s much flogged social media version, but even real life ones, I can’t help but agree with Scott Adams that it won’t be as bad as it sounds. I probably wouldn’t mind it at all.

    When I feel like a freak
    When I’m on the other end of someone’s mean streak
    People make fun I’ve got to lose myself
    Take my thin skin and move it somewhere else

    I’m setting myself up for the future
    Looking for the chance that something good might lie ahead
    I’m just looking for the possibilities
    In my mind I’ve got this skin I can shed

    Scott Adams began his post noting that humans are overrated. Sometimes, I wonder whether humanity is, and whether losing our current perceptions of it would actually make a difference. (earlier post on the subject)

    Lyrics: Invisible, Bruce Hornsby

    until next, bot.any

  • Evolution of Enterprise 2.0

    In the last post  – on defining social collaboration – I had also applied it in the context of social business. It was a brief mention and I did describe it as a utopian thought at this stage. However it reminded me of a debate late last year on Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, because ‘collaborative tools’ found mention then. The reasons for the debate notwithstanding, it was still interesting.

    It began with a post from Andrew McAfee, written in favor of Enterprise 2.0 and in which he pretty much called ‘social business’ geriatric. 🙂 Stowe Boyd shot back with this post, giving his definition of social business and insisting that the nomenclature was important.In keeping with my generally agreeable nature, I subscribe to parts of both thoughts. Social business as an idea is indeed old, but its adoption has been patchy at best. The ‘social’ tools of this era can enable greater, better and more consistent adoption, as there is indeed much potential for synthesis when people, processes and technology meet. Because of this, the manifestation of ‘social business’ would be new.

    But in my mind, there is quite a dichotomy between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 anyway, primarily because of intent, and therefore the way they’re pitched as ideas. To use them interchangeably would be doing injustice to both. Enterprise 2.0 focuses on using social technologies to address the objectives of the organisation. But Social Business has a larger role and (for the purpose of a direct comparison) would involve setting organisational objectives with a social-societal perspective and a purpose that people can identify with. In Hugh MacLeod’s words, “the need to belong  to something that matters”.

    Is one better than the other? I don’t think so and it is perhaps not an apt comparison. Enterprise 2.0 is perhaps a better fit (relatively) to the current organisational frameworks, while Social Business is much more radical. But it is quite possible that over a period of time, an organisation that adopts Enterprise 2.0 will transform into a Social Business. As for social collaboration, it is a process that can fit well into both.

    until next time, a social enterprise 🙂