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A crash course in changing the world.
Augmenting human intellect
Have you ever heard of Doug Engelbart?
No?
If you haven't, did you know that you are daily using one of the tools he invented?
Did you also know that the mouse, the tool he invented and first showed at a famous demo in 1968, was part of a wider quest to "augment human intellect"?
Look at the announcement for that 1968 event "... investigating principles by which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capacity".
How do you think the computer is augmenting human intellect today, 42 years after that first demonstration of the mouse?
Views: 39
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Comment by Brian Ballsun-Stanton on March 9, 2010 at 8:47am
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Look at Vinge's Rainbows End for the best example of augmented intellect through computation. At the root, computers are moving the demands from knowledge-in-the-head to knowledge-at-hand (to translate Heidegger.) It's no longer about what we know, but about domain expertise to know what we /can/ know.
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Comment by cameron michael keys on March 9, 2010 at 10:02am
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Rainbow's End is one of my favorites, Brian! Kids are playing a park and each one sees different colors, shapes, and cultural objects than the others due to augmented contact lenses. My favorite part is when the ACTUAL library at University of California at San Diego, which has been rigged to sway-stabilize through software protocols, is hijacked and walks around like a spider!!!!
(By the way, I think Greg Egan's book Distress is also a good example of augmented reality: the journalist main character has a digital power input where his belly button used to be!!!!)
It's very auspicious you should be blogging about augmenting cognitive functions, Raymond; as I just started reading Jaron Lanier's brand new book You are Not a Gadget. Lanier writes in the first few pages: "As technologists..." writes Lanier,
We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.
I'm really excited to read Lanier's new book. It was published January 12, 2010 -- I can't find any record of it on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Your post is certainly striking, it's not the typical perspective people are inclined to take about their cultural artifacts.
The question "Where does augmented cognition lead?" is almost a metaphysical question; and like most metaphysical questions, the answer you give tells us more about YOU than it does about the actual future.
I personally think Dr. Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona is at the forefront of realistic investigations of the future of cognitive manipulation through cultural artifacts. He begins his survey of the topic through an investigation into the actual cognitive capacities of the brain, which are even more complex than the computationalists could ever imagine.
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/Google_000.htm (video presentation)
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/ultimatecomputing.html (amazingly informative e-book [see the final chapter specifically for Hameroff's sci-fi speculation about the future of cognitive manipulation])
Peace // Cameron
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