Ray Kurzweil spoke at TED earlier this year and announced the formation of Singularity University, an educational and research institution devoted to addressing the impending meeting of man and machine.
I’ve blogged about Kurzweil before - he’s a brilliant garden gnome of a philosopher scientist with a seemingly fantastical take on how our exponentially evolving technologies will eventually (ie. soon) meet and overtake us - but in a good way. He has been scoffed at for years despite the unimpeachable litany of statistics he presents to back up his claims. That was then - this is now.
People aren’t scoffing any more - they’re listening - and they’re participating in the creation of what could possibly be our best hope to stop acting like a bunch of fucking jerk-off stone-throwing chimps. The Singularity Univeristy is backed by NASA and Google. Not bad, Ray, not bad at all.
I don’t know if we’ll be able to meet Kurzweil’s prediction of the Singularity by 2020 and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to upload ourselves into a technical construct and thereby live forever (or until the warranty expires) - what do I know, I’m just a drug addled puppeteer - but I do know our very near future is going to make our very near past look like the frickin’ dark ages. It won’t all be slick and shiny and happy - but it sure as shit won’t be boring.
Consider Kurzweil’s words when he says:
What used to take up a building now fits in our pockets; what now fits in our pockets will fit in a blood cell in 25 years.
Even if we can never crack that leap of wholly integrating ourselves into our machines, as Kurzweil predicts, we will still be fundamentally changed; changed in how we think, how we sense, how we feel, how we comunicate, and how our bodies grow and develop; we will have accomplished a major leap of evolution not through any process of natural selection but through the practical implementation of our own technology.
Don’t snooze while it happens - when you wake up you might not recognize anyone.
I found this video and a link to a site called Pachube over on Bruce Sterling’s always mind-wrinkling blog Beyond The Beyond and was overwhelmed by yet another leap forward in the growth of the web as an extension of not just our mind but also our consciousness.
I’ve ranted abut this before but everytime I stumble across another piece in this unfolding evolution of ourselves and our technologies my mind can’t help but start shoot out the top of my skull with the inherent possibilities of it all.
Ray Kurzweil likes to focus on the Singularity, that point in the not so distant future when our technology and ourselves will meet as equals, and Kevin Kelly has spun off in his writing of The Technium to explore the seemingly inevitable rise of the web and its attendant technologies as a real world metaphorical mind. My friend Bryan and I trade related news stories we find on the web alternating between “This is so fucking bizarre and cool all at the same time!” and “OMFG it’s Skynet! We’re all gonna die!”.
The overview of this strange perspective on how the web is putting truth to Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that our technologies are extensions of ourselves and that media, our communications technologies, are an extension of our senses and if we don’t treat them as such we’re in danger of letting ourselves be controlled - if not by the technology itself then most certainly by those who choose to assume the mantle of power over where we direct our gaze, what sounds we allow to reach our ears and even, ultimately, if Kurzweil is accurate in his predictions, the sensations of touch and taste - perhaps even our emotional responses themselves.
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
Freaky flaky shit to be sure but when you see the rapid deployment and ubiquity of these emerging technologies - the web itself is now but a mere foundation for what is coming down the pipe - it’s difficult not to nod in assent that we are bearing witness to the growth and development of a massive, collective extension of our senses that dwarfs the telephone, radio, television, and the myriad of other forms of reaching out to see and speak to the world (and the universe) around us.
Dystopian science fiction parables warning of technology developing the capability to think like and then out-think humanity abound. The Terminator franchise, lifted from a couple of Harlan Ellison tales, is but the latest iteration; along with the Matrix trilogy, the completely fucked up version of I, Robot and the deliriously dated but still delightful Colossus: The Forbin Project. I love all those films and I understand how the zeitgeist of fear manifests itself in such stories. Ripping yarns of zombies are the current fashion just as alien dopplegangers, like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, were the narrative fashion in the McCarthy era.
These stories reflect our doubts and fears; they show us allegories and metaphors so we may better come to understand the changes which surround and confront us. But they aren’t an accurate depiction of any real world truths. Yes, during the McCarthy era (and, to a lesser extent, during subsequent political shifts) there was the real threat of imposed conformity. We live in times of torture and try to acclimate ourselves to that reality with entertaining tales of sadism like the Saw franchise. So too do we craft stories that put our evolving technologies in the role of antagonist, that thing we do not understand and so we fear it and so we must defend ourselves by destroying it. An age old narrative as entrenched in our bones as any fairy tale or campfire yarn.
But here’s the thing: aside from the sometimes seemingly vicious wrath of nature our only real antagonist is ourselves. That’s what we’re really afraid of - who we are and who we may become. McLuhan sought to open our perceptions to this so we can move forward on our own evolutionary path alongside our technologies, comforted and confident that they are not some ‘enemy from the outside” but an extension of ourselves.
That is not the hand of another which lays before me ready to strike - it is mine own hand - and I have the means to direct its action for good or evil.
A whole bunch of fucking words to lay out a simple point with all this Pachube stuff: It is real time tracking of sensorial input for the web mind.
Huh? Say what?
Make the leap with me. The web - an extension of our mind - is learning how to sense - and through that evolution, it will learn how to feel.
What the fuck?!
Oh yeah.
Imagine these inputs expanding (and they will) and becoming more detailed and more varied. It won’t remain as an interesting set of data that is collected, collated and displayed in pretty pictures. It will react and feedback upon itself. What kind of pictures will be displayed when the heart rate, breath rate, body temperature and EEG signals of every person on the planet is displayed in such a way? Will that fantasmagoric display of swirling coloured data show us the planet can blush? Or turn blue with collective sorrow? And what happens when those sensorial inputs, feeding back upon themselves, do more than just make pretty pictures but also trigger real world responses, to help or to hurt, to react. Whether it is by prompting people to act themselves to fix or exacerbate a problem - or providing an automated response with robotic intervention that outpaces our collective ability to say: “Wait a second, maybe we should think about this first.”
Good and bad can come from this.
The thing itself is neither good nor bad - because it is us. We will be very much like the image of the foetus hovering space at the end of Clarke & Kubrick’s film2001: A Space Odyssey, playing with the world, McLuhan’s global theatre. A collective mind capable of collective thought, independent of each person and at the same time an extension of each person, and capable of real world action. It’s going to happen, folks; and in arriving at that point we would do well to make sure our collective young self has the smarts not to fuck everything up.
Cheers.
P. S. This is the kind of meandering shite I dwell on when I give myself a day off. - “Keep the boy busy, Martha, he’s starting to worry me.”
I found this over on BoingBoing and I know it’s just an ad for BBC Radio but it caught it my eye for a number of reasons.
Wouldn’t it just be so fucking cool if we had a time machine and could pull a Bill & Ted by bringing together collections of the best talents (in any field, not just music) to create collaborations we could only dream of in our lesser techno-magically enabled reality. Who doesn’t want to trip back to New York before December 1980 and get John to go with Paul for a surprise visit to SNL?
Alas, we don’t have time travel - we just have really fucking cool computer tech. To paraphrase the Six Million Dollar Man intro “We have the technology, let’s abuse it.” We might not be able to draw together these performers in the flesh but we can certainly render digital compilations which can, at the very least, give us a glimpse of what might have been. Harking back to the Beatles once more, they did something similar in 1995 by working together again on Free As A Bird, blending the voices of the still extant Fab with the departed John, courtesy of the ministrations of Jeff Lynne.
I recall in the late ’70’s a bootleg tape came out that had Elvis Presley and Linda Rondstadt singing a duet of Love Me Tender. It sounded great. It was wonderous. It was magical. The problem was, if I recall correctly, it was made from the masters of their original recordings without permission for public release - as a demonstration of what the new emerging recording technologies could do with control over pitch and timing of audio recordings. I heard on Q107 here in Toronto over a period of 2 days before it was yanked.
Since then such things have become old hat. We’ve had Natalie Cole sing duets with her father Nat King Cole; Bono, Robbie Williams and a host of others singing along with Frank Sinatra; and a whole lot more.
As I said, it’s not just limited to music. Famous actors, long dead and gone, are still turning in performances on the screen. Oliver Reed and Brandon Lee each finished their film work after dying during production. Laurence Olivier turned up as the villain Professor Totenkopf in Sky Captain. Humphrey Bogart and Alfred Hitchcock showed up for Robert Zemekis in an episode of Tales From The Crypt.
This sort of shit goes on all the time now.
It’s a far cry from the flurry of excitement elicited over the 1969 release of The Masked Marauders. Yeah - it wasn’t really them - but I still love that album and I play it on my iPod, thank you very fucking much. And it was a great idea.
I was struck many years ago when watching the AFI honours for Henry Fonda when they showed the obligatory montage at the height of the evening, running through clips from all his onscreen performances - and you saw a young man grow up in front of your eyes. Fuck off, Benjamin Button, this was the real deal. A life in time captured in images.
The memory of human beings is a changed thing as a result of recording technologies. We have become very different creatures from what we once were.
As our tech evolves with us - and becomes increasingly a part of us - we will change even further. We may never achieve the immortality sought within the shrouded mysteries of Kurzweil’s Singularity - but our perception of time and life and death itself will be forever altered as we continue to step back in time or draw the past into our present as if the formerly impenetrable veil of time was forever rent and we were physically capable of stepping with ease from thence to hence.
It’s not time travel - but it’s pretty fucking close - and you just know the music will rock.
Patti Maes from the MIT Media Lab - that nifty place full of really smart people who invent a lot of the future - gave a TED Talk about a new system Pranav Mistry and others have developed to allow us more direct and intuitive interaction with our expanding infoworld. It’s called: Sixth Sense.
This dovetails nicely with what Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly have been going on about - the eventual meshing and merging of ourselves with our technology, becoming ubiquitous users of and used by our toys and tools. Kurzweil speaks of the Singularity. Kelly speaks of the One Mind. I think they’re both right and at some point in our lifetime we”ll get to see just how wrong Azimov’s robotic vision was, along with the Terminator and the Matrix dystopias.
We aren’t going to get saved or oppressed by the technology of our future - we’re going to become the technology; which only makes sense when you look at it from McLuhan’s perspective that any tech we create is a mere extension of ourselves.
Will we change? You bet your ass we will. Will it be for the better? Well, looking around at this piss poor excuse for a brutish, nasty, sociopathic monkey world we’ve created I’d have to say - it can’t make it worse.
Will we survive? Ah - there’s the rub.
Let’s see what Susan Blackmore has to say about it in her TED Talk on memes and temes:
And if that doesn’t stoke your imagination - or make you run around screaming - about the future of human beings becoming one with their tech, don’t forget to consider the recent news story on the UK geezer with his bionic eye, the Canadian filmmaker who plans on shooting a documentary with his camera eye and the amazing Aimee Mullins and her talk at TED where she shows off her 12 pairs of staggering (please pardon the pun) prosthetic legs:
Are we going to change?
God, I hope so.
And when we do - we’ll be beautiful.
Cheers.
P. S. I wanted to post about this yesterday but my site was down so all I managed was this Twitter post.
