Douglas Coupland and William Gibson discuss culture, technology, and the craft of writing. Communications technologies are a global memory prosthesis, says Gibson, and aspire to an experience in which distinctions between the "virtual" and the "real" are dissolved. We are already the borg, Gibson says.
http://www.kwls.org/podcasts/douglas-coupland-william-gibson/
As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, O’Reilly was impressed by a book titled The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) O’Reilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century.
Global consciousness was a recurrent idea in the 1970s—-from Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and Omega point (“the Singularity of its day”) to “New Age mumbo-jumbo” such as the Harmonic Convergence. O’Reilly noted that the term “singularity” for technology acceleration was first used in 1958 by John von Neumann. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled “Human-computer Symbiosis.” O’Reilly predicted that “exploring the possibility space of human-computer symbiosis is one of the fascinating frontiers of the next decades and possibly century.”
Echoing Dale Dougherty, he says the Web has become the leading platform for harnessing collective intelligence. Wikipedia is a virtual city. Connected smart phones have become our “outboard brain.” Through device automation, Apple has imbued retail clerks with superpowers in its stores. Watson, the AI that beat human champions at “Jeopardy,” is now being deployed to advise doctors in real time, having read ALL the scientific papers. YouTube has mastered the attention economy. Humanity has a shared memory in the cloud. Data scientists rule.
The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. It’s us, connected and augmented.
What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.
— by Stewart Brand
How is the vision we have of our digital lives matching the reality? In a digital age who are we connected to and who are we not connected to? Should we re-think how evenly distributed access to the Internet really is? Two leading Internet scholars talk about the ways in which people are engaging with the digital world — from Australia and Africa to the suburbs of Boston and Shanghai and all points in between.
Guests:
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of MIT’s Centre for Civic Media and co-founder of Global Voices.
Dr Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow, Intel Labs Director, Interaction and Experience Research
Further Information:
RiverBend Books- Meet The Author Information (http://www.riverbendbooks.com.au/product/648347-MeettheAuthorAntonyFunnell-rbe11sep)
SABRENet (http://www.sabrenet.edu.au/)
Ethan Zuckerman’s blog (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/)
MIT Centre for Civic Media (http://civic.mit.edu/)
2012 RN Big Ideas Program with Genevieve Bell (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/what-does-our-technology-future-look-like3f/4003568)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/many-internets2c-many-lives/4241874
Aaron Gustafson, author of Adaptive Web Design, joins us to discuss progressive enhancement. From content and semantic markup, to CSS, JavaScript and accessibility enhancements, we discuss the benefits of a “layered” development approach.
Economist and trend-spotter Jeremy Rifkin predicts that the evolution of energy production and distribution — from fossil fuels to more decentralized renewable energy — will transform the global economy. He joins us to discuss his latest book, "The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World."
As the climate warms, oil disappears, and the economy shakes and shifts, how will our urban places adapt? Will density and communal living be important tools for human resilience, or will city life become costly and unworkable—or even unlivable? Listen to Kunstler share his forecast for the American city, elaborate on his feature in the July/August 2011 issue of the magazine, and answer listener questions.
Public Lectures and Events: podcasts - Podcasts - LSE
Speaker: Professor Niall Ferguson
Chair: Professor Michael Cox
This event was recorded on 24 November 2010 in Old Theatre, Old Building
Although never a "hot" war between the superpowers, the Cold War was waged partly through a series of proxy wars in Third World countries from Guatemala to Korea to Vietnam. Although a great deal of attention has been devoted to a select number of U.S. Interventions in the Third World, there is an urgent need to see the "Third World’s War" in perspective, showing how successful the Soviet Union was in pursuing a strategy of fomenting revolution and how consistently successive U.S. administrations behaved in response. Professor Niall Ferguson is the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs for the 2010-2011 academic year.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm#generated-subheading9
Environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard discusses his new book, "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years." Writing from the perspective of a father, Hertsgaard outlines the changes he foresees happening in the global environment over the next fifty years, emphasizing how his five-year-old daughter’s generation will have to contend with the disruptions of climate change.
Mark Bittman is one of the country’s foremost food writers, author of "The Minimalist" food column for The New York Times and of multiple James Beard Award and IACP/Julia Child Award-winning cookbooks, including How to Cook Everything. Selling more than a million copies, the book was described by a Washington Post reviewer as "the new, hip Joy of Cooking." Bittman also appears regularly on NBC’s Today Show and NPR’s All Things Considered, and has hosted three public television series. His latest cookbook is a follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, offering recipes that are both healthier for you and for the environment.
Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson joins us to discuss his new book, "The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies." Wilson is faculty emeritus in the department of entomology at Harvard University and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R905110900?itemMD5=ae221a42440d262171d77ea407e7ca58
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