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.
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
Noam Chomsky, Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Larry Bensky, Former National Affairs Correspondent, Pacifica Radio; Host, "Sunday Salon" KPFA; Professor at Stanford, California State University East Bay and Berkeley City College - Moderator
World-renowned intellectual Chomsky has been pushing change in language, politics and culture for decades.
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on October 6th, 2009.
Recorded at the London School of Economics.
Speaker: Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Professor of Politics at NYU and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
Chair: Professor Richard Steinberg
Why is it harder to predict the climate in 2050 than 2020? Tim Harford investigates reports saying the world will cool over the next two decades before global warming resumes. The More or Less team examine a claim that beautiful people have more daughters. And they use maths to decode a Beatles musical mystery.
Tagged with bbc statistics global warming beatles maths mathematics