Moore's Law and the digital body
In cultural space where the logic of the digital increasingly informs our cultural lensing, our relationships with our bodies is quickly emerging as a victim.
Rendered another artifact in the field of technical apparatus, the body disappoints.
There is no clean equivalent to Moore’s Law for the ancient technology of the body (at least that we have uncovered to date).
As a result, the evolutionary inertia of the body no longer satisfies the arc of our attention, the arc of our effort, the arc of our desired future…it is too slow, too viscous, too ostensibly static.
In the digital age, the body is not malleable enough. Not digital enough. Not avatar enough.
The logic of the digital demands that we escape from the body.
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In her book Bodies, Susie Orbach speaks to the visual reign of the digitized human body and the challenges embedded in reconciling the digital with the visceral:
A good 2,000 to 5,000 times a week, we receive images of bodies enhanced by digital manipulation. These images convey an idea of a body which does not exist in the real world. The photo shoot which produces the raw pictures of the models are carefully lit to exaggerate features prized today and then further perfected by being Photoshopped, airbrushed and stretched. It takes a large team to create the image we see on the billboards or in the magazines…
In the end, I think the near future of society will be defined in part by man’s attempt to escape his body…to attempt to transfer the inertia of Moore’s Law from the digital realm into the physical realm.
Robots and the dislocation of accountability
You can’t really punish robots…
They don’t feel pain. They don’t have regrets.
A robot can’t realign its blighted moral compass. It can’t find Jesus.
So who is ultimately responsible when a robot damages human life? Who exactly is subject to punishment?
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This week a Swedish company settled with an industrial worker who was injured by a robot after it “forcibly grabbed the man’s head” and broke four of his ribs.
In this case the company had to pay up.
But sorting out issues of accountability among robot actors and their ‘creators’ gets amorphous.
New Scientist has a good piece on the inevitable need to regulate increasingly autonomous robotic systems:
In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?
I’m wondering if a legal philosophy of autonomous robot will eventually be taught under the rubric of the legal system…
As these robotic systems become more powerful and dangerous, some kind of ethical and legal framework will be necessary to deal with their de facto dislocation of human accountability.
The Military Industrial (Entertainment) Complex
The U.S. Army is currently testing a machine-gun mounted, remote-controlled helicopter called the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS).
It’s controlled by a modified Xbox 360 controller:
Back on the ground, a human directs it using a modified Xbox 360 controller, which plugs into a laptop so that the operator can see what the drone sees.
“Having the ability to accurately engage single point man sized targets with an airborne UAV will give the ground based soldier the ability to have a high-point survivable sniper at their disposal when needed,” stated the Army solicitation notice when the project was announced in 2005.
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Zizek is making sense:
It is thus not the fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the face to face killing of another person; it is, on the opposite, this fantasy of a face to face encounter with an enemy killed in a bloody confrontation that we construct in order to escape the trauma of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological apparatus.
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Wired: “Army Tests Flying Robo-Sniper”
Digitizing Superorganisms
As a tool with both social and cognitive implications, the Internet is electronically weaving humanity into a new mode of being and doing.
The Internet allows us to interact with each other in a state of perpetual asynchrony, outside the logic of place, and against a backdrop of zero-transaction costs.
To an increasing degree, digital technologies are driving humanity towards a renaissance of coordination and cognition.
Embedded in this rebirth of behavior and mores is the possibility humans are becoming a superorganism: “a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective.”
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Despite recent developments, I think ants still remain the most obvious example of a superorganism with distributed intelligence:
Put a couple million individuals — tiny little brains — together, and they interact according to certain rules that create an emergent pattern. The end result is these fantastic nests. And not only that, these collectives of little brains — if you take a picture of the brain, a brain consists of a couple million or billion neurons. The members of an ant colony [are neurons that form] a little brain. These are millions of brains connected in a way we don’t understand yet.
This experiment – fitting ants w/ RFID technolgoy – is a mashup leveraging digital and biological systems and represents the iterative nature of cognitive systems:
Bristol Scientists who attached tiny radio transmitters to ants to study how they choose a nesting site say that they are better at house hunting than “irrational” humans.
University researchers fitted radio-frequency identification tags to the backs of the rock ants, which measure up to 3mm in length. The scientists then watched the way that the ants chose between two nest sites to make their home.
Symbolically, it is pretty loaded.
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As the Internet lays the foundation for a digitally interfaced network of human neurons, it will be interesting to see how existing biologically networked superorganisms may get rendered into the digital realm for reference/study.
I’m still not convinced that the vertical integration of natural innovation won’t be revealed once we mimic our way into understanding the stuff that binds purely biological superorganisms.
In the meantime, I think we’ll be hearing much more about ants.
Public Radio and the Experience Economy: a letter to my CEO
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a letter to NPR’s CEO w/ some ideas on how NPR might be able to increase its revenue.
It included something to the effect:
In the recording industry, they’ve seen the money stream shift away from recorded content and into live experiences…concerts. I think public radio may need a similar shift to an experience-based business model. Public Radio needs to find it’s own version of a live concert.
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This American Life’s live broadcasts in theaters around the country are a great example of this shift. I applaud their willingness to try it:
How do you sell out a movie theater on a Thursday night? Well, tonight, hundreds of theaters are doing so with a live broadcast of the popular radio show, “This American Life,” which is hosted by Ira Glass and distributed by Public Radio International.
The actual staged performance is taking place at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, which seats under 900. But the show is also being broadcast to 400 theaters around the country which, collectively, have seating capacity for tens of thousands, in cities like Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Provo, Utah.
Four of the five theaters showing it in New York City and are sold out. (To meet demand, it is being rebroadcast on May 7).
I hope that somebody does some number crunching on the venture so we can figure out if this helped w/ their 120k budget gap. (Evidently, that’s what spurred the idea in the first place.)
If this is successful, all of Public Radio needs to think about tinkering in the experience economy.
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All this is making me want to read this book:
In The Experience Economy, the authors argue that the service economy is about to be superseded with something that critics will find even more ephemeral (and controversial) than services ever were: experiences. In part because of technology and the increasing expectations of consumers, services today are starting to look like commodities. The authors write that “Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.”
Baudrillard and Deborg would probably have some science to drop on this…
The Tyler Durden School of Life Sciences
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you
have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive.
You’re not the contents of your genetic code.
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New Scientist has an article up on the linkage between autism and anorexia that I think would benefit from a dose of Durden.
They cover an important and laudable story, but I think they miss what – in my mind – could be a more interesting thread.
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Autism is generally understood as having a strong genetic basis – it’s thought of as a hardware issue – the brain didn’t develop properly.
Meanwhile, anorexia is generally understood as having a behavioral/psychological basis – it’s a sofware issue – girls (women account for 90-95% of EDs) grow up in a warped cultural matrix and as a result develop a warped body image.
Interestingly, it appears that anorexia is moving towards being understood as more of a hardware issue:
Last month, the international Academy for Eating Disorders published a paper calling for eating disorders (EDs) such as anorexia and bulimia to receive the same degree of healthcare as other biologically based mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.
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The main reason for this change is a growing understanding of the biological basis of EDs. Twin studies suggest that between 50 and 83 per cent of EDs have a genetic basis.
The way I see it, in natural systems, hardware and software are inseparable. Human engineering demands the division but the universe doesn’t.
Organisms are integral.
So understanding either anorexia and autism as solely biological issues, completely separate from cultural factors, seems shortsighted. Culture and genetic coding are snapshots of the same substance at different viscosities, two sides of the same mobius strip.
If it turns out that eating disorders are genetic through and through and have always been that way than that is one thing…
But I can’t help but think that both autism and anorexia could be collateral effects of industrialization.
Both could be downstream effects of humanity’s violent departure from hunter-gatherer/agrarian societies into the shiny plastic industrial wonderland we call home.
To use genetics as the lone fulcrum point for understanding any human malady seems similar to the blind guy claiming to have understood the elephant by handling only the tail.
Not only do we need an army of blind guys to further grope the elephant…we also need to work from a more ecological, integral and long throw perspective on human activity.
Underneath the ostensibly static/myopic order of things (world is flat, sun is center of universe, genetic code determinism), we are ultimately designed to design ourselves.
We are the stuff of innovation…an existential open source project.
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If your DNA’s got you down, I encourage you to watch this corny, but informative NOVA video.
WWJD? Get some paper…
Dude is making a killing:
Manhattan’s Riverside Church – one of the country’s most illustrious religious institutions – is paying its new senior pastor, the Rev. Brad Braxton, more than $600,000 in annual compensation.
That’s twice what Braxton’s predecessor, James Forbes, one of the country’s best-known preachers, was getting after running Riverside for more than 18 years.
It amounts to almost 10 times what William Sloane Coffin, the legendary anti-Vietnam War clergyman, was paid in his last year as senior minister at Riverside in 1987.
I wish William Sloane Coffin was still alive to comment.
I don’t think it’d be pretty.
In the meantime, I think the EPA needs to check Manhattan’s water table…
Bike-assisted Parkour
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Breakdancing Beta
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