DNA on sufficiently-advanced technology

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Great Douglas Adams quote found at Helmintholog:

“Of course, we don’t have real intelligence cracked – it’s a bit like Zeno’s paradox: we get closer and closer to the actual business of language, without ever reaching it. Like sawing someone in half: considered as a medical problem, it is very very difficult indeed. But if you just want to convince a large audience that you have sawn a lady in half in a cabinet – that’s easy.

I say that we really want to be fooled, and that is the secret of persuading people that we have found artificial intelligence. Even very stupid bots can appear intelligent if they are acting in accord with our preconceptions. “

Racoons, Rudy Rucker and Fiction Suits

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Reflecting on Nokia Lifeblog, Jeremy Bushnell’s Raccoon blog quotes Rudy Rucker in Mondo2000:

“I want to have my life’s work on a CD with an access system that can call up any part of it, key on it with a cursor, and then go out into my journals, see what was happening, or get into my essays, see what I was doing then or find other stories that used a particular item and have it all be totally seamless … I’m trying to merge my life with my fiction and essentially create a word model of my consciousness.”

Two related Grant Morrison quotes on merging with fiction:

“As you read, the complete human archive – films and diaries and paintings and newspapers, recipes and family photos, abstracted to strings of ones and zeroes – is undergoing a steady, discreet conversion into digital data. Our entire cultural record, available in every home, via the telephone, direct to the screen, making History as convenient as the local 24-hour cornershop.

I submit that, just as the sailing ships of the Mediterranean empires opened the doors to the New World, just as space shuttles ferry our astronauts to the foothills of the infinite, so are our computers prototype time travel engines. The technology may be gumming a rusk but steps to develop the undefiled landscapes of our foremothers and fathers are already being taken. A computer, a digital camera, a modem, some Photoshop packages: all you’ll need to plan your own holiday in All Our Yesterdays. Think of Tom Hanks in ‘Forrest Gump’, schmoozing LBJ, Lennon and Bobby Kennedy. Think of the young Dennis Hopper shanghaied into a car ad by his older, more cynical self. Think, above all, of the potential ;wearing our own cut-and-pasted images like spacesuits, we can freefall into the picture libraries of the past and party with the dead.” – source

And…

“Not ALL of our fictions are becoming realities, only those memetically-engineered to do so by experts like myself and Snoop Dogg.” – source

Smokebelch III

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Again for the psychogeographically-inclined, The Spool reports that the latest issue of London-focussed writing and photography mag Smoke, number 3, has been published.

“And I will realise that this clue to her tribe is a big sign of what’s going on, and I will start to see all the tribes that this city is pulling together in its detritus of street signs, high-rise window boxes and discarded elastic bands. And I will start to look at pinstripe men with briefcases and stare at them on trains watching them become high-rank druids with cartoon robes but arcane and serious expressions.”

[Notes on the Exercise of the Derive, Sam Geall]

Some more excerpts here.

Hippo campus rock

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Prompted by conversations last night with Marko about Steely Dan, I listened to some this morning on the way into work, and my state of ‘zeitgeist distance’ at the moment was elegantly reflected back to me all the way from 1972.

You been tellin’ me you’re a genius
Since you were seventeen
In all the time I’ve known you
I still don’t know what you mean
The weekend at the college
Didn’t turn out like you planned
The things that pass for knowledge
I can’t understand

College, knowledge, campus, hippos… Had a great, though brief, conversation last night with Sanjay Khanna about the importance of forgetting, which led me to dig out some wikipedia stuff on the brain.

From the entry on the hippocampus:

“There is some controversy in psychology and the neurosciences about the precise role of the hippocampus, but it is generally agreed that it is essential for the formation of new memories about personally experienced events (episodic or autobiographical memory). Some researchers prefer to think of the hippocampus as part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory (memories which can be explicitly verbalized – these would include e.g., memory for facts in addition to episiodic memory).

There is some evidence that, although these forms of memory often last a lifetime, the hippocampus ceases to be crucial for the retention of the memory after a period of consolidation. Damage to the hippocampus usually results in profound difficulties in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia), and normally also affects access to memories prior to the damage (retrograde amnesia). Although the retrograde effect normally extends some years prior to the brain damage, in some cases older memories are spared – it is this sparing of older memories which leads to the idea that consolidation over time involves the transfer of memories out of the hippocampus to other parts of the brain.”

When Nokia announced Lifeblog, Anne Galloway juxtaposed it against the idea of “forgetting machines”. If our life recording devices are ‘outboard-hippocampi’ then perhaps balance and consolidation processes are the natural progressions.

Hopefully Anne will reveal more about her “forgetting machine” in due course.

One other gem for the psychogeographically-inclined from the wikipedia entry on the hippocampus:

“The hippocampus is believed to be particularly important for finding shortcuts and new routes between familiar places. Some people are better at this than others, and brain imaging shows that these individuals have more active hippocampi when navigating.

London’s taxi drivers are required to learn a large number of places — and know the most direct routes between them (they have to pass a strict test, the Knowledge, before being licensed to drive the famous black cabs). One study showed that part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than in the general public, and that more experienced drivers have bigger hippocampi. It may be that having a bigger hippocampus helps you to become a cab driver. It also seems that finding shortcuts for a living may make your hippocampus grow.”

How one gets an MRI scanner in the back of a Black Cab is anyone’s guess.

Planets, sweet.

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Steve Bowbrick ruminates on the pace of unmanned planetary exploration, and if I read between the lines a little; the torrents of telemetric information and simulation that the next generation have access to (cf. access to the Maestro simulations of Mars rover data, and more way-out “Why Starfleet”)

“My kids – before they’re my age – will know Mars better than I know, say, Tasmania or Patagonia. They won’t have been there but they’ll feel like they have. If they’re paying attention (unlikely), they’ll also have a pretty detailed mental image of two or three of our Sun’s other planets, submarine images from Europa’s salty ocean and – maybe – reasonable pictures of half a dozen small-ish, blue-ish planets orbiting other stars. I suspect they’ll also know that the solar system – and the universe beyond it – are greener and more hospitable to life than we could ever have imagined and that there’s as much water (liquid and otherwise) on distant planets as there is here on earth. They’ll also have a pretty good idea how it got there.”

Landmarks, wayfinding and the 3-ring binder

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Abstract Dynamics:

“What happens to landmarks when every store is a chain? When we live life at 70 miles an hour we hand our navigation skills over to the government and place our trust in freeway signage. But what about when slow down to 35, stop and go, through the infinite “strip” feeds Americans and their cars?

The preferred navigation is landmark. Follow the river, keep the mountain on your left, turn right at the large oak, veer left at the rabbit rock. Walk towards the walls, through the iron gates, left at inn, right at the bank. Towards the capital, left at the Starbucks, right at the Jamba Juice, you’ll see it right before the B of A… All of a sudden our landmarks are multiplying. And make no mistake plenty of effort goes into making sure those marks are memorable. But anyone who turns at a Starbucks is going nowhere but in circles…”

Puts me in mind of the franchised-landscape spread by the DNA of the 3-ring binders as described in Snowcrash.