'Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision. The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We don’t know why. It just works.'

'...innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac). As with Maslow's hierarchy, you shouldn't look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We're already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn't seem particularly pressing. We've become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.'

'...successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential. -- ...technology only becomes interesting once it becomes technically boring. Technological futurists are pre-Fieldists. Marketing futurists are post-Fieldists. This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered. Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t. The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path. This actually suggests a different, subtler reading of Gibson’s unevenly-distributed line. -- ...as everyday experiences get mangled by layer after layer of metaphoric back-referencing, these metaphors get reified into a sort of atemporal, non-physical realm of abstract experience-primitives. These are sort of like Platonic primitives, except that they are reified patterns of behavior... The Field stretches to accommodate the future, rather than moving to cover it. 1997 never happened. Neither did 1500 in a way. What we did have was different stretched states of the Manufactured Normalcy Field in 1500 and 1997. If the Matrix were to happen, it would have to actually keep that stretching going.'

'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. -- A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken. In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone.'

'As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication – and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.' -- "...people can't get enough of each other, if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control." -- "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding – and we clean them up with technology." -- "We use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. And our flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for reflection." -- "...people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people altogether." -- "Being alone feels like a problem to be solved, and so people try to solve it by 'connecting'." -- "...if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves – so we 'connect' more and more, but in the process we set ourselves up to be isolated." -- "Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious, in order to feel alive. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

"The most destructive thing that we've allowed to have an expectation of each other is that we will instantly respond to each other ... and almost without thinking." "If you need to be constantly responding, you can only answer in little bits that really show no thought." -- "The kid comes out of the school, is desperately trying to make eye contact with the parent, and the parent is sitting there glued to the phone..." "This generation has grown up seeing technology as the competition. I don't think they're going to raise their children this way."

"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."

'"Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those." Pagel argues that our evolution as "social learners" has likely had the effect, as it's played out through hundreds of millennia, of encouraging the development of copying skills, perhaps over the development of originality. "We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species," he explains. "But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves ... And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators." What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting.'

'...since interchangeability limits the need for communication among collaborating makers, refinement of component technologies can progress much faster... You could say that work previously achieved by communication among makers is now achieved via communication among artifacts. A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies. This creates a refinement surplus. Exploitation of this refinement surplus is fundamentally what creates the predictable “growth” in industrial age Schumpeterian creative destruction. But it isn’t the intent to exploit that drives the evolution. It is a collective unconscious drive to exhaust possibilities and find limits, independent of any specific need. The most high-impact technologies of the day are almost never whatever the wisdom of the day identifies as the most potentially useful ones. They are the ones that can spread most rapidly through The One Machine, mopping up refinement surplus. So the best and brightest flock to Facebook or Google, and cancer remains uncured.'

'Social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing. Om Malik nailed it when he called Twitter the “messaging bus” of Web 2.0. That’s a raw, lowest-level hardware metaphor, the level with the highest volume of raw bytes. And we’ve plugged ourselves right into the switching circuitry at that level. Think about it, Twitter is a massively parallel stochastic switching circuit built as a global human bus, where more of us are routing bit.ly links than actually reading them. We’ve moved ourselves into the bottom layer of the information work stack. The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry. ...SEO aka “writing to the machine” is just the tip of the iceberg.'

'To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling. The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves. This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection.'

'Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.'

'#NARCISSUS TRANCE: An interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus as the inability to recognize technologies as extensions of the human being and the failure to detect the message, or new environment, created by new technologies. #NUMBING: See Narcissus trance, somnambulism. #AUTOAMPUTATION: The human body reacting to a source of irritation/danger by shutting down the affected area. #COUNTER-IRRITANT: When technologies produce stress and pressure through speed-up or overload, new technologies develop to offset those effects. Counter-irritants can be benign (games) or as destructive as the original irritant (a drug habit). #ANTI-ENVIRONMENT: In Mcluhan’s terms, “without an anti-environment all environments are invisible”. An artist provides us with anti-environments that enable us to see the environment. #CLOSURE: The human body’s attempt to regain equilibrium among its channels of sensory input, whenever this equilibrium is disturbed by new media.'

"We can't get enough of each other IF we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control." -- "Things go from: I have a feeling, I want to make a call; to: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. In other words, the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it."

'The worse things are, the more "technology" is celebrated. It has been ever thus. Western mainstream media is a kind of prestidigitation, a magic show. One is always looking under the wrong shell. Some of the information on the Internet is viable; some of it is speculative; some of it is incorrect. But unlike in the 20th century, "forbidden' information is actually available. Internet communication hasn't just informed us about alternative technologies or ancient archeology; it's also helped us understand our governments and the shadowy elites standing behind them. It is the Internet that has allowed the exploration of the world's disastrous central banking economy and exposed the elite's plans for a new world order. It is much more difficult to hide relevant information in the 21st than in the 20th century. That doesn't mean the mainstream media won't try – and try it does with ever-increasing fervor. The cult of communication technology coverage is just one example.'

'Sherry Turkle discusses Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' -- "People start asking simpler questions so they can get immediate answers."

'This BBC documentary from 1982 tries to bring people closer to the – back then – just emerging micro computers by showing how computers already helped out creating a more efficient society. This documentary gives a unique insight into 70s and 80s technology, as well as into peoples fears, hopes and images of how the role of the computer might influence the future.'

'Don't really understand the appeal of video games when u can play 'the game of life' every day.'

'America was built by makers – curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries. At TED@MotorCity, MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we're all makers at heart, and shows cool new tools to tinker with, like Arduinos, affordable 3D printers, even DIY satellites.'

'Psychiatrist Aboujaoude says that immersion in gaming runs the risk that a player begins to believe that behaviors acceptable in a game might also pass offline: Heavy gamers may develop an offline persona with the swagger and bravado of their avatars. "It also becomes easier to lose perspective on one's divergent priorities: the need to perform well as a favorite game character or as an accomplished player versus the need to function as a responsible adult. It's all one big life with one big 'cumulative' score, the faulty justification goes, and if we are breaking records in an online game, we may feel, in aggregate, responsible and productive enough, and thus allow for some gross negligence elsewhere in life." -- "Addictions happen when people are trying to control their emotional state. You find something that makes you feel better and then you want more of it, but then there is emptiness in the payoff."

Julian Bleeker at Kicker Studio's 2010 Device Design Day: 'Prototypes are ways to test ideas—but where do those ideas come from? It may be that the path to better device design is best followed by creating props that help tell stories before prototypes designed to test technical feasibility. What I want to suggest in this talk is the way that design can use fiction—and fiction can use design—to help imagine how things can be designed just a little bit better.'

'#6. Shifting Psychology = Shifting Power: 2011 will bring a psychological shift in individuals and groups. Social media, social networks, and mobile technologies have caused a fundamental change in the core assumptions about how the world works. People are more publicly expressive and vocal. Expectations of having voice don't exist in a vacuum. If you speak, you want to be heard. This will redefine relationships at all levels of society: between business and consumers, governments and people, teachers and students, and social and cultural groups. #11. Creative Problem-Solving: Low technological hurdles, collective information pools, global access and real-time information inspire creative solutions to problems. Empowerment, agency, and technological competence and the belief that individuals can make a difference will fuel a massive flood of Do-It-Yourself solutions to everything from job creation to philanthropy.'

'MY LIFE IS BETTER WITH TECHNOLOGY LASTING 4EVR CONNECTING WITH OTHER HUMANS SMART, SAVVY SHOPPING MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I AM 'BEATING SOCIETY' 'BEATING CONSUMERISM' ''TRANSCENDING TECHNOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE''

'Should Google 'respond' by making an official snuggie?'

'Do u think twitter is effectively monetizing?'

“The technology amplifies whoever you are."

'Terrence Ryan breaks down the patterns and types of resistance technologists face in many organizations. You’ll get a rich understanding of what blocks users from accepting your solutions. From that, you’ll see techniques for dismantling their objection... You’ll learn all about peoples’ “resistance patterns.” There’s a pattern for each type of person resisting your technology, from The Uninformed to The Herd, The Cynic, The Burned, The Time Crunched, The Boss, and The Irrational. From there you’ll discover battle-tested techniques for overcoming users’ objections, and strategies that put it all together: the patterns of resistance and the techniques for winning buy-in. In the end, change is a two-way street. In order to get your co-workers to stretch their technical skills, you’ll have to stretch your soft skills. This book will help you make that stretch without compromising your resistance to playing politics. You can overcome resistance (however illogical) in a logical way.'

'One thing is probably for certain: the elite will create it with the idea of perfecting another level of control (as with the DARPA and the Internet) and the free-market itself (the invention of the PC) will interact with it and turn it from a tool of repression into a mechanism for intellectual expansion and inspiration. The window for elite control over the rest of us is beginning to close. Each time one of these major communication revolutions comes along, the power elite of the day has to entirely revamp its messaging – and often, in areas, start from scratch. We realize such an opinion is distinctly unfashionable in this day and age, especially within the parameters of the alternative Internet press that makes the power elite out to be an almost unstoppable adversary. But from our humble point of view, technology itself is history's major driver, especially in modernity, and major communication revolutions tend to revivify human culture and expand freedom.'

'We scramble to keep up with the never-ending inflow of demands and commands, under the false premise that moving faster will allow us to get out from under the endless stream of pings for our attention. For answering email and responding to texts or tweets only exacerbates the problem by leading to more responses to our responses, and so on. Every answered email spawns more. The quicker we respond, the more of an expectation we create that we will respond that rapidly again. We mistake the rapid-fire stimulus of our networks for immediacy, and the moment we are actually living in for the thing that needs to catch up. -- The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no, symbolic language. We are making choices not because we want to, but because our programs demand them. ...the more we learn to conform to the available choices, the more predictable and machinelike we become ourselves.'

'#Failure of artificial intelligence: In the novel, "Artificial Intelligence" has been renamed "Pseudo intelligence" (Hackworth declares the older term to have been "cheeky", meaning presumptuous). That this "pseudo-intelligence" is lacking compared to human intelligence is demonstrated by the fact that humans are able to earn a living as "ractors", interacting with customers in virtual reality entertainments. Since ractors are more expensive than AI, the only reason to use them would be that the customers could tell the difference, implying that in the world of the novel, the marketplace of virtual reality entertainment has become one ongoing Turing Test, and software is continuously failing it.'

'WorldBoard is a proposed planetary augmented reality system that facilitates innovative ways of associating information with places. Short-term the goal is to allow users to post messages on any of the six faces of every cubic meter (a hundred billion billion cubic meters) of space humans might go on this planet (see personal web pages when you look at someone's office door; label interesting plants and rocks on nature trails). Long-term WorldBoard allows users to experience any information in any place, co-registered with realiy.'

'...algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations. ...while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility. But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent A.I.’s, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings.'

'Psychosis in the 21st century looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality television show starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor. The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Syndrome... The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in psychiatry: Are these merely modern examples of classic paranoia fed by the current cultural landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push people over the sanity line? Psychiatrists say that other movies whose characters are living in a unreal world or being watched by malevolent forces, including “The Matrix,” “Edtv” and even the film based on George Orwell’s “1984,” have come up in conversations with psychotic patients. But the premise of “The Truman Show” is strikingly similar to what patients describe as their own experiences.'

'Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.'

'Yesterday, Tomorrow and You. Change causes more change. Start with the plow, you get craftsmen, civilization, irrigation, pottery and writing, mathematics, a calendar to predict floods, empires, and a modern world where change happens so rapidly you can’t keep up.'

'From the vantage point of hindsight, that which came before so often looks quaint with respect to technology. Indeed, we have a hard time imagining that the users weren’t at some level aware of the absurdity of what they were doing. The switchboard operators crisscrossing the wires into the right slots; Dad settling into his luxury automobile, all fins and chrome. The marvel is that all of them—all of us—concealed their embarrassment so well. The attitude of the present to the past depends on who is looking. The older you are, the more likely it is that your regard will be benign—indulgent, even nostalgic. Youth, by contrast, quickly gets derisive, preening itself on knowing better, oblivious to the fact that its toys will be found no less preposterous by the next wave of the young. -- In a lifetime of reading, which maps closely to a lifetime of forgetting, we store impressions willy-nilly, according to private systems of distribution... The source may fade as the sensation remains.'

'War is the elite's answer to social enlightenment as well as transformative technology ...the larger strategy is a pincer-like movement that uses both military conflicts and censorship to control the flow of knowledge and the growing comprehension of just how manipulated Western societies have been over the past century. Will it work? ...not in the long run ...the difference between the human ape and any other species is mostly in the dexterity with which we wield tools ...humanity has evolved along with such tools and perhaps our brains have even adapted to their advancing complexity. Young people, especially, males in their sexual prime, see the utilization of the most advanced toolkits as a way of enhancing genetic desirability. ...if the power elite believes it can control such cutting edge technologies, it is going to end up battling human biology. (Given that the power elite is indeed the power elite, it will do so anyway, we have no doubt.)'

'“When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. “But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software.”'

'The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. ...what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? Goldenfield: "It's natural to wonder, if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level."'

On augmented reality etc. Comment: g48: '...when people become dependent upon things that are not necessary, they become leveraged, they become vulnerable, they become subject to manipulation. What they lose is an increment of resilience, an increment of self-reliance, and an increment of direct contact with others. -- The most resilient technologies are simple machines that can be maintained (and ideally, built) in community workshops with community labor. -- More digital media will not house us, feed us, keep our towns clean, or protect us against attack. It won't lessen the labor of digging a trench for water pipes, as the machine for that purpose is a simple one, hand shovels still work in a pinch. It won't make our food taste better or keep us warm. It won't deepen our capacity for friendship, love, and philosophical or spiritual insight. But it may very well distract us from all of those things, to the point where there is nothing left for us to do, except watch, and be watched.'

'Today we are not who we really are, we are what google says who we are. Everything is openly connected and we’ve been trying so hard to make things open: making browsers more open, more social and more you, making everything connected, making open IDs. Suddenly we found out: The more we try to design for “you”, the less “you” can express yourself freely. When we talk about user experience, we always say we are engaging in making people’s life better. Nowadays we’re even trying to embed the most intricate and sophisticated human emotions into the consideration of design: like religious needs and sexual needs. However we designed a huge system that ignore the most basic one: The need to lie. Or they need the freedom to lie. If we are really aiming to design a YOU centric web, this question becomes unavoidable and probably be the hottest one in the next 10 years: How do we design a web that people can have real freedom within?'

'We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right. Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are. -- I think when you have a generation that doesn't see simulation as second best, doesn't know what's behind simulation and the programming that goes into simulation, but just takes simulation at interface value, you really have a set up for a very problematic political, among other things, set of issues. ...things are built out of simple programs to more complex programs, and these programs are cultural creations, cultural constructions... Education has dropped that out of the curriculum. -- We're becoming quite intolerant of letting each other think complicated things.'

'CHAPTER 2: An apocalypse of self-abdication: If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture in to being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring. But in either case, the rest of us would never know if you had been right. The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living.'

'The original turn of phrase was "Information wants to be free." And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are given to people. If you express yourself on the internet, what you say will be copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme. However, the information, the abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, the new holy of holies. You never see it and are not allowed to touch it. This is exactly the wrong set of values. A weird cult in the world of technology has done damage to culture at large.'

'Researchers theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development. “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.” -- Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less. “They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said. “They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not.”'

'"Fire, and its ability to light any object not currently on fire instantly on fire, completely changed human existence," noted archaeologist and historian Phillip Krensen said. "Not only could man now defend himself from dangerous predators, but he could also cook their meat, then get up from the bonfire, smile briefly to himself, and spend the rest of the evening seeing what else there was around to burn down."'

"More and more as the numbers of technologies increase, the only way we can assert our identity is by not using [particular] technologies."

Technology: "Anything useful invented by a mind". Technology is going to become more energy dense.

'When we deal with this condition of outformation, we concern ourselves with rates, flow, vector, flux, and its messaging types [unicast, multicast, broadcast, or anycast]. We deal with paths, closeness, link, connectivity, signaling, entropy, self-similarity, throughput, and latency. It doesn't matter what the content is. Rather, the critical standpoint deals with its entropy, its signaling, its rate, flux density and messaging type. -- The requirement for citizen-actors on reality television reflects not nearly the need for such vocations of entertainment, rather, it is the construct of computer networks and software algorithm attempting and stuggling to learn to mimic the bizarre banality of a society dwelling in the afterburn of failed capitalism. It is not staged idiocy, it is pre-school for the machine screens comprehensively looping the simulation of the western debt class.'

'Converging technology, transhumanism, and our future in the making. The cutting edge group known as transhumanists see a beautiful future brought about by artificial intelligence, life extension, and cybernetics. What one must realize before getting carried away with such utopian dreams is that transhumanism was born out of the elitist pseudo-science eugenics. This documentary provides vital information on the history of eugenics and its new cutting edge transformation.' -- Transhumanism is a eugenics cult. Well, yeah. The idea is to man-u-facture better slaves. This is what humans lust to do to each other. 'Twas ever thus.

'Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don't quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.'

'Once an idea is "in the air" its many manifestation are inevitable. You just need a sufficient number of smart, prolific people to start catching them. Gladwell observes, "The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight." -- "Inventions are culturally determined. Such a statement must not be given a mystical connotation." warns Kroeber. It means only that when all the required conditions generated by previous technologies are in place, the next technology can precipitate. "Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate," says sociologist Robert Merton, who studied simultaneous inventions in history. The ever thickening mix of existing technologies in a society create a supersaturated matrix, charged with restless potential. When the right idea is seeded within, the inevitable invention practically explodes into existence...'

'The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. -- #1. Speed matters. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not work­ing. -- #2. The Physical World matters. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.'

'My two favorite quotes from the article: "The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy." I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don't understand how it's any different. Quote number two is under the heading "the model is what matters" and says, "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." That one made my head spin a little. It's so true. As a culture we've become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)'

"The tweets turned out to be obfuscated links to sites where further malicious code and instructions could be downloaded. Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. -- There’s something ironic about this finding, given that Russian hackers allegedly used a botnet to take Twitter down for two days last week. But we won’t go down that rabbit hole.'

'This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities. -- “They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”'

10-15 billion years ago: The Universe is born.

'... a Swedish company, The Astonishing Tribe, has gone a step further, with a facial recognition system called Augmented ID. It tells you who people are, based on identifying their picture via a technology called Polar Rose, which analyses faces and then searches for photos on Flickr that match it - and pulls out the name from the tags.' -- What motivates this? Is the motivation even human?

'...robot telepresence (drone "jocks" that rent their brains to robots). Robotic technology will shrink and cheapen quickly. Applications (driven by open platforms and modular programming) will begin to flow from the commercial and open source sectors until they reach a torrential level. Additionally, robotic and "complex sensor" telepresence will, by the next decade, be as easy as in Internet connection and a Web application. Add swarm management (the ability to manage massive swarms of micro-robots that work as a single entity, much as we see with software "bots" in the cyber-crime space) to the mixture of inexpensive robotics and simplistic telepresence (accessible to ten/hundreds of millions of people), and you have another technological avenue for open source warfare. It also likely means that the heady world of cybercrime will soon be able to access the physical sphere ---> robocrime?'

'Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking. If there are no gaps there is no emotion. Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/language) for emotion. When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/industrial/financial/fast visuals/fast words) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing. There comes a time when there are almost no gaps. People become incapable of experiencing/tolerating gaps. Emotion ends. Man becomes machine. -- #A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression/Anxiety. #A (travelling) society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression/Anxiety. #A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression/Anxiety.' -- So true.

'Most journalists have run out of knowing what's going on in the world. And they have embraced this idea of media democracy as a way to disguise that fact. I'm deeply suspicious of it. The whole reason why journalism was invented in the first place is that we have the time, the money, and the power of the organisation to go places, push through doors, find things out, bring it back, and tell you it and allow you to make up your mind about it. ...those who are the promoters of the internet, the boosters, the people who put forward the utopian dream of the internet, and those who basically run silicon valley, are arch individualists, they portray the internet as a playground where every individual can invent their own identity, and it's a new form of democracy without hierarchies of power.' -- On the paradox of the booster dependence on datamining: -- 'it's a completely contradictory view of what human beings are, how they behave, to what these boosters actually portray the internet as.'

'What's happened is you had an idea – which in a way was quite an heroic idea – that each individual could be themselves, could express themselves and become better people. In fact, what happened in that process is that you shifted the idea of risk away from institutions and onto the person themselves, and in that process is what people began to do – far from expressing themselves – began to monitor themselves to see whether they are the correct definition of the individual, whether it's in psychology, how they feel and how they behave; and they begin to search for – and are given – ways of monitoring that as individuals, and that paradoxically leads them to trying to become what they think is the right individual, which actually leads to homogeneity... that idea of total expressiveness... it may be breaking up now as we enter an economic crisis and politicians discover they have power, institutions have power, and that's the way to change the world. The idea of the self may change.'

'I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.' -- 'The connection to communications technology — the connection to connection — has become part of what makes us human. In the idiom of those who are swooningly in love, it makes us “feel alive.” When we’re denied the connection to connection, it’s no wonder we lust for it.' -- Love, temes xXx

'#Free 1: Simple cross-subsidy #Free 2: Ad-supported #Free 3: Freemium #Free 4: Gift economy -- #Reversible business models: In China, some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid. -- In Denmark, a gym offers a membership program where you pay nothing as long as you show up at least once a week. But miss a week and you have to pay full price for the month. The psychology is brilliant. When you go every week, you feel great about yourself and the gym. But eventually you’ll get busy and miss a week. You’ll pay, but you’ll blame yourself alone. Unlike the usual situation where you pay for a gym you’re not going to, your instinct is not to cancel your membership; instead it’s to redouble your commitment.' -- On the fallacy of consistent price elasticity: 'The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.'

'Kevin opened his talk with a story about a fascinatingly bizarre woman who had such intense feelings for the Berlin Wall that she married it. Through his talk, Kevin demonstrated how the woman’s relationship with the Wall, while extreme, parallels the relationships we’re developing with the material objects we love, use, play with, and wear. Technologies that give an object an ‘identity’ and make it ’smarter’ (RFID, accelerometers, QR codes, GPS) are breathing artificial life into our favorite unliving things. These technological innovations are, in essence, moving us towards a complete convergence with the objects in our lives… Maybe we are becoming more dependent and defined by our possessions because they are becoming more dependent and defined by us.'

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

'There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a #psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). -- For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free.' -- And all predicated on cheap, abundant energy...

'Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. -- ....something dark and unsettling is happening in Silicon Valley ...the culture of the area has subtly evolved to meet the social needs of adults in high-functioning regions of the [autistic] spectrum. The chilling possibility is that what's happening now is the first proof that the genes responsible for bestowing certain special gifts on slightly autistic adults - the very abilities that have made them dreamers and architects of our technological future - are capable of bringing a plague down on the best minds of the next generation. -- It has become commonplace for parents to diagnose themselves as having Asperger's syndrome, or to pinpoint other relatives living on the spectrum, only after their own children have been diagnosed.' -- Inbreeding the teme people

"The line between the wisdom of the crowd and stupidity of the mob is a very, very fine line. Things can flip over from the being the smart hive mind to being the out of control mob mind, and so there's always that risk. But the thing with technology is, technology is not powerful until it can be powerfully abused." -- "In biology, there's extinction. In technology, we find that ideas and technologies are very hard to extinguish." -- "We are the sex organs of technology." == The temes of technology.

'Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia. For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded. What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: "It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it's alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it's alive enough to be tortured." We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us.'

"Societies do not self-simplify—they collapse. The riskiest behaviours perpetuate the status quo. Those who feel the need to be inclusive, accommodating, to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand the awesome force of social inertia. It is an immovable, crushing weight. Our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We are evolved to live in small groups of a few families, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that seem to have relied on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human. When confronted with the unfamiliar, we have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed! And so, in fashioning a survivable future, where do we put our emphasis: on individuals and small groups, or on larger entities - regions, nations, humanity as a whole? I believe the answer to that is obvious." -- Green Pill

"While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics."

'The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ubiquity. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous. ...the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively. Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. -- '...something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.'

'Ray Kurzweil's latest graphs show that technology's breakneck advances will only accelerate -- recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.' -- The temes are strong with this one.

'... human society is still an ambivalent system, balancing between individual selfishness and collective responsibility. However, there seems to be a continuing trend towards global integration. As technological and social systems develop into a more closely knit tissue of interactions, transcending the old boundaries between countries and cultures, the social superorganism seems to turn from a metaphor into a reality. Although many people tend to see the super-organism philosophy as a totalitarian or collectivist ideology, the opposite is true: further integration will basically increase individual freedom and diversity. A remaining question is whether this transition will lead to the integration of the whole of humanity, producing a human "super-being", or merely enhance the capabilities of individuals, thus producing a multitude of "meta-beings".'

"Ever since Hobbes, man has been using his ingenuity and energy in an attempt to ­create a technological utopia. We have been taught in schools since the late 18th century, and by the culture at large, to revere technology and to place faith in it as a liberator. Soon, soon, it seems to say, soon you will be free. I have a different view. I hold in supreme contempt 90 per cent of modern technology. The whole sorry shebang is actually a costly distraction, which isolates us, makes us stupid and is never going to free us. Take that digital manacle, the BlackBerry..." --- Lulzy troll. Love this guy.

"My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors. I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism." -- Escalating set of definitions of the superorganism: "# I: A manufactured superorganism # II: An autonomous superorganism # III: An autonomous smart superorganism # IV: An autonomous conscious superorganism -- My hunch is that the One Machine has advanced through levels I and II in the past decades and is presently entering level III."

"Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. ...information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information. ...that substrate is the global network of communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running. It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy... The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end... The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis."