RT @moehlert: . RT @caseorganic: My slides for @oreillymedia Cyborg Anthropology: A Short Introduction are here:

More decks here too to check out. Some nice terms to add in to some kind of themes/IA thing for the dermis.

One of a series of Apps which looks to augment our sense of time/history. There's a lot here to think about.

Especially when you link to the Anecdata-Mining piece on tl81.net.

All points I've been thinking of for ages. And ages. Put better than I could, though with some errors (?) - hundreds or thousands to make a space suit? more like millions.

And, it's not essential to go to space.

For the survivalists, it's interesting to note the 'unit of selection' that Tim Maly talked about.

How would you go about decommissioning complexity?

There seem to be a whole host of these. See that Pinboard thing too.

Lots of good stuff in here from Mirror Worlds guy.

I keep on wondering how important the Uncanny Valley is. AI will come. And as soon as it does, it won't be AI but just I. The big question is whether we'll imagine it's there before it really is or won't notice it until after the fact. There's no other possibility, really.

See Ramona and Watson and how people are working on these Grand Projects.

We're getting closer to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Big theme:
Small pieces closely joined to make the mega-projects: AI - new life and YLIP - ultimate teacher/companion

Bacteria outnumber our own cells 10:1

"The original ELIZA tricked a surprising number of people into feeling there was some "there" there, when actually it was just a fixed list of IF-THEN rules. Today people are more sophisticated than that. But still it's easy -- well, for me anyway -- to get seduced into the amusement of interacting with a system like Ramona 4. The way she combines erudition with absurdity appeals to me (perhaps not surprisingly, because I helped design her!), and I'd like to hope that this combination will still be there in the generally-intelligent dialogue systems we'll build in the future. Knowledge and humor can be a powerful combination."

you> Ramona, are you conscious?

Ramona> I'm working on it.

you> am I conscious?

Ramona> Oh I really don't know whether you are or not.

you> What is consciousness?

Ramona> This is when humans feel aware of themselves and how they see themselves. Computers can't quite do this yet, but they will, you just wait and see. However, think about this. How are you going to know when it happens?

How are we going to know when it happens (the two bits above are quotes)? Either we'll imagine it's true before it actually is, or we won't notice it until after it's true. This has implications.

Playing Jeopardy is a kind of obvious thing to do. I don't mean this as a criticism, just an observation. The magic 8-ball things that play 20 Questions are really cool. Playing Jeopardy will be cooler.

I suppose I'm curious about how long it will take to get your own one of these. Would it make you smarter? I think it probably would - if you had a team of bots doing stuff like this in the background.

Butlers? Sommeliers? What servants will we have?

Will this be the Neo-Victorian revolution, when we all have people living downstairs doing stuff for us?

"Seeing the City as Software" & other thought provoking stuff in @agpublic's 'Towards a Read/Write Urbanism'