Re: <documenta X><blast> hot summer night (was home)
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Tue, 19 Aug 1997 13:59:42 -0400
>But: current (browsing) software doesn't really support gathering let alone
>sharing of information. It's a pervasive media/publishing model. Bookmark
>business as usual. Artists developed their tools in the past.
>
>>And "virtual space" just doesn't mean a thing.
>
>Virtual space is a backdrop to the bachelor's party, like any old space
>
>Jouke Kleerebezem Amsterdam
>
>PS
>Major information cul-de-sac from Morgan Garwood:
>>But, I make reference to suck.com, mainly because I think they
>>express ideas so similar to my own that it is easier to have them think
>>those ideas for me than to have me think them.
>
well, I'm not so sure about the cul-de-sac nature of having virtual
subselves (toiling midgets?) take care of certain areas of your existence.
Human intelligence is generally spotty... one some topics you are much more
intelligent than I am, or your solutions to certain life problems will be
more elegant than mine; so if I am very smart, I would come up with a way
to substitute *you* for *me* in those situations.
Suck.com fills in for a small, but recurring area that I previously
assigned to internal processes; however, they supply me with a short daily
feed of pre-processed thinking, and I experience my neural load lightening,
because some of the things I used to experience as obsessive thinking
within myself are now somebody elses obsession. So, I now have this nice
open space of unassigned neural RAM to do lots of other things with; such
as sitting down and working through this thought sequence.
I have a very strong suspicion this is how Bill Gates gets so much
thinking done... not unlike Henty Ford's technique, but highly evolved and
refined.
Ford was nearly illiterate, and given to ideas that today would be
labeled as mentally unbalanced, but he had a phenomenal sense of how to
establish a distributed thinking system.
Because he was so extremely wealthy, he hired the smartest people that
he could in every specialty that mattered to him. He had a keyboard-like
apparatus on his desk, with about one hundred buttons on it. Each button
connected to a bell in the office of one of his specialists. As he sat at
his desk, he didn't bother to do a vast amount of thinking. As he worked,
he would tap on his "keyboard", and the particular idea-man that he needed
would appear at his door to process the thought for him. It is truly
paradoxical that a man so innovative could also be so furiously resistent
to change, but he was, and it took Alfred Sloan of General Motors (Sloan,
by the way, is Gates' idol) to force change on Ford. But that's another story.
The first "intranet" was Microsoft's in house e-mail system, and no
doubt it worked similarly to the one we are using now. At the time, though,
it was unique, and permitted a strategic breakthrough in the coordinating
and directing of idea flow. Now I think that Gates' majority of time-energy
resource isn't devoted to running Microsoft as it is designing thinking
systems, mental or epistemological "operating systems" for the Microsoft
"machine" to run.
Microsoft has decided to take a lead in research, and the word is that
they are establishing the world's foremost working group in the are of
Baysian Inference, which I know very little about, except it forms the
basis of the next generation of artificial intelligence systems and derives
solution fits in a non-probabalistic way.
What's up Bill's sleeve ? I think he has anticipated a system that can
replicate as many of his "in the skull" tasks, and map them onto silicon,
so he can then traverse to the next higher logical level, and perhaps be
the first human to climb the Mt. Everst of meta-meta-thought programming.
I know the correct attitude is to be paranoid about Gates, and the
very mention of his name has the same superstitious effect of talking about
the devil a century ago, but in actuality we could learn a lot from his
approach.
Something like this is now happening in Japan with radio
broadcasting... they have a cable music system with in the vacinity of 450
channels, each to extremely specific musical parameters, and each is
programmed by an expert in that musical line... so instead of listening to
a station and waiting for the selection you like to appear, you program
your box for what "idea of music" you want throughout the day; so you wake
up to the Mozart channel, pull your head together with Be-Bop From
1945-1949, listen to Ambient Lite at work, come home to Glenn Miller, cook
to Opera, chill out with Beethoven Quartets, have sex with Marvin Gaye, and
pass out to Gamelan. This exists today.
The ideas of Fredrick Winslow Taylor (scientific management) merge
seamlessly with Stanley Kubrick and Hugh Hefner... and with biosensors this
is likely to be improved on dramatically, as is the case with Gates' new
house; in it each occupant or visitor wears a presence tag, and each tag is
connecting to a choice ranking system... the highest ranking tag gets to
have the environment change to his preference, in terms of lighting,
termperature, choice of art on the walls by LED screen, background music,
etc. But if several people of equal rank enter the room, a compromise is
created between their preferences; however an algorithm designed in
co-operation with several of the worlds leading museums determines which of
the occupants has the best taste in art, and that "denominator" becomes the
standard for art display until that person leaves the room, then the
taste-plateau will downshift to the next highest level of aesthetic
appreciation.
Small robotic service units have been devised as an outgrowth of a
project undertaken with NASA and MIT. These patrol the room bringing snacks
and drinks as are determined by the profile of the occupant, are capable of
vacuuming up small amounts of spillage, and are also capable of security
related functions if needed.
The first major breakthrough that Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are
attempting to develop with the Baysian working group (and mind you, they
are spending about 1 billion dolars per year on reaearch alone, now, and
they are co-ordinating around 200 of the best minds in artifical
intelligence) is a virtual Bill, or Bill' (Bill Prime) that will act as
your personal "meta-programmer" to keep the project moving along as fluidly
as possible. The Bill Primes feed into a higher level Bill''(Bill Double
Prime) system that keeps a real time flow-map of the project under
consideration. Real Bill (or Bill Aleph as he is known in the project code)
and his high level executives then interact with Bill'' to determine the
strategic direction of the company.
Eventually, the knowledge-identity primes system will be released to the
public, and each of use will be given the opportunity to place out life
experise on a prime.exp (.exp is the designator for expert system and
problem solution site)
You will be incentivised by a royalty you collect for each time your
prime is accessed, and Microsoft will get a percentage of this.
If I know, for example, that Jouke'.exp will think some of my thoughts
for me better than I will think them, obviously I am going to assign them
to Jouke'.exp and collect the results in the morning. This will be the most
extreme knowledge advance in human history because the signal to noise
ratio will increas by about a power of ten.
After a break in period, the prime.exps will be ratable in signal
noise terms, so new descriptors of intelligence will co-vector with
traditional scales... such as a native intelligence Q in spatial
organization may be 150 in a top flight architect, but emotional issues may
induce a S/N ratio of 65 db., but throught the prime agent, you may get a
70 db S/N ratio, which would be a major improvement. However, a higher
order prime would compare factors of site, budget, tastes of client, and
availability of lower order primes to process the task, which gets project
development time down nicely, and then the PROJECT S/N ratio also goes way
up...
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documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
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