The Last Mile and the Gatekeeper

In Judeo-Christian tradition, the first man and woman lived in a place in which no technological solutions were needed, a place with food freely provided and climate appropriate for no use of clothes.

It's a sin to think of the Garden of Eden as a desirable or admirable place. It is stripped of what makes humans special - cognitively generated gear and information that provide survival solutions.

I'm very fastidious when it comes to gear and information. The paradigm of mass marketed dominant brands ( Mall culture ) is not for me, mainly because I find the solutions provide a poor function space for my overall existence. The paradigm of abstinence or less-and-local, whether a Thoreau type of downshifting or militant grown-locally adbusting, is not for me because it is impoverished, self-righteous and not at all healthy.

My highly specific agenda for living has found a perfect meta-tool for life. Google and Amazon. Google ads (with integrated user-targeted news articles) and Amazon recommendations are the only way I want to learn about the gear needed for living. Google monitors almost my entire online life and provides ads relative to my discourse. Amazon provides associative logic on patterns of purchase. With Google and Amazon parsing my online activity, My discourse becomes the gatekeeper/filter for marketing of gear. Gear is good and a sign of a more fully realized human, and with smart ads, the marketing of gear is made good also. Smart advertising combined with long tail economics makes an even more empowering acquisition of goods.

Internet protocol Information travels as electrical pulses called bits. Typically they travel across cables on backbone networks, often one or two satellite hops. Since the 1990's a last mile delivery system of wireless radio signals has become popular, most often in homes or offices as a local area network. With the Federally mandated illegalization of television over the analogue 700Mhz spectrum ( all standard definition TV is now digital, by law ), the internet can be broadcast over old TV signal bands.

This is a new "last mile" delivery solution for information. Remember what makes humans special - cognitively generated gear and information that provide survival solutions. A new last mile delivery of a world wide web of information is a big deal in human progress. Add to that a exponentially more important distinction -the 700Mhz spectrum could be a closed network ( only allowing specific devices, with specific functionalities to access ) or an open network ( you could create your own device, operating system and applications that can access through publicly known standardized protocols ). Google got the FCC to agree that if a certain reserve bid is met, Block C of the 700Mhz spectrum would be mandated as open, no matter who buys it.

As of Jan 31st 2008, with auctioning still going on and winning bidders not known, news emerged that Block C has met that reserve bid threshold, and open access is now mandated. A new step towards more client side economics has been made, in one of the most powerful pieces of property on Earth.

Unmanageable Complexity

January 20, 2008 I wrote a friend with a positive tone about chaos in society:

"Unintended consequences are a good sign, a sign that the society is innovative beyond the pace of its own ethics. In a state of absolute adherence to its ethics it would die or be consumed by an innovative society. Balance can only slightly be achieved in perpetual disequilibrium. Absolute balance means death and entropy, perpetual disequilibrium is life."

I am unrepentant for this celebration of diversity, but will offer this pathology in social dynamics (including internal dialogue which is just a subcomponent of social constructs).

Dishonesty.

Dishonesty creates unmanageable complexity for the deceived.

• Examples:
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_Inquiry
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Symbolic analysis of the corporeal world

"Symbolic analysists solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. The manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. These tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or to amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles."
-The Work of Nations, Robert B. Reich, Vintage Books, New York, 1991^excerpt

Binding the above to tangible reference points is a means to avoid the cultural failures that occur when metaphysics is the reference point. Metaphysics is by definition impervious to facts, thus making it a pathological course-correcting mechanism in social systems. Cultures whose symbolic analysts are entirely metaphysical ( religious or psychological shamans ) guide the culture into a black hole of lost. Binding the corporeal to symbolic analysis is the distinction of cultures capable of progress or course correction.

All cultures have the corporeal as a reference point in their language, but not all have symbolic analysts who can move massive amounts of the material world by manipulation of symbols (example: mining engineers). Cultures without this mass moving capability are in more of a peer relationship with the biological and geological. This limitation means loss of control on a planet with cultures that use letter/number symbols or electrical-networked bits to move earth, water, air, animals, and people.

The dominance of one of these types over the other type is not rigid nor enduring. Cultures can be amorphous. Symbolic analysis of the corporeal world always dominates and succeeds, and even more so when those formerly not capable of it are encouraged to integrate into the elite skill set user group.

Forget the Frankfurt School

"Dialectic of Enlightenment, is the pivotal, fundamental textbook of Freudo-Marxist Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment, a defeat represented most dramatically by the events of the Holocaust."
-wikipedia

"Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. Herbert Marcuse was the first to demarcate true needs from false needs."
-wikipedia

Paleo-hippies rallied around memes that , by their spreading, would weaken the stronghold of mass culture and rational thought.

With those memes a wave of euphoric freedom is expected to be felt, a new perspective in which the magical and unbounded are available. What can be purchased in the capitalist system is then seen as dirty, caged in, tired and ridden with guilt for the lack of stature of the workers at the origin point of the goods.

Magic, creativity and freedom are enabled.

The second class human emerges. One that can be easily owned and manipulated. Disengaged from symbolic analysis of the corporeal world, the magical class are not easily herded from without but will strongly bind to an inner mission statement or religious icon.

In their minds forever the victors of a war with Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle and any cultural artifact that has an association with the building blocks of the Holocaust. This is the class which suffers recurring defeats in contests with any foe that wields technology powered by symbolic analysis of the corporeal world, but they never perceive themselves as defeated because the use of symbolic analysis of the corporeal world is either beyond the grasp of the lower ranks or taboo for the leaders.

The old joke "Question: Why are so many trees in France? Answer: Because the Germans like to march in the shade" describes the situation for magical and mystical cultures quite well.

Progressive means moving on from caring about this news story. Every day the mystical emerge defeated, with the news that their modus operandi has succeeded once again. All have styles of broadcast for scenes of their martyrdom, and a path for money to follow to reinvigorate their self-image.

Let's spend our money on an iPhone, let's create more wi-fi networks, let's build robots to fight war, let's constantly improve symbolic analysis of the corporeal world.

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• My definition of symbolic analysis of the corporeal world
• Arc of activity called humanity (a compatible writing without the Frankfurt School in mind).

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AI vs AI and the Quantum of the Conversation

This blog post is going to proceed with a fast, bumpy clip. The topics will be:

1. Reference to a riveting story on dual asynchronous suicides of two pioneers in artificial intelligence.
2. Where their projects have migrated to after their death.
3. The Turing Test compared to Shannon's Theory of Information.
4. Alicebot vs Google. Introducing my phrase :"The Quantum of the Conversation"
5. My wife's question to me: why is AI so important to you?

Wired magazine has an amazingly well written piece by David Kushner titled Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?. Not going to repeat the article here, the article does a better job of representing itself. Everything I write in this blog entry assumes you know their work in AI.

McKinstry's Generic Artificial Consciousness (GAC) [pronounced 'jack"] is incorporated into chatbots at http://www.alicebot.org/. Push's project lives on at http://commons.media.mit.edu:3000. Reflecting the essence of the project goal, the websites are interactive, full duplex communication for the visitor.

Both the Mindpixel and Open Mind projects pursue some nuance of the Turing Test (1950), building a machine which appears totally human (in language only) to a human interviewer.

Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Information (1948) is an earliest stage of a comprehensive understanding of all communication via statistical quantification By using Google, a user is showing an interest in statistical quantification of information, because that is all Google searches provide.

Now for my opinion. I would rather have a conversation with Google than Alicebot. Assuming a chatbot friend is not stupid: the bot knows Nixon did not fear an invasion of Visigoths, that leaders in another point in history did worry about Visigoths, and that there are no outdoor alligator farms in Greenland. Still, it is just a single human friend. With Google I get to have a conversation with a real time world information filtering device. WORLD, dear brothers, sisters and chatbots. A chatbot stands in that mode humans usually stand in, socializing. Socialization helps normalize us to be within bounds of behavior and opinion. With a chatbot, just as with single human friends, your normalization is shaped by the quantum itself, which is small and intimate. With Google, your normalization is with an entity much larger than human.

The quantum of the conversation is analogous to the standalone computer versus internet-as-computer dichotomy. Older computer programs were written to happen entirely on one computer, whereas cloud computing programming utilizes multiple computers and usually has access to the whole internet. By another analogy, the Turing Test is flatearth, and a non-human-giant-AI is copernican.

Last night, my wife asked me; "Why is AI so important to you?". My answer: Because of the quantum of our problem domain. All questions, including the most metaphysical or philosophical, have become too complex for humans to understand by talking to more humans. Historically, when we've realized we needed information beyond what other humans could provide we turned to Earth gods or Sky gods. Now the 7th Kingdom of Life, Technology, has grown to measuring all information and giving meta reports, which recursively change the information set. Humans able to get in on that conversation are part of something amazingly powerful. Powerful on a scale with the advent of prayer and community.

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Supporting and supplemental documents:

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Naivete: The Essential Fuel for War

Frontlines: Fuel for War is a new video game that is about one thing: A world war in 2030 fought for the last supplies of oil.

In a CNN Money article "Peak oil: The video game" there is the usual marketing-hype-as-news. What is more pathetic than the free advertising came from the the sole academic in the news story.

"They could in fact lead to changes in attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately, changes in behavior," said Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who studies the effects of video games on people.

"It may well change attitudes towards the use of these tactics as a political tool," he said. Players may think "of course we have to use military tactics to go take oil."

Is Craig Anderson an adult? I mean the kind that can vote, pay their own rent, watch a movie with some sense of timeline coherence? His multi-faceted confusion about politics concerns me, and I find it strange he is deemed an expert/gatekeeper on the effects of games on our psychology, and politics. He doesn't even have the meaning of politics in his head.

In the the early 1990's war between the US and Iraq that took place in Kuwait, President Bush mentioned oil resources as a reason for war in a general public speech. This is one of many public utterances regarding military tactics to take resources. But this acknowledgment of a long history in which politicians talk about war for resources misses a major overarching semantic distinction:

Politics is the process by which humans decide the allocation of resources, with war and trading as fundamental and eternal subcomponents of the term itself.

Not knowing the above is appropriate for someone that never visits a voting booth.

Knowing the meaning of politics and agreeing with the narrative assumptions in a game such as Fuel for War are two different things. e.g. Believing we should both 1) Develop other means of powering industrialized society 2) Find more cooperative ways to negotiate and pay for oil resources. I am thoroughly in that camp. Fuel for War has America fighting China and Russia. Such an uncool scenario to me.

But I wouldn't be thinking it is "uncool" if I had the mind Craig Anderson assumes I have. I wouldn't know the problem domain at all.

21st Century Public Safety

In a previous blog entry, Towards less Hate: Rise of the Bourgeoise-Technologist, I show a typing of social/economic dependence. Please see that blog entry in order to understand what follows.

Racially and religiously homogenous groups have ancient means of self-governance. They fall into my Type 1 category. Policing is performed by the familial -mothers, fathers, friends. "It takes a village" sums it up.

Type 2 stage is less coherent and efficient for public safety if policing has moved to non-local and non-familial, while the local node is still as racist, religiously sectarian, or harbors a nationalist agenda serving their race or religion. The LA riots of the 1990's, riots in Muslim neighborhoods of France, and religious compound raids such as the Waco Texas Branch Davidians are examples. In all these cases the local racist or sectarian node does not tolerate non-familial ambivalent policing.

A Bourgeoisie-Technologist class, Type 3, are a return to coherence and efficiency in the realm of public-safety. With the ancient form of familial social governance diminished almost to zero, and opposition to racist or sectarian agendas due to these being an economic suppressant; the Type 3 Bourgeoisie-Technologist class stands to gain more public-safety in an age of ambivalent technological social control.

With every surveillance camera and RFID tag the Bourgeoisie-Technologist class can expect greater safety. Of course Type 1 and 2 societies will see the same technologies as threatening their racist or sectarian strongholds, and especially threatening their use of violence on outsiders. For the more fluid individuals without strong allegiance to race or sect, but serving themselves through violence or illegal economics, the surveillance is a straightforward threat.

The Bourgeoise-Technologist class can make increased public-safety more likely by practicing a non-solidarity with Type 1 and 2 classes. The check point, query from police officers, or survey by video camera is an entirely different experience for the legal and illegal. A safe environment for the Bourgeoisie-Technologist class is one with these policing methods 24/7.

A word should be said about wealth and inclusiveness. Our standard view of the 1950's as a bourgeoise paradise, and repressive for minorities; helps foster a negative connotation of the term bourgeoise. That "bourgeoise paradise" of the 1950's was Type 2-an antithesis of the Bourgeoise-Technologist class. The cost of equipment needed for entrance in the Bourgeoisie-Technologist class is well below $500, and there is no one at the entrance door checking for specific race or religion. As far as hurdles to enter an upper class go, the < $500 is a doable one. Then there is the issue of public safety. Historically the underclass have a life threatening hurdle before they can enter a higher class, and it is called "street violence". Peaceful members of the underclass could more likely muster the $500 for upward mobility if they could safely go about their business. Every surveillance camera helps the underclass have less harassment from their own.

The poor want public safety also, for immediate peace, and for an environment conducive to entrance in the Bourgeoisie-Technologist class.

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Supporting and related material:

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Coplink Artificial Intelligence

Towards less Hate: Rise of the Bourgeoise-Technologist

Type 1: Symbiotic dependence is entirely local. If there is a more global connection and trade, it is created by an elite class equipped with mobility and communications, involved with locals only to exploit natural commodities of labor, minerals, plant or animal extracts, or entertainment talent.

Type 2: People we are symbiotically dependent on are local, plus political leverage through homogeny by solidarity with racial or culturally similar groups. Coordination between local nodes is facilitated by one-to-many media. The media has certain command capabilities, and locals have leverage in the form of only watching affirmation of their cultural or racial biases. This social type is still strongly Type 1. Examples: 50's and 60's WASP-centric programming, Black Entertainment Television channel, TV evangelism.

Type 3: A growing class symbiotically dependent on a global economy. These are non-elite equipped with mobility and communications, untethered to local circumstances of others, and symbiotically dependent on people not in their racial, religious, or national profile. My term for this antithesis class to the Type 1 and 2 profiles: Bourgeoisie-Technologist. Bourgeoisie-Technologist Flag

Dialectics on Types 1, 2 and 3

A rise of a Bourgeoisie-Technologist class does not equate to anticipation of total peace, nor does it imply that the Internet will disable Type 1 and 2. The Internet will aid in perpetuating 1) the exploitation of locals by malicious elite. 2) Affirming old racial and cultural homogeny's and prejudices by giving "channels" for viewers to watch their beliefs affirmed. The Bourgeoisie-Technologist class owes its existence to mobile phones, computers, and satellite data transmission; but the Internet is a wider phenomenon. Perhaps this illuminates the stereotype of iPhone user as a diversity-friendly type, and large PC users as more Type 2-ish.

Bottom Up Workplace Productivity

Below is generalized copy of an email I sent to all employees in my company, and has gotten a very positive response from the CEO and workers. The seeds of it are a political framework summed up in one line of the email: All great societies become that way because the little guy wants to do better than their bosses asked. Bosses = Authority figures of any kind.

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BEGIN EMAIL

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All,

I would like to propose a [COMPANY NAME] BottomUp Productive Workplace Group.

The concept is well documented and formulated in academia and in writings on the web. I'll be happy to show examples at another time, but prefer to keep it short here.

This group would be all the non-managers at [COMPANY NAME] who want to join in. Not sure how often people would want to meet, and the most likely time slot would be when we are off the clock but conveniently around each other -which is lunch time.

To cut to the chase, here is list of what I believe it should be, and not be:

• NO:
1. Aimless complaining.
2. Aimless bad mouthing managers or anyone at [COMPANY NAME].
3. Chatter about hobbies unless those hobbies have a roundabout connection to [COMPANY NAME] culture or business.
• YES:

1. Visions for how we can do directives from managers better, faster or easier. Note that this is opposite of "revolution" or other forms of disobedience. All great societies become that way because the little guy wants to do better than their bosses asked.

2. Focused criticism of a given SOP, with a mandatory "better idea" that one can offer. The person offering such ideas needs to point out some practical details, not just unfocused day dreaming.

3. Fun ideas about anything creative for [COMPANY NAME]. What should we invent? What the booth should look like at the big demo? If we as group think an idea is especially shiny, we can present it formally to [CEO and CTO]. It is not expected that our ideas will be usable by [COMPANY NAME], but there is always the chance. ( This is how some of Googles best products have happened, with employees creating on personal projects. Google awards one million dollars to teams that create such new ideas.)

Perhaps it would help telling why I thought of this. First, a good bit of my schooling was in this. Second, this week there was a management meeting. I noted those not in attendance, and they are a valuable resource within [COMPANY NAME]. Said another way: [COMPANY NAME] has an abundance of people with interesting perspectives, useful skills, and intelligence. I guarantee all of you [CEO and CTO] want to make as much money as possible (as I do also). Once they see non-management providing more profit through greater efficiency, quality, and general smartness; they will be receptive and acknowledge your contributions.

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END EMAIL

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Long Tail Economics

In the 1980's and 90's news columnists and political-economics activists focused on the threat to Mom&Pop stores ( the archetypical Jim and Betty's Hardware Store) that Wal-Mart was posing. No doubt, the rise of Wal-Mart and the big box stores did lead to the disappearance of small or individually owned stores in suburban or small town USA.

The activists may have had hearts of gold, wanting Jim and Betty's Hardware Store to survive, and along with it the community spaces that usually formed ad hoc in these old and less formulaic establishments. But that's not what people wanted. The big box stores sold the generic stuff at the cheapest prices. For poor or middle class people, that formula is going to almost always win.

Now, there has been another revolution, maybe more fundamental than the rise of big box stores. The key is the breaking of the generic+cheapest formula, by subtracting the generic and "most popular" items. It is called Long Tail Economics, named after the "long tail" of the graph at the top of this post.

Imagine a brick and mortar book or video store, such as your town's big Border's Bookstore. This store stocks the 160,000 most popular books. Great for them, and for all of us living within driving distance that want one of those books. Here is where sellers with no store on Earth, such as Amazon.com or Netflix.com, crush that reality. They make more money selling millions of copies of the least popular titles on Earth.

Society is not going back to shopping at Jim and Betty's Hardware Store, they are closed. We will still need big bags of Dorito's, 2 liter Coca-Cola's, screwdrivers and office supplies -so the Costco's and Wal-Mart's are needed on a weekly basis. What is needed on a permanent basis is access to the almost bottomless pit of obscure micro-industries, spin-off C-grade rip-offs of subculture cult favorites, and ancient goods such as stone tools.

Thank god we have internet online commerce, without which we would only have stores with Doritos, Coca-Cola, and office supplies.

Who are the people selling in the new paradigm? Here are two excellent examples:

Very Scary Carnival is an artist who I've known since 1982. She has sold art in various media for decades, and now has lots of fun stuff at Zazzle.com.

Another grand example of hyper-obscurity is my tiny presence on iTunes as a music artist. Click here to be taken to my place in the store. To have a listen to different music by me for free go here.

Some have thought that the paradigmatic decline of big-box Doritos outlets would be the local food co-op. While living in Olympia, I saw the local co-op, with its under-caffeinated staff selling nothing useful. The photo to the left is about all they had. I'll take Doritos, specialized FOSS capable electronics, and obscure art over that any day.

Robert Putnam's book Better Together has as title of one chapter: Craigslist.org: Is Virtual Community Real?. The case study marks the online phenomenon as positive in many ways, but fails to fully qualify it as building social capital. This is mostly due to the Putnam social capital thesis demanding a high degree of corporeal associativity (basically you need to hang out with the group on a frequent basis). Here is where the revolution flips: asynchronous associativity provided by ambivalent machines performing algorithms. The associations are not just about about long tail economics (customers that bought this also bought that), rather every social domain, especially politics, are being supported in this asynchronous virtual world. Of course the old fashioned form of meeting people in real time is always in fashion, but to say it is a higher form of social capital is academically arbitrary and out of sync with the trajectory of folk empowerment. This localism stance socially and civically disables anyone who strictly obeys the orthodoxy.

Me: The Mutation

This blog posting may appear as 100 per cent indulgent. I am going to talk about what I like. But the idea is not to propagate readers -you are not being asked to be like me. The focus is on two axioms:

1. No one is entirely alone in their preferences and methodologies. If I prefer, contemplate, or do something, there are others doing the same.
2. Humans have been evolving in very separate ways, grouped by continents (influenced by unique climates and landscape), and even more so in the last 5,000 years with culture (not nature) being the filter for surviving mutations.

These axioms are the a priori assumptions to keep in mind as you look at

Me: The Mutation: My Ambient Environments:

ice, mountains, and technology

rock and ice topped mountains

concrete bridges

power and communication towers

high population density (city)

high population density (remote village)

high altitude, treeless plains

big city urban core

command line interface

data link to globe

buckethead types of music

caffeine

surveillance

long tail economics

The point of listing these cognitive artifacts/biota is to press for their antithesis -all the types which do not fit on the list. Now think of all the humans that function at optimum on the antithesis list.

Those humans are of a different evolutionary track. We are genetically different.

Supporting and supplemental documentation:
The neural bases of complex tool use in humans Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution. Behav Brain Sci, 29(4), 329-347; discussion 347-383
Human-Computer Interaction: Cognitive Science, Memes and Evolution.
21st Century Public Safety

Buckethead video.

Long tail economics theory.

The Giant AI Series: The Text Machine

Supporting and supplemental documents:
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_11.html#oreilly

Stewart Brand: On what he changed his mind about.

Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder; The Well; cofounder, Global Business Network; Author, How Buildings Learn.

He was asked "What things did you change your mind about in 2007?

Answer: Good Old Stuff Sucks. See the full text here.

The question, and Mr. Brand's answer, were part of survey question addressed to a large of what I would ( with high respect ) call celebrity intellectuals. These are people with years of investment in their ideas. their "ideology". Their bills get paid because people pay to hear their ideas. So, for them to change their minds, and admit it in a public forum, is an honest sort of courage.

I think those of us who are not celebrity intellectuals could use the same dose of courage. Whoever we are -committed environmentalist, Christian Coalition fundraiser, gay rights activist, anarchist, or police officer; that identity may pay our bills or gain us popularity but will dry up the more nimble parts of our brain and our hearts if left unchanged forever. No one is asking us to go work for the bad guys, whoever that is, but maybe the fresh vantage point gained from a changed mind will help you serve the good guys a little better.

The Giant AI Series: Technology is the 7th Kingdom of Life

The Giant AI Series: The Integration

In the 1960's a German philosopher wrote:

“Eventually the system will reach a point–the word that provides the social cue is ‘integration’–where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society. Only that society itself remains the cause.”

( Negative Dialectics, p. 267, Adorno). ^Amazon.com

There are many postulating a rise of technology that makes technology, and has political leverage with humans. Could Adorno's "total integration" be an antecedent of the rise of technology as political peer? Nature was an ambient condition for the rise of culture, could culture that has lost its reference to outside causality be an ambient for the rise of technological life?

This progressive hopes so.

The Arc of Activity called Humanity, and Antithesis

One great arc through humanity's whole existence has been towards ever more mobility, distance from biological governance, and symbolic analysis.

No legislation can undo this iron law. No religion can control this through ethical constraints. To be human is to try to move to the next hyper-stage of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing without all other humans following the same uptake.

This creates stratifications. Stratifications to the point of enslaving those who have not equally graduated to the upper limits of the arc -these stratifications are not wrong but the enslavement is.

Equality of all ways of being or equality of opportunity? That is the question that divides many progressives. My stance: Equating every strata as equal with the current upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing is a mistake, a lie, and nothing to do with social justice. Being progressive is allowing all to move towards the upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing.

One is not an equal within humanity's upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing until one participates in its creation and maintenance.

Those who permanently oppose, or fundamentally abstain from, the upper limits of this "Arc of Human Activity" generate a unique class in the "Arc of Human Activity". An antithetical arc to the larger human enterprise, historically this class began as religious aesthetics in various cultures after the great migrations of 800 BC. Today the antithetical arc has matured, enabled by cheap, ubiquitous lethal technology and distributed informational warfare; resulting in a formidable religious aesthetic militancy.

The religious aesthetic militants, whether propagandists or violence professionals, benefit from cognitive dissonance -they oppose the classes and cultures representative of the current upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing; and also use every last shred of those culture's industrial output artifacts in inventive ways to wage their opposition. This is not new, the Middle Ages had even more of this phenomenon present in wars that spanned out from Central Asia. What is new is the lethality of our portable and affordable technologies.

"The Arc of Activity called Humanity" is not going to cease, and the antithesis is always going to have practitioners. It will be interesting to see the mutations and adaptations humans are forced into through this great war of the Arc and Antithesis. Ironically, the religious aesthetic militants may push human evolution (through cultural induced evolution) to a more permanent and mechanical class difference.

We'll see.

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Forget the Frankfurt School (a compatible writing, more accessible terminology and developed critique.)

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Supporting and supplemental documents:
Terraforming War

United States President: An Innovation

For an end to the culture war, and to move to a more collaborative and efficient union, America needs one of these scenarios for the Executive Branch:

Obama/Huckabee

Huckabee/Obama

Bloomberg/Schwarzenegger

Schwarzenegger/Bloomberg

I am an inner-city liberal that has no car, secular and geekish. My lifestyle would put me in the left-liberal camp under the old rules of the culture war. But I'm really tired of one side winning 4 years and shoving their collective lifestyle tenets down the throat of the other culture. All the guys in my list above are beyond such liberal-conservative war mongering. Defying old stereotypes -Huckabee is a former preacher that is also hip and witty, Obama is hip and also religious. Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger are Republicans that have championed progressive environmental policies, out of sync with many in their own party. They all know the collective economic muscle of this country relies on cities and countryside, religious people and geeks, hipsters and oldsters. To choose one or the other is to choose a weak country.

I select All the Above.

Idealistic Autopoiesis

The idealist's autopoiesis postulate is quite out of control in the last couple of decades. With cultish religious groups funding psuedo-populist projects such as the What the Bleep movie, we now have a whole subculture that has self-propagated their own affirmation of the postulate.

This is nicely recursive, a subculture auto-creating their own epistemology, but as an example it shows the weakness in the subculture itself and autopoiesis as an entity's modus operandi.

While posing as avant garde, the autopoiesis cults commit a strange error. The language is very stong in platonism and individualism, two things the cults typically vilify. e.g. Entity X is existing, knowing its X-ness, and imposing its continued X-ness in the next moments of the universe.

As much as the autopoiesis cults talk about complexity/chaos/transitory states, the X in Universe phraseology is flat-earthish.

A richer view of the universe would have a "critical mass" appended to the X in Universe construct. And this view is not so woo-woo as to generate an inarticulate awe. We should be able to say 1,000,000,000 X's, self aware and wanting to perpetuate their lifestyle, are living in the Universe.

For an excellent example of this view, look at any old classic book written about city life. Whether the city is Beijing, New York, or Calcutta -the prose needed to represent such a complex phenomenon usually acknowledges a critical mass complexity.

I guess I'm wanting to shake up the Realist vs Idealist dichotomy, and say there should be a Realist vs Idealist dichotomy on atomic levels language constructs, but a more mature construct is an Emergence view that avoids the traps of these camps. Emergence would focus on consequences more than reductionistic causation questions. Watching for bifurcations in phases of critical mass of X's.

Thats where the action is.

originally posted on craigslist/philosophy

The Giant AI Series: Cyborg Aggregate of All Human Knowledge: An Interview with Photos

Knowledge and information are the most valuable and sought after commodities for survival. The Google multi-computer brain has mined human knowledge more than any other aggregate entity. All humans seeking to maintain or achieve economic status above peasant-class must be capable of using this all-information tool on a daily basis.

A virtuous civic community featuring a strong associational life is an impediment and harbinger of collective ruin if the members cannot retrieve or post new information online. Association with other humans is still essential for survival, and added to this is association with the world wide web, via its current interface, http://www.Google.com.

The Google multi-computer brain has access to the world wide web mutli-computer brain. The Google machines have gone through several generations.

1. Early Stanford Years: 1998
• Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
• 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers donated by Intel, they included 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran.
• F50 IBM RS/6000 donated by IBM, included 4 processors, 512MB of memory and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
• Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
• IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives donated by IBM.
• Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.
2. Current hardware: 2000-2007
• Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. Indeed, the goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per unit of power, not absolute performance.
• Over 450,000 servers[1] ranging from a 533 MHz Intel Celeron to a dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (as of 2005)
• One or more 80GB hard disks per server (2003)
• 2–4 GiB of memory per machine (2004)
3. Code name: Project 02: 2007-Future
• Google is currently developing a supercomputer at a data center located in the town of The Dalles, Oregon. The new complex is approximately the size of two football fields with cooling towers four stories high.

These have been formative stages of the Google brain. Amongst the world's non-miserable class -a class definable as those with access to global information to inform or empower their mobility, this brain is the most essential ingredient in their classification away from oppression or death. For social justice or political empowerment to occur, some portion of it must have been in the form of a query to the top-tier reference to the world wide web.

This Giant Cyborg Aggregate of All Human Knowledge is uniquely powerful, but not in the same way as power was manifest in early-middle industrial times. This new kind of "Most Powerful" has a core function of dispensing knowledge, which is antithetical to hoarding it within a veil of secrecy.

Oddly enough, this Giant Cyborg Aggregate of All Human Knowledge grants interviews with questions about its presumably secret inner life, and the interviews are granted 24/7 to anyone online.

Interview with Google.com

Question: We have a heard there is a Google Owners Manual. Answer:

Question: Tell us more about the secretive Project 02 in The Dalles, Oregon. Answer:

Photos:

Question: Have you ever been hacked? Answer:

Question: This Goolge-Super-AI-Cyborg-Ruling-the-World-Benevolently-Thing, are there others writing about you in this way? Answer:

Google speaks to the world in other ways besides a propositional query. The humans in the "company/corporation" sponsor and video record lectures that "do not represent the views of Google Inc" but nonetheless propagate memes via sight and sound. They are called googletechtalks. One lecture connects nicely with the concept of Google as a giant AI. It is titled "Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence", at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4ox0.

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Supporting and supplemental documents:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/brin98anatomy.html

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