“When man entered the atomic age he opened a door to a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.”

Dr. Harold Medford, THEM!

They understood…

a half century ago.

Even pop scifi movie makers appeared to understand…

That a threshold had been crossed, a new world found, a new reason to both hope and fear the future, that unmapped country.

When you look at those pop sicfi films from a half century ago – from the best to the worst – there is a common theme: we are not what we were, we have become something new, even as most of the old stays with us, even as our everyday appears mostly unchanged. We have become something new and we’re not ready.

But there’s no choice, they say, no choice at all. There’s no going back.

Fundamentally, this is, I think, what sets the pop scifi of the 1950s – the source material for many of our machine dreams – apart from what we see currently: the mixture of hope and fear, warning and celebration, seems to have disappeared, like morning mist. Perhaps Blade Runner, that extended meditation on loneliness, was the last great filmed example.

What has taken the place of the old nightmares which once walked hand-in-hand with the old dreams?

Dear Buttons:

Sorry I haven’t been able to call you; I’ve been busy, overwhelmed really.

But not with work or family duties. Of course, these responsibilities occupy my time – nothing important is neglected.

But neither of these have prevented me from keeping in touch as I used to.

No, what has consumed what little spare time I have is a leitmotif triggered by a K-Punk posted article about “The Prestige“, a film I’m very eager to see.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Prestige is of course about the power of film and fiction to cast spells. Its own captivation depends upon keeping the question of its own generic status open: are we watching a simulation of 1890s narrative realism or have we – as some IMDB commenters complained without irony – been ‘conned’ into watching an SF film? The film’s final irony concerns the fact that, to function as magic, genuine science must appear as an illusion.

The full essay can be found here.

This got me thinking about science and magic or, more specifically, what might happen if our techniques became so subtle that they were, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, “…indistinguishable from magic”.

In a pop sci fi scenario, this very situation leads to an advanced species believing itself to be gods and insisting, accordingly, upon the worship of mortals.

Perhaps, in the real, this is what the powerful do to the powerless: demand not only obedience but worship.

Recently, on “60 Minutes“, Bush declared:

I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. … We’ve endured great sacrifice to help them. … (Americans) wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.

Which has, I think, a certain ‘hallowed am I‘ ring to it.

Love,

d.

In December of 1995, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown wrote:

Designing Calm Technology

Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the “Dangling String”.

The Periphery

Designs that encalm and inform meet two human needs not usually met together. Information technology is more often the enemy of calm. Pagers, cellphones, newservices, the World-Wide-Web, email, TV, and radio bombard us frenetically. Can we really look to technology itself for a solution?

But some technology does lead to true calm and comfort. There is no less technology involved in a comfortable pair of shoes, in a fine writing pen, or in delivering the New York Times on a Sunday morning, than in a home PC. Why is one often enraging, the others frequently encalming? We believe the difference is in how they engage our attention. Calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two.

We use “periphery” to name what we are attuned to without attending to explicitly. Ordinarily when driving our attention is centered on the road, the radio, our passenger, but not the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we were attuned to the noise in the periphery, and could come quickly to attend to it.

It should be clear that what we mean by the periphery is anything but on the fringe or unimportant. What is in the periphery at one moment may in the next moment come to be at the center of our attention and so be crucial. The same physical form may even have elements in both the center and periphery. The ink that communicates the central words of a text also, though choice of font and layout, peripherally clues us into the genre of the text.

A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. This is fundamentally encalming, for two reasons.

First, by placing things in the periphery we are able to attune to many more things than we could if everything had to be at the center. Things in the periphery are attuned to by the large portion of our brains devoted to peripheral (sensory) processing. Thus the periphery is informing without overburdening.

Second, by recentering something formerly in the periphery we take control of it. Peripherally we may become aware that something is not quite right, as when awkward sentences leave a reader tired and discomforted without knowing why. By moving sentence construction from periphery to center we are empowered to act, either by finding better literature or accepting the source of the unease and continuing. Without centering the periphery might be a source of frantic following of fashion; with centering the periphery is a fundamental enabler of calm through increased awareness and power.

Not all technology need be calm. A calm videogame would get little use; the point is to be excited. But too much design focuses on the object itself and its surface features without regard for context. We must learn to design for the periphery so that we can most fully command technology without being dominated by it.

Our notion of technology in the periphery is related to the notion of affordances, due to Gibson by popularized by Norman. An affordance is a relationship between an object in the world and the intentions, perceptions, and capabilities of a person. The side of a door that only pushes out affords this action by offering a flat pushplate. The idea of affordance, powerful as it is, tends to describe the surface of a design. For us the term “affordance” does not reach far enough into the periphery where a design must be attuned to but not attended to.

Three signs of calm technology

Technologies encalm as they empower our periphery. This happens in two ways. First, as already mentioned, a calming technology may be one that easily moves from center to periphery and back. Second, a technology may enhance our peripheral reach by bringing more details into the periphery. An example is a video conference that, by comparison to a telephone conference, enables us to attune to nuances of body posture and facial expression that would otherwise be inaccessible. This is encalming when the enhanced peripheral reach increases our knowledge and so our ability to act without increasing information overload.

The result of calm technology is to put us at home, in a familiar place. When our periphery is functioning well we are tuned into what is happening around us, and so also to what is going to happen, and what has just happened. We are connected effortlessly to a myriad of familiar details. This connection to the world around we called “locatedness”, and it is the fundamental gift that the periphery gives us.

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I understand what you’re saying Lord Strawberry but right now what I’m wondering is this: in 3,000 years — give or take — will people study the ruins of Las Vegas much as we study the remains of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes?

If so, what will they get right and what wrong?

Of course, there is irony aplenty here.

Just as penguins begin to enjoy pop cultural godhood in dramatized documentaries and computer generated children’s films, the climate begins to change in ways not beneficial to penguin-dom.

The Huge Entity’s ever seeking Mr. Danieru writes:

What ideas will future generations glance back at and laugh in contemptuous hindsight? In 50 years time which contemporary cultural memes will be deader than the proverbial Dodo? Lying in the digital darkness of our internet time-capsule these questions, and more, will have to wait 50 years of technological shifts; of societal upheavals; of cultural fermentation before they can be answered.

To answer this question, he presents to a darkly glittering world the Conceptual Time Capsule.

Contributions include musings from:

• Your dystopian host
• Velcro City Tourist Board’s Armchair Anarchist
• Hyperaware Consciousness’ Daniel Poynter
• Reality Carnival’s Cliff Pickover
• The Huge Entity’s Mr. Danieru

and more to come…

“The very basis of the precautionary principle is to imagine the worst without supporting evidence…those with the darkest imaginations become the most influential.”

Adam Curtis, “The Power of Nightmares” Part 3

Very often, on line conversations spin around and around, going nowhere at incredible speed (and with a peculiar sort of ferocity).   Sometimes however, surprisingly, you’re led to strange, quiet places.

Last week – on line – I discussed with a correspondent the possible meanings of a very old Egyptian statue: a representation of Khafra and Horus. Horus – depicted as a stylized falcon – cradles the back of the Pharaoh’s head with his outstretched wings, perhaps whispering celestial mysteries into his ear.

No doubt, egyptologists can offer a more scholarly, evidence-supported interpretation.

Beyond the precise political and religious uses to which the statue was put during Khafra’s reign, and after, we were (we are) fascinated by the waking dream-state it presents in stone-preserved form.

That is, the after-life and eternity fixated Egyptians carried with them, it seems, a dream of life’s purpose that linked the mundane to the supra-mundane. This dream inspired them, during that ancient civilization’s most fertile period, to embark on a sort of stone-based space program, an effort to build eternal structures and create a universe of imagery that kept the dream-state alive in people’s minds everyday.

I can’t know with certainty, but I believe the old civilization, the culture that built immense monuments to cosmic concerns, faded as a dream-world first and then, due to various social/political pressures and time’s irresistible damage, crumbled into what came next.

…

Needless to say, America, during the (both on the ground and mind-formed) empire building decades that followed World War Two’s end, cannot be compared, at least not flawlessly, to ancient Egypt; still, it (the U.S.) nurtured its own dream-state, one so seductive the world seemed compelled to fall deeply in love with it even as the real U.S. – or at least its strategists in Washington, committed all the old crimes using all the old excuses.

The dream was of a technologically advanced, politically fair-minded, future-oriented civilization, the burning chrome heart of shining modernity, the creator of actual stairways to heaven.

…

In recent years, with gathering velocity, this dream, this promise really, has been dying.   It’s being replaced, as Adam Curtis states, with a nightmare of endlessly increased security, eternal war against shadowy foes which, Curtis points out, don’t exist in the hyperventilating form our governments present to justify their draconian flights of dark fancy.

When your dreams are supplanted by nightmares, is disintegration far behind?

Here’s my fantasy, of the moment…

Clearly, we aren’t very good at organizing our affairs so that the maximum amount of people enjoy the best possible life.

Perhaps it’s time to redirect our efforts away from Utopian political projects (or really, any political project) and towards a universal command and control matrix.

In Harry Bates‘ “Farewell to the Master” a robot, called Gnut, arrives with its human servant to offer humanity some new options.

The filmed version of this story made the choice quite clear: you (humanity) have nuclear weapons and nascent space flight, this makes you a potential future problem for the rest of us. So, either calm down and straighten up or we’ll destroy you – a sort of preemptive interstellar unilateralism.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/OfpSXI8_UpY"" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"/]

As far as I know, there aren’t any extraterrestrials hovering about, waiting to give us valuable lessons backed up with a friendly smile and the threat of annihilation (which, as mind focusing incentives go, surely has a lot going for it).

So it’s up to us.

Perhaps a global collaborative effort to fashion strong artificial intelligence is in order. I suggest the creation of a new United Nations office: the International Artificial Intelligence Perfection Agency or IAIPA.

IAIPA’s mission would be to shepherd our replacements (at the managerial level) into existence.

Even if this proved to be a failure (and although this is a fantasy, making the impossible possible, I suspect it would), perhaps new methods of global cooperation would result.

Recently, for some unknown reason, I’ve been thinking about the ideal, long haul computer.

What would it be like?

It would be very different from the computers we use – which, cast adrift from the power, contextual and semantic life support systems of our civilization, would be pointless (imagine you’re transported to the 14th century, or survive some future catastrophe, with your laptop intact – while the battery held out it’d be a curiosity – after the battery died it’d be junk – connectivity makes our logic devices valuable).

So a perfect computer would be able to connect to networks and inter networks, of course, but it would also have other capabilities that made it self sufficient, a stand alone resource.

The perfect computer (or maybe, instead of writing “perfect” I should write “useful anywhere and everywhere”) would have the following characteristics:

• Astoundingly durable – so mind bogglingly durable you could toss it over the side of the Grand Canyon, climb down after it, and boot the tough little bastard up.

• Self powered

• Store all human knowledge and media (or, a reasonable amount of it) so you could look up how to do anything, watch movies, listen to music and read any one of millions of books.

• Incorporate sensors that allowed it to determine environmental conditions, detect toxins, perform radar sweeps and just generally be able to interact with the real world, crunch data and produce information based upon what’s going on in 3D.

• Employ both voice and touch interfaces (not exclusively, there’s still room for a keyboard)

• Employ some level of what’s called artificial intelligence

• Be able to perform instantaneous language trasnslation (perhaps through an earpiece transmission so my lack of fluency in, say, Farsi, is hidden).

Of course, a universally useful robot would have all of the above but also be mobile and capable of lending a hand (enforcement of Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics would be good too).

Here is my fantasy….

In the future, there’s a place – call it Mission Control – where world problems are intelligently managed.

Perhaps it’s in orbit or on the surface of the ocean.

Actually, there’s more than one; there are lots of little mission controls, scattered throughout the world each feeding its data stream into Central.

Some are small and quaint – like cozy coffee shops, there are large couches and people serenely tapping away on laptop keyboards.

Others are immense and slick and ultra mod. Perhaps like a set from a 1960s Bond movie.

Greenhouse emissions, ongoing and threatened conflicts, arguments between cats and dogs…

All are monitored and addressed by the Mission Control network.