Group items tagged

printing broadcast them

Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music

scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques

Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated

The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium

Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization

paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of informatio

Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we've ever built - say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information

the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information

The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell.

Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage.

One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information.

Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10^20) of information, many orders smaller than nature's total, but growing. Technology expands data by 66% per year, overwhelming the growth rates of any natural source.

the laws of physics don't (as far as we know) improve with time, but extropic systems like life, mind and the technium do. Over billions of years they gain order, complexity, and their own self-organized autonomy — all things not present in the universe before. As Paul Davies points out, "life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history."

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move towards the immaterial.

Forty percent of US exports today are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). Disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium

Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium's ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial.

Every scientific theory is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries stacked with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated information.

the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics.

If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk.

Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times

Once scientists built large scopes to examine matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, they saw the world was incorporeal. They discovered that matter is, at the bottom, empty space and waves of quantum uncertainties.

All creation is assembled from irreducible bits. The bits are like the "atoms" of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life.

To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. Surprisingly almost any kind of material can serve as the matrix for a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well.

The third postulate is: All computation is one.

The physics of person munching on a banana is computationally equivalent to the best possible virtual simulation of the same act. Both phenomenon require the same degree of universal computation, one in particles, and one in electrons.

The Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration

The consequence of these three propositions — that computation is universal, ubiquitous, and equivalent — suggests that the logical processing of bits is the most potent form of self-organization at work in the universe.

If everything can compute, and all computation is equivalent, then there is only one universal computer. All the human-made computation, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggyback on cycles of the Great Computer, also known as the Universe.

doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, "at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source." This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

Generally, a society does not abandon a new technology to return to an earlier version. When a current technology is suspended in the natural course of evolution it is usually displaced by a more complex variation, and the old version is swept aside as a viable minor alternative, or at least a curiosity, but rarely goes extinct.

Rather than a series of linear displacements climbing a ladder of evolution, the technium progresses as a widening field of accumulation.

Existing technologies keep operating almost intact, but are subsumed under additional new, more complex layers.

As any modern farmer will tell you, the glories of virtual worlds and e-commerce depend upon a rather primitive cycle of poking seeds into dirt and harvesting the replicants

For all practical purposes the flexibility of a technological system is eliminated once its initial choices and defaults are fixed. As systems scale up they acquire inertia.

The more established a process is, the harder it is to change, the more it proceeds along its path. Big technology is hard to stop.

This grid, built 100 years ago, lighted your grandparent's home, and our parents', and now brightens mine, and will light the lights of our grandchildren and probably their grandkids.

This technological longevity is almost a kind of immortality that transcends our comparatively brief lives. The technium's scope exists outside of our oversight, especially outside of our personal oversight. Its omnipresence together with its relative immortality grants it a version of autonomy.

The second way that technology gains a measure of autonomy is through its self-creation of needs.

It is this stratified stability created by extropy, evolution, and self-organization which prevents the collapse of complexity. If complexity had to re-assemble itself at every instance, nothing really complex would be possible.

The technium today is entirely populated with combinations of primitive technologies that have been ratcheted up into more complex devices.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology.

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.  That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents.

"New technologies are never created from nothing." Arthur observed. "They are constructed—put together—from components that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building blocks—for the construction of further new technologies."

(Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more valuable.) In six years the average weight per dollar of US exports (the most valuable things the US produces) dropped by half.

Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirit." But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well. Although it may not dominate matter's behavior, information must rest in the essence of matter. That's a lot less intuitive. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating.

One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC, or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. A Dell laptop could, if anyone wanted it to, emulate an iPhone.

In that curious way of life, growth triggers more growth. The web of technologies is ever expanding because a particular technology will self-generate new needs, new demands, and new appetites.

But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow "built into" that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years.

For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren't really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a  2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity  in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of  synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.  On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

An emerging set of cheap tools is now making it easy to create digital video. There were more than 10 billion views of video on YouTube in September. The most popular videos were watched as many times as any blockbuster movie. Many are mashups of existing video material. Most vernacular video makers start with the tools of Movie Maker or iMovie, or with Web-based video editing software like Jumpcut. They take soundtracks found online, or recorded in their bedrooms, cut and reorder scenes, enter text and then layer in a new story or novel point of view. Remixing commercials is rampant. A typical creation might artfully combine the audio of a Budweiser “Wassup” commercial with visuals from “The Simpsons” (or the Teletubbies or “Lord of the Rings”). Recutting movie trailers allows unknown auteurs to turn a comedy into a horror flick, or vice versa.

The collective intelligence of humans can also be used to make a film more accessible. Avid fans dissect popular movies scene by scene. With maniacal attention to detail, movie enthusiasts will extract bits of dialogue, catalog breaks in continuity, tag appearances of actors and track a thousand other traits. To date most fan responses appear in text form, on sites like the Internet Movie Database. But increasingly fans respond to video with video. The Web site Seesmic encourages “video conversations” by enabling users to reply to one video clip with their own video clip. The site organizes the sprawling threads of these visual chats so that they can be read like a paragraph of dialogue.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology.

In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.

For directors who speak this new cinematographic language, even the most photo-realistic scenes are tweaked, remade and written over frame by frame. Filmmaking is thus liberated from the stranglehold of photography. Gone is the frustrating method of trying to capture reality with one or two takes of expensive film and then creating your fantasy from whatever you get.

A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images.

The best editors can remix video as fast as you might type.

TimeTube is the visual equivalent of a citation index; instead of tracking which scholarly papers cite other papers, it tracks which videos cite other videos. All of these small innovations enable a literacy of the screen.

In classic cinematography, a film is planned out in scenes; the scenes are filmed (usually more than once); and from a surfeit of these captured scenes, a movie is assembled. Sometimes a director must go back for “pickup” shots if the final story cannot be told with the available film. With the new screen fluency enabled by digital technology, however, a movie scene is something more flexible: it is like a writer’s paragraph, constantly being revised. Scenes are not captured (as in a photo) but built up incrementally. Layers of visual and audio refinement are added over a crude outline of the motion, the mix constantly in flux, always changeable.

In the great hive-mind of image creation, something similar is already happening with still photographs. Every minute, thousands of photographers are uploading their latest photos on the Web site Flickr. The more than three billion photos posted to the site so far cover any subject you can imagine; I have not yet been able to stump the site with a request. Flickr offers more than 200,000 images of the Golden Gate Bridge alone. Every conceivable angle, lighting condition and point of view of the Golden Gate Bridge has been photographed and posted. If you want to use an image of the bridge in your video or movie, there is really no reason to take a new picture of this bridge. It’s been done. All you need is a really easy way to find it. Similar advances have taken place with 3D models. On Google SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse, you can find insanely detailed three-dimensional virtual models of most major building structures of the world. Need a street in San Francisco? Here’s a filmable virtual set. With powerful search and specification tools, high-resolution clips of any bridge in the world can be circulated into the common visual dictionary for reuse. Out of these ready-made “words,” a film can be assembled, mashed up from readily available parts. The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images.

hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another

tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

Expert software can be used to identify the key frames in a film in order to maximize the effectiveness of the summary.

Researchers have started training computers to recognize a human face. Specialized software can rapidly inspect a photograph’s pixels searching for the signature of a face: circular eyeballs within a larger oval, shadows that verify it is spherical. Once an algorithm has identified a face, the computer could do many things with this knowledge: search for the same face elsewhere, find similar-looking faces or substitute a happier version

With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. With the assistance of screen fluency tools we might even be able to summon up realistic fantasies spontaneously. Standing before a screen, we could create the visual image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen literate, maybe even faster. And that is just the opening scene.

Fourth, the forces that conspire towards convergence don't seem to have strong counter-forces, suggesting that convergence will tighten over time. Perhaps in one hundred years, or two, technological development will not vary much around the globe. In this sense "the future will be more evenly distributed" to paraphrase William Gibson. In reaction to this homogeneity, perhaps the variation we see in regions we will see in individuals. People will choose to abstain or forsake particular global standards of technology in a form of idiosyncratic distinction. (See my post on the Neo-Amish.)  They will re-distribute the future themselves. But like the Amish they will harbor these "redistributions" as a personal choice within an ocean of planetary convergence. When everyone has access to all technologies (and all the same technologies), no one will have time to use or load them all. Then the only course will be to carry or "distribute" your personal slice of the technium. In this way while the planetary culture slides toward convergence of technologies, billions of technology users will diverge in their personal choices as they edge toward using smaller and more eccentric selections of available stuff. Your identity will be displayed by what you don't use.