Vuze Keep Crashing My Computer

Dear Cyborg, now you're just an old iron

The controversial remake of RoboCop for the likely direction of José Padilha and the third in a series of Iron Man, expected for 2013 (against all predictions on the imminent end of the world) can not avoid the feeling that the very concept of the cyborg is point to move to a better life. The cyborg has had its day, with its heavy aftertaste twentieth century. No denying it. The very name calls to mind the unintentionally awkward Borg of Star Trek, the surrogates of Philip K. Dick, Ruggero Vasari's rise or protoplasmic robot Karel Čapek.
The third millennium is worth much more, is ready to welcome something new, charming, wonderful, awful. And here is looming on the horizon "Technium".
What will never be the "Technium"? It is primarily a neologism guessed it, certainly is intended to replicate like a virus, but primarily it is the central concept of What he wants technology, the latest book by Kevin Kelly just released for the code editions in Italian . A book since, as the journalist and writer Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, ecological assault is already a celebrity in his field since the release of Out of Control, a classic of its kind, in which he examined the derives almost uncontrollable imposed by the tumultuous changes in technology, in discussing it, However, a new and supposedly "Biology of Machines".
respect to the contents of that book now remote (we were in 1994, almost prehistoric) the Technium concept has value that goes beyond the virtues or the limits of the analysis of Kelly. The Technium would be visible all the technologies and organizations intangible, conceived as bodies in a mutual relationship: a complex that includes all artifacts, from the metropolis to the media, from web content to legal and financial systems.
In other words, the Technium is the well-known technosphere, from which humans ultimately depend on no less than by nature. But - according to Kelly - the complex system would be transformed over time, following the same basic patterns of biological evolution and Darwinian evolution.
Hence the idea that this complex heterogeneous button is neither more nor less than the seventh order of living systems, equal in dignity ontological bacteria, protists, plants. At stake is therefore the survival of the entire set-technology man, because every innovation carries with it changes, but also imbalances. "Purpose" of the Technium is to increase the complexity, accelerate development, increase exploration and connections, exploiting every possible form of energy, develop a vaguely defined "density of meaning" and expand the "area of \u200b\u200bopportunity" concept - it - borrowed from the thought of the molecular biologist Stuart Kauffman, and of which we are already busy on these pages. There
matter for wonder and awe. At a first reading. But, in hindsight, where is the news? The technology is evolving as a body that is very old theme. Already talked about Samuel Butler in Erewon , and in 1871! Without disturbing the great-grandmother died one hundred and ten years ago, we know that science fiction is crammed with these myths. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and legions of other authors have grappled with the same concept, and there is even a case in which, nearly forty years ago, the work of pure imagination actually hallucinatory key advance in a recent, serious and accredited scientific theory. This is Hellstrom's Hive, Frank Herbert, while the scientific theory mentioned above is that of the "superorganism", which discusses Edward O. Bert Hölldobler and Wilson in his book soon to be released for Adelphi. Do not forget that Wilson, the father of sociobiology discussed, it is not any one, nor does it seem foolish to jump which he does in this book through analysis of insect societies to human communities.
If not that, even the term "superorganism" is not exactly new, indeed it is the title of the most well-known text of the famous American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who, in turn, derived the idea from Herbert Spencer. Therefore, although the ideas of each thinker are even diametrically opposed, despite the identical terminology, it certainly can not cry in front of stunned amazement conceptual epiphany.
But back to Kelly and the application that forms the title of the book and explains the work plan. What it wants, in his view, the technology? String, you can say that the "purpose" of hi-tech is to multiply indefinitely the complexity of games and life, which would lead mankind, of course, through endless trial and error, often painful, toward more democratic forms of organization and respectful of nature. Well, scratch the skin of the speculation, check the utopia, in which case a new technological utopia, which replaces the now aged and decayed metaphors of 'collective intelligence "or" meme machines. "
"Technium" wins a lexical enviable record for being a single term and to be evocative, but its content is not very different from all the metaphors that the American philosopher Daniel Dennett together under the concept of "algorithm evolution ", for which, once given the variation, inheritance and selection, evolutionary pressures will be generated in any system under consideration, was also a totally artificial, or a mixture of organic and artificial.
short, we are always within a tautological thinking, and a frame of reference in the name of humanitarianism lies on the outskirts of systems, the human person. But any technological application raises obvious ethical problems of identity and politics. From where comes this or that new invention? What do obey? How and to what extent transformed relations, psychology, the emotions of human beings? How much of these transformations is imposed, therefore, directed to a purpose, and how much will be expected? What new desires, beliefs, aspirations and dreams provides a new technological paradigm?
From a different point of view in the background intelligent and often fascinating publications dedicated hi-tech, there is always the subject of his audience never explicitly thematized. In fact, even before producing content, the writer must take into account the expectations and collective sensitivity. And so his first step is the construction of a conventional language, which forms a frame of reference. Terms and concepts of "collective mind", "superorganism" "Meme machines" and now the new and amazing "Technium" obey the need to encourage forms of integration and acceptance.
For its part, the public want the writer to create a kind of framework legislation to dissolve the doubts, the tensions and concerns about unstable environment in which we live. The public calls for short, that these elements are not brought back live in patterns comprehensible to the dismay, apprehension, even terror to the cumulative effects of technology, to be replaced by reassuring regularity, although forces from "outside" man .
But if we examine the same issues in terms less abstract, one may note that the source of the deepest human behavior, individual and collective, are not technology, but psychology. If anything, the technology (eg technologies, namely the "nervous system" of the world) have a profound effect on the size and persistence of psychological responses, individual and collective, as shown by the recent avalanche effect chain of revolutions.

Posted March 4, 2011

Acute Cerebral Vascular Accident

If you're not a gadget: nets and explosives people in the last book of Jaron Lanier

The beauty of the recent volume of Jaron Lanier You're not a gadget is that it opens with an unusual question, at least in a book devoted entirely to computers, virtual realities and the web. The question is: what is a person? While it is true that technologies alter the sense of place, time and art, then they also affect human relationships, then this will impact the very definition of "person".
From this premise the first three dense chapters, devoted to "Missing Persons", the 'Apocalypse of the renunciation of self and the dangers of the "noosphere", the term, the latter known as coined by the philosopher Pierre Teihard de Chardin, but that has now become incorrectly synonymous with the concept of "collective intelligence".
If the attack on the type of emerging intellectual culture came from a retro classic nostalgia from a declared enemy of technology, no one would be surprised. The scandal lies in the fact Jaron Lanier is a recognized genius of computer science, among other things, inventor of virtual reality, an avid explorer of borderline territories that connect the computer science with cognitive psychology, neuroscience, medicine and even music. Lanier was and is a key problem in the history of hi-tech camera. That is why his book has caused an earthquake in the seventh grade in the panorama of culture Internet users.
Yes, because among other things You're not a gadget (Mondadori, 268 pages, € 17.50), the whose subtitle reads "because we must ensure that the digital culture to get control of our lives," examines the immense damage caused by "collectivism" computerized, accused of hiding behind a new kind of technological messianism, the worst damage to creativity, culture, civilization .
Needless to say that Lanier was immediately accused of treason by a large part of the web that people identify with the "cloud", ie the cloud point of anonymous individuals connected to think and act faster and better than any individual: the elusive "hive mind".
Cloud computing the new millennium seems to be dominated collectivist ideology that culture is embodied in the open or free. The domination of this ideology will lead to an early systemic collapse of gigantic proportions. Lanier's arguments are compelling, but in these brief notes can only be mentioned. For example, it is a mistake to confuse the freedom of expression and the absence of transactions in the exchange of information. Imagine what would happen if you applied the same methodology to the money or goods. Eventually we land to stagnation, and that is what is happening because of file sharing. The free exchange of films, videos or music draws on the enormous reservoir of what has been achieved in the past high level, but also discourages undertaken the equally high standard.
The paradoxical result is the emergence of a global subculture that, while declaring themselves revolutionary, in fact is fiercely conservative. The clues are many: Despite technological advances, the world seems trapped in the intellectual framework youth of the seventies. The epochal changes in the forms of communication do not inspire more (as has happened in the revolutions of the past systemic) thought and art equally extraordinary. Instead, apathy and repetition reign supreme and the world seems about to succumb to the torpor of Sleeping Beauty.
Criticism bolted to the collectivism and totalitarianism are technological So growing up, and not at the periphery of the system, but from his own heart. We find the considerations in Lanier The dark side of the network Nicholas Carr, but in The Shallows. What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , his latest book, recently released in the U.S., a bolus injection examining the scientific literature concerning the effects of the subliminal digital culture in the wake of studies that have tested the effects of television, printing and writing. And the effects appear to be devastating, such as those resulting from the erosion of long-term memory, deep memory, which allows the production chains of complex reasoning. Similar criticism comes from BJ Fogg, cognitive psychologist who studies persuasion strategies favored by the web.
Spontaneously interventionist style compared to the Anglo-American "continental". Even in Europe to discuss the internett collectivism, just remember the cult of the Internet. The global interconnectedness and the end of the social bond by Philippe Breton, cryptic or not the Spheres trilogy, by Peter Sloterdijk. Although the United States, David F. Noble, well-known author of The Religion of Technology, this approach suffers from a purely critical. But these remain the major taken at the periphery apparatus that analyze, because it is entirely designed in the frame of thought of the press. Technologists, more pragmatic, aiming instead to the heart of the system. Hence the tendency to analyze Lanier but then to propose remedial concrete, practical.
take what he calls the "reduction of information systems." All information systems require data to operate. One example is the registry, without which there can not be modern bureaucracy. But in real life no one wants to reduce a person to all its data. But it is exactly what happens in Facebook, MySpace oTwitter, where the abstract obscure the real person. For a "funnel effect" of social networking users are forced to constantly manage their reputation online, an obstacle course where, however, are awarded the insincerity, the shrewdness, opportunism or careerism. So what? So everything is to rethink the software that allows the Social Network to promote the worst behaviors, such as the terrible phenomenon of "troll", a term used to describe those who, protected by anonymity, launches insults and provocations in an online environment. It is the son of the ideology of the breach, according to which everything can be defiled, naked, despised, revealed. The phenomenon has captured the record for the number of suicides caused by these attacks and anonymous collective. Yet, according to Lanier, they may be corrected, speaking just on the design of software. And here are the nodes to comb it all depends on policy choices. In fact
Lanier is not an isolated one. It is action in a specific cultural environment of the highest profile. For example, his ideas on the possible (and very surprising) positive innovations in finance and business Internet users make use of the contributions of persons who are establishing a new paradigm. These include biochemical Stuart Kauffman, Lee Smolin astrophysicist, mathematician and economist Eric R. Weinstein. An entire cultural environment comes together to raise key issues and propose innovative solutions.
The disconcerting quality of virtual reality and the web, think on other grounds, spread In fact, nothing short of stunning expressive possibilities. We find in these pages Lanier twenty years ago, which he outlined his pioneering ideas on post-symbolic communication: information that goes beyond the constraints of the symbols. Which, from the perspective of a technologist, it means transcending the limits of existing programming languages. In short, virtual reality and post-symbolic communication in the absence of protocols. But mind you, the keystone that holds the entire project is just the term "communication". Declared a humanistic approach, which relies on the technology and founded, but to strengthen the positive linkages between people. Something that totalitarianism can never understand cyberspace.