October 7: Identity workshop
This is a plug for a workshop that I am co-chairing with the estimable Ren Reynolds on Friday, Oct. 7 as part of State of Play III (”Social Revolutions”). The subject of the workshop is digital identity. Here's the description:
As we move from the two-dimensional, text-based “web world” to more interactive and immersive social cyberspaces designed for human interaction, we must address how we will promote and protect the development of robust, persistent online identity. Social cooperation in any medium depends on trust. We need signals of commitment to support cooperative behavior. While, previously, cyberspace undermined our ability to create persistent, reliable and coherent measures of identity across a distance, the technology of virtual worlds holds out the promise for creating meaningful identity online. This workshop asks how we can use the interfaces and tools of virtual worlds to strengthen online identity and thereby produce social trust in cyberspace. We can create vivid, visual representations of personal identity independent of our offline attributes and, at the same time we can create reputations independent of social identity in real space. The aim of this session is to develop a dynamic, player-managed social reputation system(s) for the metaverse.
The whole weekend of events will be worthwhile. To register, go here.
Let's Give It Up for Intelligent Design
It's impossible to deny that biological evolution happened. Combining many simple steps many times, plus mutations and contextual struggles, resulted in human beings. We didn't spring from the head of Zeus or any other god.
Because of this evolutionary process, right now humans have minds that have great computational powers of pattern recognition and language acquisition. We're able to note that the pace of technological development is quickening. We can tell that devices are getting smaller and smarter. (We're still evolving slowly.)
We don't avail ourselves of most of our computational powers, though, even as we are amazed by the nuances we can notice. Neither our bodily computers — our minds — nor the computers we buy are fully used.
Kurzweil thinks that if we are able in the coming years to take advantage of growth in computing power and access more of it, we'll soon be able to reverse-engineer the functioning of the human mind. We won't necessarily be able to compute (or describe) personality, but we may be able to figure out functions and replicate them. With this information, he thinks we can evolve better (”stronger”) intelligence amplification processes.
Perhaps if we can persuade the Administration that research into the functioning of the human brain will reveal truths about intelligent design, these reverse engineering efforts will be better-funded. Brain research: the ARPANET of the 21st century.
On a more practical level, the book is full of claims based on concrete cases that the rate of technological change (and consequent paradigm shifts) is increasing exponentially.
If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, perhaps worries about standard network access providers being able to inspect and charge for unauthorized services (providing “smart pipes”) are misplaced. The unauthorized services are changing so rapidly, evolving and mutating along the way, that the pipes won't be able to keep up. Pipes aren't generally good at evolutionary models of service development.
So one possible alternative use of the words “intelligent design” is to denote “evolutionary design.” Designing for adaptability and evolution, as the instigators of TCP-IP did, is extremely intelligent.