Edge: FEATURES

For its fourth anniversary edition — "The World Question Center 2001" — Edge has reached out to a wide group of individuals distinguished by their significant achievements and asked them to respond to the following question: "What Questions Have Disappeared?"

THE SECOND GLOBALIZATION DEBATE [1.30.00]
A Talk With Anthony Giddens

The second globalization debate is now upon us, and it's no longer just an academic debate. It's in the streets, as we know since Seattle, since the meetings in Washington, since the carnival against capitalism in London, and similar kinds of events all over the world.

THE LAST DIGERATI DINNER— 2001 [2.22.01]

These days, it's open season on the Web. Where that will take us now is anybody's guess, but it won't be back to headier times, says John Brockman, a New York literary agent who became known in Silicon Valley over the past several years for throwing an annual "Billionaires Dinner".....He wants to change the name of the event. "This year," he says. "It's the 'Joy of the Ordinary Income Dinner.' .....Bon appetit and pass the Rolaids." — Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal

THE ECONOMICS OF DREAMS [3.14.01]
Two Questions for the Edge Community
by Joseph "Yossi" Vardi

"Mr. Brockman," he said in a thick accent. "Being an Israeli, I must respond to your question not with an answer but with two more questions, which I would like to adress to your faithful readers. First: Where are we right now on the enclosed chart (see "The Economics of Dreams" below). Second: How long will it be until the stock market begins to go up?"

IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL? [3.14.01]
Question for Edge discussion group from Freeman Dyson

Silicon-based life and dust-based life are fiction and not fact. I use them as examples to illustrate an abstract argument. The examples are taken from science-fiction but the abstract argument is rigorous science. The abstract concepts are valid, whether or not the examples are real. The concepts are digital-life and analog-life. The concepts are based on a broad definition of life. For the purposes of this discussion, life is defined as a material system that can acquire, store, process, and use information to organize its activities. In this broad view, the essence of life is information, but information is not synonymous with life. To be alive, a system must not only hold information but process and use it. It is the active use of information, and not the passive storage, that constitutes life.

SEX AND PHYSICS [4.2.01]
A Talk with Dennis Overbye

"What else is there? Sex and physics."

SOFTWARE IS A CULTURAL SOLVENT [4.12.01]
How Our Artifacts Will Be Able To Interact With Our Biological Forms
A Talk with Jordan Pollack

I work on developing an understanding of biological complexity and how we can create it, because the limits of software engineering have been clear now for two decades. The biggest programs anyone can build are about ten million lines of code. A real biological object — a creature, an ecosystem, a brain — is something with the same complexity as ten billion lines of code. And how do we get there?

DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952 - 2001) [5.14.01]
"Lament for Douglas" by Richard Dawkins

I believe it falls to me to say something about Douglas's love of science. He once asked my advice. He was contemplating going back to university to read science, I think specifically my own subject of Zoology. I advised against it. He already knew plenty of science. It rings through almost every line he wrote and through the best jokes he made. As a single example, think of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Douglas's ear for science was finely tuned. He thought like a scientist, but was much funnier. It is fair to say that he was a hero to scientists. And technologists, especially in the computer industry.

THE EMERGENT SELF [6.5.01]
FRANCISCO VARELA [1946-2001]

"Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and eternal question.

HOW FAST, HOW SMALL, AND HOW POWERFUL?: MOORE'S LAW AND THE ULTIMATE LAPTOP
A Talk with Seth Lloyd [7.23.01]

Something else has happened with computers. What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.

ONE HALF OF AN ARGUMENT [8.4.01]
A Response to Jaron Lanier's ONE HALF A MANIFESTO and POSTSCRIPT REGARDING RAY KURZWEIL
By Ray Kurzweil

Jaron writes that "the whole enterprise of Artificial Intelligence is based on an intellectual mistake." Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out yet other goals have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner, that once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered AI and becomes just a useful technique. AI is inherently the set of problems we have not yet solved.

SCIENCE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEFS [8.23.01]
A Talk with Michael Shermer

The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else.

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY [9.10.01]

One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most signigicant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in software and computation. This Edge event is an opportunity for people in various fields such as computer science, cosmology, cognition, evolutionary biology, etc., to begin talking to each other, to become aware of interesting and important work in other fields.
Opening comments and streaming video from the recent Edge meeting on "software and computation, and the beginning of everything" — David Gelernter, Brian Greene, Alan Guth, John Brockman, Marc D. Hauser, Jaron Lanier, Jordan Pollack, Lee Smolin

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER [9/11 EDITION — 2001] [10.31.01]
WHAT NOW?

I believe that the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the "Edgies" can bring to the subjects.

WHAT EVOLUTION IS [10.31.01]
A Talk with Ernst Mayr
Introduction by Jared Diamond

Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.

KEN KESEY (1935 - 2001) [11.10.01]

As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

THE COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVE [11.19.01]
Daniel C. Dennett

"There are going to be things that meet those conditions that are not interestingly computational by anybody's standards, and there are things that are going to fail to meet the standards, which nevertheless you see are significantly like the things that you want to consider computational. So how do you deal with that? By ignoring it, by ignoring the issue of definition, that's my suggestion. Same as with life! You don't want to argue about whether viruses are alive or not; in some ways they're alive, in some ways they're not. Some processes are obviously computational. Others are obviously not computational. Where does the computational perspective illuminate? Well, that depends on who's looking at the illumination."

INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION [12.4.01]
Lee Smolin

As a theoretical physicist, my main concern is space, time and cosmology. The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information.

SOFTWARE, PROPERTY & HUMAN CIVILIZATION [12.4.01]
Jordan Pollack

It seems to me that what we're seeing in the software area, and this is the scary part for human society, is the beginning of a kind of dispossession. People are talking about this as dispossession that only comes from piracy, like Napster and Gnutella where the rights of artists are being violated by people sharing their work. But there's another kind of dispossession, which is the inability to actually buy a product. The idea is here: you couldn't buy this piece of software, you could only licence it on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis; As this idea spreads from software to music, films, books, human civilization based on property fundamentally changes.

STREAMS [12.4.01]
David Gelernter

When we ask ourselves what the effect will be of time coming into focus the way space came into focus during the 19th century, we can count on the fact that the consequences will be big. It won't cause the kind of change in our spiritual life that space coming into focus did, because we've moved as far outside as we can get, pretty much. We won't see any further fundamental changes in our attitude towards art or religion all that has happened already. We're apt to see other incalculably large affects on the way we deal with the world and with each other, and looking back at this world today it will look more or less the way 1800 did from the vantage point of 1900. Not just a world with fewer gadgets, but a world with a fundamentally different relationship to space and time. From the small details of our crummy software to the biggest and most abstract issues of how we deal with the world at large, this is a big story.

A GOLDEN AGE OF COSMOLOGY [[12.4.01]
Alan Guth

Even though cosmology doesn't have that much to do with information It certainly does have to do with revolution and phase transitions, in fact phase transitions in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word.

THE CENTRAL METAPHOR FOR EVERYTHING? [12.4.01]
Jaron Lanier

One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moore's law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. It's as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.

HOW DOES THE BRAIN GENERATE COMPUTATION? [12.4.01]
Marc D. Hauser

For humans, Chomsky's insights into the computational mechanisms underlying language really revolutionized the field, even though not all would agree with the approach he has taken. Nonetheless, the fact that he pointed to the universality of many linguistic /archive/archive_, and the poverty of the input for the child acquiring language, suggested that an innate computational mechanism must be at play. This insight revolutionized the field of linguistics, and set much of the cognitive sciences in motion. That's a verbal claim, and as Chomsky himself would quickly recognize, we really don't know how the brain generates such computation.

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