Introduction

"As our worlds become smarter, and get to know us better and better," writes cognitive scientist Andy Clark, "it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins."

Clark's examines the"potent, portable machinery linking the user to an increasingly responsive World Wide Web," as well as "the gradual smartening-up and interconnection of the many everyday objects which populate our homes and offices." But his interest is not primarily in new technology. "Rather," he writes, "it is to talk about us, about our sense of self, and about the nature of the human mind. The point is not to guess at what we might soon become, but to better appreciate what we already are: creatures whose minds are special precisely because they are tailor-made to mix and match neural, bodily and technological ploys."

According to Clark, we have to give up the prejudice "that whatever matters about mind must depend solely on what goes on inside the biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull." He presents cognitive technologies as "deep and integral parts of the problem-solving systems that constitute human intelligence. They are best seen as proper parts of the computational apparatus that constitutes our minds."

– JB

For your entertainment, here is a piece by George Dyson. It shows the way to deal equitably with the situation in Florida. It was written three years ago and it is being published this week in the Bellingham Herald and in theFrankfurter Algemeine Zeitung. You might consider it an addendum to Danny Hillis's piece in the news-letter about "How Democracy Works". It describes a real case verifying Hillis's theory of democracy. Implications for biology, engineering, and physics are enormous.

"For the last twenty years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before."

Introduction

Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, musician, and currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, worries about the future of human culture more than the gadgets. In his "Half a Manifesto" he takes on those he terms the "cybernetic totalists" who do not seem "to not have been educated in the tradition of scientific skepticism. I understand why they are intoxicated. There IS a compelling simple logic behind their thinking and elegance in thought is infectious."

"There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people.

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false, but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality. Cybernetic eschatology shares with some of history's worst ideologies a doctrine of historical predestination. There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in the sun arrives."

Read on.....

—John Brockman

JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL.

Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page

Reality Club — Part I: George Dyson, Freeman Dyson. Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rod Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Dennett, Philip W. Anderson.

Reality Club — Part II: Jaron Lanier responds; Lanier's postscript on Ray Kurtzweil

Hans Moravec has been thinking about machines thinking since he was a child in the 1950s, building his first robot, a construct of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor, at age ten. In high school he won two science fair prizes for a light-following electronic turtle and a tape-controlled robot hand.

As an undergraduate he designed a computer to control fancier robots, and experimented with learning and automatic programming on commercial machines. During his master's work he built a small robot with whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer, and wrote a thesis on a computer language for artificial intelligence. He received a PhD from Stanford in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses.

Since 1980 he has been director of the Carnegie Mellon University Mobile Robot Laboratory, birthplace of mobile robots deriving 3D spatial awareness from cameras, sonars, and other sensors.

His books consider the future prospects for humans, robots and intelligence. He has published many papers in robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel and other speculative areas.

HANS MORAVEC is a Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.

Introduction
By John Brockman

David Gelernter .....

"...prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened." (John Markoff)

"...is a treasure in the world of computer science...the most articulate and thoughtful of the great living practitioners" (Jaron Lanier)

"...is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperate on solving a single problem, which is the future of computing." (Danny Hillis)

"...is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." (Bill Joy)

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter entered the public mind one morning in January '92 when The New York Sunday Times ran his picture on the front page of the business section; it filled nearly the whole page. The text of the accompanying story occupied almost another whole page inside.

In 1991 Gelernter had published a book for technologists (an extended research paper) called Mirror Worlds, claiming in effect that one day, there would be something like the Web. As well as forecasting the Web, the book, according to the people who built these systems, also helped lay the basis for the internet programming language "Java" and Sun Microsystems' "Jini."

Gelernter's earlier work on his parallel programming language "Linda" (which allows you to distribute a computer program across a multitude of processors and thus break down problems into a multitude of parts in order to solve them more quickly) and "tuple spaces" underlies such modern-day systems as Sun's JavaSpaces, IBM's T-Spaces, a Lucent company's new "InfernoSpaces" and many other descendants worldwide.

By mid-'92 this set of ideas had taken hold and was exerting a strong influence . By 1993 the Internet was growing fast, and the Web was about to be launched. Gelernter's research group at Yale was an acknowledged world leader in network software and more important, it was known for "The Vision Thing", for the big picture.

In June '93 everything stopped for Gelernter when he was critically injured by a terrorist mailbomb. He was out of action for the rest of '93 and most of '94 as the Web took off, the Internet become an international phenomenon and his aggressive forecasts started to come true. Gelernter endured numerous surgeries through 95, and then a long recuperation period.

Now Gelernter is back. In this audacious manifesto, "The Second Coming", he writes: "Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.""

-JB

DAVID GELERNTER, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a leading figure in the third generation of Artificial Intelligence scientists, known for his programming language called "Linda" that made it possible to link computers together to work on a single problem. He has since emerged as one of the seminal thinkers in the field known as parallel, or distributed, computing.

He is the author of Mirror Worlds (1991), The Muse In The Machine (1994), 1939: The Lost World Of The Fair (1995), And Drawiing A Life: Surviving The Unabomber (1998).

David Gelernter's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Stewart Brand, David Ditzel, John C. Dvorak, Feeman Dyson, George Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, David Farber, Danny Hillis, Vinod Kholsa, John McCarthy on "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" by David Gelernter

Doyne Farmer and I read two different metaphors from the biological / evolutionary analogy that George Dyson has advanced. ... Farmer seems to believe that software and especially operating system standards are not only necessary and useful but also that they are as static as a utility grid. I view utilities as entities that occupy difficult-to-acquire land, accommodate expected future growth, that operate at a very high level of efficiency (well over 50% and probably more like 95%), and where technological advances (superconduction, or hydrogen-economy) would not be expected before the investment is completely amortized. Similarly old-time telecommunications operated in the difficult-to-acquire lower frequencies, and until recently did not have serious technological competition. Government created and government enforced monopolies (such as AT&T was until recently) required government regulation.

CHARLES SIMONYI is Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation, where he focuses on Intentional Programming, an "ecology for abstractions" which strives for maximal reuse of components by separating high level intentions from implementation detail.

 Charles Simonyi's Edge Bio Page

I don't think that the connection that George Dyson has made between cells and operating systems is far fetched at all. In any case it doesn't really matter; the key point is that there are enormous advantages to having a standardized platform that all applications run on, and it is bound to happen. I agree that the implications and consequences of this monopoly are much more far reaching than Rockefeller's control of the oil industry. This is much more than a monopoly — it is control of society's replication machinery for ideas.

J. DOYNE FARMER, the co-founder and co-president of Prediction Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is one of the pioneers of what has come to be called chaos theory. Farmer was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and later started the complex systems group, which came to include some of the rising stars in the field, such as Chris Langton, Walter Fontana, and Steen Rasmussen. In addition to his work on chaos, he has made important theoretical contributions to other problems in complex systems, including machine learning, a model for the immune system, and the origin of life.

J. Doyne Farmer's Edge Bio Page

Introduction
By John Brockman

Pattie Maes came to the United States nine years ago to work with Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She had received her Ph.D. in AI at the University of Brussels and was attracted by Marvin and Rod's more alternative view on artificial intelligence, and artificial life. After working for the AI lab for two years she moved to MIT's Media Lab, which is more interdisciplinary than the AI lab, something that attracted her given that she has varied interests. She used to be happy just doing research, but given that her research is finally applied anyway, she realized that she would only be happy if her work made it into the real world, and so that's one of the reasons that she started Firefly, a start-up which sells software that allows Web sites to personalize the interactions that they have with the visitors of their Web sites. An example is Barnes and Noble, a Firefly customer.

Barnes and Noble uses the tools to recognize individual people so that they can provide personalized service to those people. Maes points out that it used to be the case that many years ago you would go to the corner bookstore and the owner there would know you, would know what you have bought before, they would know about your interests and they could give you personalized service and say, "Hey, did you know there was a new book by Isabelle Allende?" They know you have an interest in certain types of writers. She believes that Web sites will have to provide that same kind of very personalized high quality service on the Web, because this will be one of the ways in which they can distinguish themselves.

"If Barnes and Noble on the Web knows me," she says, "knows what I'm interested in, can help me find the stuff that I'm interested in, can tell me hey, you've bought the other Isabelle Allende books, did you know that she has a new book out, or did you know that there's another author very similar to Marquez, etc., that just published a new book? If I get that kind of personalized service, even though in this case it's implemented by an algorithm rather than by the corner bookstore owner, I'm going to be much more loyal and go to Barnes and Noble because they give me this personalized treatment, they recognize me, they greet me, they remember what I've bought before.

-JB