"In faith, i do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise."
— Shakespeare 

Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine — so we often hear such statements as this:

Citizen: Of course machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love.

No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways — nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.

What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about?....

MARVIN MINSKY, computer scientist at MIT, is a 1st Generation Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, and author of Society of Mind and the recently published The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind.

Marvin Minsky's Edge Bio Page

Stewart Brand

Introduction by John Brockman 

When I first met Stewart Brand in 1965, he was sporting a button on which was printed: "America Needs Indians." We were at the headquarters of USCO ("US" company), an anonymous group of artists whose installations and events combined multiple audio and visual inputs, including film, slides, video, lighting, music, and random sounds. We were both wearing remnants of our US Army uniforms. We hit it off immediately and have been in touch consistently for the past forty-one years.

USCO's mantra, "We Are All One," had already been altered to "We Are All One...except Brockman" in order to accommodate my involvement. In 1963, the group had erected a Psychedelic Tabernacle in a church half an hour outside of Manhattan, in Garnerville, New York. It became an obligatory stop for every seeker and guru passing through the area. Stewart lived there (in the steeple) for a while.

Stewart was fascinated with the USCO community of artists—including painter Steve Durkee and poet Gerd Stern—and with Rockland County neighbors such as John Cage, all of whom were reading, studying, and debating Marshall McLuhan's ideas on communications. In fact, at one point USCO went on tour with McLuhan and provided an "intermedia" counterpoint to his talks.

Brand, who preferred the term multimedia to intermedia, performed his "America Needs Indians," piece from 1964 to 1966 and performed "War: God" from 1967 to 1970. He organized The Trips Festival in January 1966 just as I was running "The Expanded Cinema Festival" in New York at Filmmaker's Cinematheque. In March 1966 he created the Whole Earth button (it read: "Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?"). This conceptual piece was the center of his 1968 campaign for a picture of "The Whole Earth", which led, in no small part, to the creation of the ecology movement. He is the king of initially obscure, ultimately compelling conceptual art. Call it reality.

Brand is best known to my generation as the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. I recall visiting him in Menlo Park, California, in 1968 while he was working on the original catalog. His wife at the time, Lois, a Native American mathematician, spent an entire day working on the catalog with a layout person while Brand and I sat together reading and underlining a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, a book Cage had handed to me at a dinner in New York. I still have that copy.

Several months later, the oversized catalog arrived packed in a long tube. The original Whole Earth Catalog captured the moment and defined the intellectual climate of the times. A subsequent edition, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, was a number-one best-seller and won Brand the National Book Award.

During the '70s, he often talked about his vision for what he called the personal computer, a term he is often credited with inventing, although he is quick to point out that Alan Kay deserves credit for its coinage. "Alan credits me for being the first to use it in print in '74 in my book Two Cybernetic Frontiers" he says. "I don't recall others using it as a term, and I didn't think I was doing a coinage, just describing the Xerox Alto in an epilogue in the book. By '75 I did use it as the name of a regular section in the CoEvolution Quarterly, well before personal computers existed."

In 1983, Brand sent Dick Farson and Darryl Iconogle of the Western Behavioral Science Institute to see me in New York about a piece of conferencing software called the Onion, which was being used on a bulletin board system called EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) and run by Murray Turoff. When I demurred, Stewart told me I could be a player or I could choose to sit out the biggest development of the decade. I chose to sit it out.

Stewart was right and wrong. It is the biggest development of the '90s, not the '80s. Inspired by EIES, in 1984 Stewart co founded The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area, considered a bellwether of the genre.

That year, Stewart's Point Foundation received a publishing advance of $1.3 million for The Whole Earth Software Catalog, a record deal for a paperback original to this day. As a spin-off, he and Kevin Kelly organized the first Hacker's Conference at Fort Cronkite, the old army barracks north of the Golden Gate bridge. It was in his talk at the conference that Stewart spoke his prophetic words, "information wants to be free", before a hacker audience that included Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, Captain Crunch (Ted Draper), and Richard Stallman, among others. I was also there. Stewart had convinced Doug Carlston, the founder of Broderbund, and myself, to put up the money to finance the event. Stewart's talk was later published in a May 1985 article inWhole Earth Review entitled "'Keep designing': How the information economy is being created and shaped by the hacker ethic."

Clearly, some of the interesting thinking about the Internet has its origins in ideas formulated by the artists of the '60s, which, wittingly or unwittingly, were carried forward by the enthusiastic young Lieutenant Brand. Considerations of form and content, context, community, and even the hacker ethic were all presaged in part by activities and discussions during that period. (Indeed a recent German feature-length movie—"Das Netz" by Lutz Dammbeck—makes this very point and does it quite well, until it melts down by putting forth the bizarre and absurd thesis that the motivating factor behind the criminally insane murderer Ted Kaczynski—"The Unabomber"—was his desire to stop the network created by Brand and myself. (See the trailer).

In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover story: "Always two steps ahead of others.....(he) is the least recognized, most influential thinker in America." The story was about Stewart Brand. The story was absolutely correct: Stewart Brand is the most influential thinker in America.

— JB

ED. NOTE: The following is an excerpt (Chapter 2) from Fred Turner's new book: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (University Of Chicago Press). Photos supplied by Stewart Brand.

FRED TURNER is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

Fred Turner's Edge Bio Page

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".

Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."

Read on as Jaron Lanier throwns a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...

-JB

THE REALITY CLUB: Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold

I wish that you would help build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares.

Photo by Jonathan Brilliant

Introduction by John Brockman

In the 1970s, Larry Brilliant was one the leaders of the successful World Health Organization smallpox eradication program. More than 500 million people died of smallpox in the 20th century. Thirty years ago, two million lives a year were still being claimed. Yet in 1980, the disease was completely eradicated from the face of the planet.

Brilliant was a highlight at this year's TED (technology, entertainment, design) Conference, where he was a recipient of the 2006 TED Prize, in which the recipient makes a "wish." Among the TED attendees are executives who run world-class companies and have pledged support to help fulfill these wishes. This is in addition to each winner receiving $100,000 to be spent however they choose in support of their wishes.

The same week, during TED, Google hired Brilliant to head Google.org. The Foundation, which serves as the umbrella organization for Google's philanthropic activities, is funded by 1% of the corporation's stock, or, about $1 billion. In his first act as the Executive Director of Google.org, Brilliant said Google will join other TED attendees to support formation of an organization to detect early signs of emerging, global health crises, such as bird flu. The name of the project: "The International Network System for Total Early Disease Detection."

Below is a link to the TED streaming video of Larry Brilliant's TED Prize acceptance speech in which he outlines his vision for a "powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares."

—JB

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THE $100,000 EDGE OF COMPUTATION SCIENCE PRIZE

For individual scientific work, extending the computational idea, performed, published, or newly applied within the past ten years.

David Deutsch

Recipient of the 2005
$100,000 Edge of Computation Science Prize 

DAVID DEUTSCH is the founder of the field of quantum computation. Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, and others had written about the possibility of quantum computation earlier, but Deutsch's 1985 paper on Quantum Turing Machines was the first full treatment of the subject, and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is the first quantum algorithm.

When he first proposed it, quantum computation seemed practically impossible. But the last decade has seen an explosion in the construction of simple quantum computers and quantum communication systems. None of this would have taken place without Deutsch's work.

The nominating essay is reproduced in part below.

Although the general idea of a quantum computer had been proposed earlier by Richard Feynman, in 1985 David Deutsch wrote the key paper which proposed the idea of a quantum computer and initiated the study of how to make one. Since then he has continued to be a pioneer and a leader in a rapidly growing field that is now called quantum information science.

Presently, small quantum computers are operating in laboratories around the world, and the race is on to find a scalable implementation that, if successful, will revolutionize the technologies of computation and communications. It is fair to say that no one deserves recognition for the growing success of this field more than Deutsch, for his ongoing work as well as for his founding paper. Among his key contributions in the last ten years are a paper with Ekert and Jozsa on quantum logic gates, and a proof of universality in quantum computation, with Barenco and Ekert (both in 1995).

One reason to nominate Deutsch for this prize is that he has always aimed to expand our understanding of the notion of computation in the context of the deepest questions in the foundations of mathematics and physics. Thus, his pioneering work in 1985 was motivated by interest in the Church-Turing thesis. Much of his recent work is motivated by his interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, as we see from his 1997 book.

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ABOUT DAVID DEUTSCH

The main papers written by Deutsch that contained "achievement in scientific work that embodies extensions of the computational idea" were in 1985 ("Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle, and the universal quantum computer") and 1989 ("Quantum computational networks").

His 1995 paper, "Conditional quantum dynamics and logic gates" (with A. Barenco, A. Ekert and R. Jozsa) was an important step in clarifying what sort of physical processes would be needed to implement quantum computation in the laboratory, and what sort of things the experimentalists should be trying to get to work.

"Universality in quantum computation," also written in 1995 (with A. Barenco and A. Ekert) proved the universality of almost all 2-qubit quantum gates, thus verifying his conjecture made in 1989 and showing that quantum computation and quantum gate operations are "built in" to quantum physics far more deeply than classical physics. In 1996, in "Quantum privacy amplification and the security of quantum cryptography over noisy channels" (with A. Ekert, R. Jozsa, C. Macchiavello, S. Popescu and A. Sanpera), he brought quantum cryptography a little bit closer to being practical as opposed to just a laboratory curiosity.

His recent work as seen in the following three papers can be seen as new "applications" of the computational idea, rather than extensions of it.

In 2000, "Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems" (with P. Hayden) refutes the long-held belief that quantum systems contain 'non-local' effects, and it does it by appealing to the universality of quantum computational networks, and analysing information flow in those.

Also in 2000, in "Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics" (with A. Ekert and R. Lupacchini), a philosophic paper, not a scientific one, he appealed to the existence of a distinctive quantum theory of computation to argue that our knowledge of mathematics is derived from, and is subordinate to, our knowledge of physics (even though mathematical truth is independent of physics).

In 2002, he answered several long-standing questions about the multiverse interpretation of quantum theory in "The Structure of the Multiverse" — in particular, what sort of structure a "universe" is, within the multiverse. It does this by using the methods of the quantum theory of computation to analyse information flow in the multiverse.

His two main lines of research at the moment, qubit field theory and quantum constructor theory, may well yield important extensions of the computational idea eventually, but at the moment neither of them has yielded any results at all, to speak of, only promising avenues of research.

Born in Haifa, Israel, David Deutsch was educated at Cambridge and Oxford universities. After several years at the University of Texas at Austin, he returned to Oxford, where he now lives and works. Since 1999, he has been a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he is a member of the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University.

In 1998 he was awarded the Institute of Physics' Paul Dirac Prize and Medal. This is the Premier Award for theoretical physics within the gift of the Council of the Institute of Physics. It is made for "outstanding contributions to theoretical (including mathematical and computational) physics." In 2002 he received the Fourth International Award on Quantum Communication for "theoretical work on Quantum Computer Science."

He is the author of The Fabric of Reality [1997].

References:

"Quantum Theory, The Church-Turing Principle, and the Universal Quantum Computer," Proc. Roy. Soc. London A400, 97-117 (1985)

" Quantum computational networks" Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A425:73-90. (1989)

"Conditional quantum dynamics and logic gates" (with A. Barenco, A. Ekert and R. Jozsa) Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 4083-6 (1995)

"Universality in quantum computation" (with A. Barenco and A. Ekert) Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A449 669-77 (1995)

"Quantum privacy amplification and the security of quantum cryptography over noisy channels" (with A. Ekert, R. Jozsa, C. Macchiavello, S. Popescu and A. Sanpera) Phys. Rev. Lett. 77 2818-21 (1996)

"Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems" (with P. Hayden) Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A456 1759-1774 (2000)

"Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics" (with A. Ekert and R. Lupacchini) Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 3 3 (2000)

"The Structure of the Multiverse" Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A458 2028 2911-23 (2002)

David Deutsch's Edge bio page