Back in January, Vermont Governor Jim Douglas proposed turning Vermont into the first ‘e-state’ in his inaugural address. Wireless communications and broadband internet access are near the point of convergence – meaning the technologies that support each will be the same. More specifically, modern telecommunications will be based on Internet Protocol, or IP, a digital language that can support voice calls – like cell phones and standard telephones – as well as internet communications – such as email and web pages. Building on these technological advances, I propose that by 2010, Vermont be the nation’s first true “e-state” – the first state to provide universal cellular and broadband coverage everywhere and anywhere within its borders. When you turn on your laptop, you’re connected. When you hit the send button on your cell phone, the call goes through. There would be no more endless downloads, no more hopeless hellos, and no more “can you hear me now.” This goal is within our grasp if we move quickly and decisively during this legislative session. |via| Vermont moved both quickly and decisively on this issue, and passed H.248 back in May, allocating 40 million bucks as seed money for generating the 200 million or so to put the plan into action. Is this a good thing? Keep reading. I have to praise Douglas for speaking intelligently about technology issues without sounding like an idiot; that’s a pretty rare thing in politics. And the “Internet for All” slogan makes me want to cheer out loud. But anyone familiar with the history of broadband infrastructure in America ought to be skeptical of this kind of rhetoric. Specifically, the talk of ‘coverage’ is suspicious. “Internet for all” is ambiguous between: Everyone has the option to buy a private connection owned and operated by a telecommunications company. […]

I am an information technology omnivore

One last post before I batten down the hatches and push through this last week of work on the east coast. I wrote the following in response to TiCK’s commentary on the Fox News vs Channers video that’s been rolling round the internet. TiCK posted: I read that shit all the time and I don’t give it another thought, because, after all, it is the internet. However, the second someone says something like that on television news it comes off as incredibly shocking and horrible (rightly so). Here’s the difference: On the internet, there are literally millions of things you could be doing at any one time. So in order to do anything effectively on the internet, you must be able to discern what is worth your attention and what isn’t. Call this “internet literacy”. Internet literacy is a special case of media literacy. In fact, I would say it is a more sophisticated form of media literacy since the internet is interactive. Not only do you need to discern the importance and meaning of particular items, but you also need to know how to appropriately respond to those items. If you are scrolling through hundreds of YouTube comments, one racist remark just fades into the background noise. It is barely worth attention, and not at all worthy of a response. Anyone who is internet literate knows this; otherwise, then the internet is just an overwhelming chaotic mess. On television, however, FoxNews can only show you one particular thing at one particular time, so they decide what is worth your attention, and everything that is put on the screen is something they think you should see. This gives everything on television an exaggerated importance. A racist comment shown on TV isn’t just background noise, but it is the most important […]

This is from the NYT Mag article linked in the last post. I thought Leo (at MIT, of course) deserved special attention: The reason the robot, called Leonardo (Leo for short), is so lifelike is that it was made by Hollywood animatronics experts at the Stan Winston Studio. (Breazeal consulted with the studio on the construction of the robotic teddy bear in the 2001 Steven Spielberg film “A.I.”) Apparently Leo is also wired up to pass the false-belief test, but the author of the article wasn’t very impressed with that.

I’ve received a lot of links. Some are great a lot of them stink Oh, the links I get! Just this past week I’ve received a lot of links Because apparently when people read of weed they think of me. Oh, the links I get! My reputation may not be high But I don’t worry. Don’t stew. I also get links about AI and robots towering in the sky Where solving checkers is easy as pie Where sociable robots go to die Even while they scream “I’m Alive!” Oh, the links I get! (Thanks, Chaz, Steve, EJDickso, IS, and Mara!)

http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/pics/comic_title.jpg

I’ve wanted to post this video for a while, but YouTube only had a crappy cam of it. It is by far the best part of the ATHF movie

Watch this.

The title is a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Here’s the relevant passage: The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. I interpret Haraway’s quote quite literally: our best machines are made of pure energy, of the same stuff as sunshine. Think of fiber optics, or of all the signals that fill the air broadcasting information at some frequency of the electromagnetic […]