Koen De Paus originally shared this post: Geoffrey West on cities as organisms Rajini’s recent post about the transportation network of the leaf reminded me of this mindblowing talk from Geoffrey West that draws parallels between organisms, cities and corporations. Truly stunning connections that are bound to spark a massive electrical storm in your grey matter… Seriously, this one is worth watching twice! If you have the time you might even want to check out his 2 hour long talk; http://fora.tv/2011/07/25/Why_Cities_Grow_Corporations_Die_and_Life_Gets_Faster – This is one of those talks that really changed my view of the world when I first stumbled across it. +Rajini Rao‘s post on beauty and utility in a Leaf; https://plus.google.com/114601143134471609087/posts/ZNr6X4ChjTh #ScienceSunday | +ScienceSunday

In my recent #attentioneconomy primer, I included a long selection from +Bruce Sterling‘s novel The Caraytids, which describes a community called the Acquis that organizes entirely by monitoring attention through the use of an immersive augmented reality headset called the “sensorweb”. The whole novel is wonderful, but the discussion of attention camps is particularly insightful. Despite the excitement about these glasses I’ve seen and heard very little to suggest that people understand how they will ultimately be used. To that end, I’m quoting an extended but important passage below. ________ When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded whatever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening. The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close attention would become an expert. The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes. As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue. Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard-not when you […]

Free Speech for Computers? by Tim Wu “Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny. … “The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all. (Where a human does make a specific choice about specific content, the question is different.) “Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.” More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/opinion/free-speech-for-computers.html?_r=4 Doctorow’s counterpoint: http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/counterpoint-algorithms-are-n.html #freespeech #robots #robotrights #digitalvalues _______________________________ This is one of those articles that we’ll look back on in 50 years as a sign of just how backwards and horrible we once were. The lack of foresight is simply astounding. Mr. Wu is simply mistaken if he thinks that the line between human choice and automation can be “easily drawn”, since every human choice is also an automated choice. We are just complex biological machines; we are robots made of lots of smaller robots. The idea that there are simple, categorical distinctions to be drawn here is little more than a fairy tale. Appealing to such fictions in the name of denying an entity their potential rights is simply irresponsible […]

This guide introduces newbies to some basic lectures and resources on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent, cutting edge contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. I hope that this primer sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. Background As the Wikipedia page notes, Herbert Simon first suggested attention management as a method for dealing with information abundance in the 1970’s, as part of his research program into complexity and cybernetic organization. “The Attention Economy” secured its place in mainstream business and marketing jargon after Davenport and Beck’s 2001 book by the same name. Since then, attention management has played a central role in the basic principles of web and game design, and is fundamental to social media management and internet advertising. Overviews have been written to keep people on track, like this 2007 overview from ReadWriteWeb or this 2011 link repository at On the Spiral. Such overviews tend to treat the attention economy (and it is always the attention economy, never an attention economy) as a mix of business strategy and design philosophy. The complexity sciences have matured a great deal since Simon’s pioneering work. We are in a better position today to model, predict, visualize, and indeed manipulate the dynamics of complex systems than we were even a decade ago. These technological advances come on the heels of incredible progress in mathematics and computer science, a paradigm which has come to be called “Big Data” by the media and has attracted significant government and research interest. This paradigm has broad application, from modeling the dynamics of climate change […]

Turing’s statue in Manchester looks quite happy today! #turing #turing100 via http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/turing-and-pride-in-manchester.html

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: This is a curated list of online talks about complex systems and complexity theory. Talks Online talks related to complex systems

The Attention Economy Primer This primer is designed to introduce newbies to some basic concepts and readings on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. There is a lot of material here, some of which is quite difficult, and not all of it is explicitly connected. However, I hope that taken together this guide sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. More: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/06/attention-economy-primer.html #attentioneconomy #bigdata #complexity #science #internet #digitalvalues #digitalculture ______________________________ +Gideon Rosenblatt asked me to put together a reading list on the attention economy last week. It took me a while, but I pulled together around 20 important contributions to the discussion, sorted it by category, and wrote a brief introductory essay to hold it together. Some of it may be familiar, but hopefully enough is new and interesting to encourage further exploration. This is a lot of material, probably more than a summer’s worth. Sorry Gideon! Still, this is a developing story, and I hope to continue to update and argument this primer as more people start to contribute to the discussion. Suggestions, criticisms, and contributions are always welcome. If you appreciate this work, please participate!

Happy Birthday, #Turing ! Marta Rauch originally shared this post: Is This the Smartest Google Doodle Yet? Another day, another awesome interactive Google doodle. This one — which hits Saturday in the U.S., but you can see it already in the Australian and New Zealand versions of Google — celebrates

‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence by Dan Dennett “What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children’s growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: “Comprehend in order to be competent.” For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing’s world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level — or divine level! — competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.” More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ via +Neil Smith

+Callum J Hackett commented: “Is it dickish of me to say that once the fund got to around, say, $100,000, people should have thought, “Maybe it’s time to turn my money to an actual charity”? Yes, those kids were awful (though I have to say that she didn’t look much like she cared given the gravity of some of the things they said), and yes it’s great that people have come out in support of her. But I think this is an example of people behaving disproportionately, and though we hear it happening all the time with bad things, it can happen with good things like this too. I think, as a crowd, the people who have donated have become carried away with indulgence in generosity, perhaps for the fuzzy feeling it gives them rather than her. I don’t think it’s rationally sustainable to make a random woman rich because she was treated like crap by children when there’s so much agony elsewhere in the world that even half of the money this woman will receive could help with enormously.” https://plus.google.com/u/0/110603832885954401865/posts/WmdDv8sL9Xw I left the following response in his thread: I think you are right that this is a disproportionate response. The problem is that there is no infrastructure to ensure that the good will generated on the internet is used productively and effectively, or that its response are in proportion to the crimes that instigated it. Such infrastructure doesn’t yet exist; +Jonathan Zittrain keynote at ROFLCon is in some sense a call for that infrastructure. The paradigm case of such disproportionate response was the Kony 2012 meme, the fastest spreading meme in history and (consequently) the most radically disproportionate ratio of virality to actual accomplishment we’ve ever seen. Just imagine if the internet had actually fomented some action as a […]