The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I described some very general features of the attention economy, and hinted at your role in it. In this post, I will describe a simple thought experiment for thinking about how the attention economy might serve as a general organizational infrastructure. Imagine that everyone straps a little box on their foreheads. These little boxes produce tiny invisible marbles at some rate, say: 10 marbles every second. While you are wearing the box, it shoots invisible marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at. Those objects along with everything else in the environment are equipped with little devices that register and absorb the incoming marbles, so that all your marbles get absorbed by something. These marbles are a crude approximation of the attention you pay. Every time you pay attention to some object, it gets bombarded with the marbles shooting from your forehead. The idea seems silly because it is. I’d never suggest we actually fling high speed projectiles in arbitrary directions from boxes mounted on people’s foreheads, that would be dangerous and irresponsible. If this is to be implemented at all, it would of course be rendered digitally and transparently as best as our technology will allow. Moreover, the direction a person’s head is facing is a terrible indicator of where their attention is being paid; to do this precisely, we’d need something far more sophisticated. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. This is a toy model, and I’m describing it in some detail to help us think about what the attention economy is doing, and what we are doing in it. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out with some frequency and getting absorbed by other objects. Still with […]

Inspired by +Gideon Rosenblatt‘s thread, an discussion of the “wisdom” of crowds. Aristotle distinguished between five “intellectual virtues”. These virtues are: episteme: scientific knowledge. Think of it as “books smarts”. techne: craft knowledge. Think of it as skills and abilities, or “street smarts”. This is where we get our word “technology”. phronesis: intelligence nous: understanding sophia: wisdom These distinctions are very interesting; you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics#Book_VI:_Intellectual_virtue I have a lot to say about techne, obviously, but the two terms that are of interest to us here are intelligence and wisdom. Aristotle thinks we are always aimed and directed at goals or projects, what he calls a telos, or an end. So intelligence is about our ability to realize those ends, and how well we can do it. There are lots of ways of accomplishing a goal, and our intelligence is, in a sense, a measure of our ability to do it. The better you are at seeing means and opportunities for accomplishing your ends and the more these ends result in living a flourishing, happy life, the more intelligent you are. At least, that’s what Aristotle means by pronesis, more or less. My favorite example of intelligence comes Herbert Simon, I think, but I can’t find the reference. Simon asks us to consider two magnets. Magnets “want” to be near each other, to get as close to each other as possible. If you put two magnets on opposite sides of a wall, and if they are strong enough, the magnets will stick to the opposing sides of the wall because that is as close as they can get. Now consider Romeo and Juliet. If you put them on the opposite sides of a wall, they won’t settle for hugging the wall with their partner on the other side, […]

This will be the first in a series of essays discussing Turing’s view of artificial intelligence. You can find some relevant links for further consideration at the bottom of the post. Questions, comments, and suggestions are appreciated! !: Turing’s prediction In his 1950’s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing gives one of the first systematic philosophical treatments of the question of artificial intelligence. Philosophers back to Descartes have worried about whether “automatons” were capable of thinking, but Turing pioneered the invention of a new kind of machine that was capable of performances unlike any machine that had come before. This new machine was called the digital computer, and instead of doing physical work like all other machines before, the digital computer was capable for doing logical work. This capacity for abstract symbolic processing, forreasoning, was taken as the fundamentally unique distinction of the human mind since the time of Aristotle, and yet suddenly we were building machines that were capable of automating the same formal processes. When Turing wrote his essay, computers were still largely the stuff of science fiction; the term “computer” hadn’t really settled into popular use, mostly because people weren’t really using computers. Univac’s introduction in the 1950’s census effort and its prediction of the 1952 presidential election was still a few years into the future, and computing played virtually no role in the daily lives of the vast majority of people. In lieu of a better name, the press would describe the new digital computers as “mechanical brains”, and this rhetoric fed into the public’s uncertainty and fear of these unfamiliar machines. Despite his short life, Turing’s vision was long. His private letters show that he felt some personal stake in the popular acceptance of these “thinking machines”, and his 1950 essay was clearly written to […]

I wrote a long comment in response to +Carl Henning Reschke‘s very insightful questions in the thread linked below. In a few days, I’ll be posting the next in my#attentioneconomy series, and people have already spoken up having difficulty following it. Perhaps the comment below will orient the discussion a bit better; the table below may help. You can find links to the attention economy series to date at the end of this post. I’m worried that the table makes me look crazy. I asked my peers, and they agreed. I’m posting it anyway. Nyah. _________ +Carl Henning Reschke You are asking some very deep and insightful questions. I’ve got my work cut out for me. =) The most important thing I want to say, if I haven’t been clear, is that the flow of attention is a self-organized phenomenon, with each individual acting autonomously to direct their attention according to their own interests and motivations. So the attention economy would actually realize many of the virtues of a laissez-faire model; in fact, I will argue that the dynamics of attention flows are a better model of “pure competition” than capitalist markets. My next post in the series will carefully distinguish between decentralization and self-organization. Part of the problem with laissez-faire economics in Enlightenment frameworks is that they conflate the two. Although money economies are usually decentralized (and capitalists tend to argue against centralization in the form of state regulations), they are usually not self-organized, and capitalists tend to resist self-organization in the form of labor movements and the like, preferring instead to maintain top-down control of the markets and resources. This has nothing to do wih human greed or goodness, this is the way the infrastructure works: money tends to accumulate in a few to the detriment of the […]

Left a comment in the +Jennifer Ouellette‘s thread objecting to the thesis of this article, quoting my comment below: _______ I’m going to have to object pretty strongly to this article. The spirit is in the right place, but the lesson it draws is completely mistaken. There is no tyranny of the majority except as it expressed itself through the centralized authoritarian institutions that levy top-down control over the supposedly consenting masses. The article jumps from the clear fact that the majority is sometimes wrong to the mistaken conclusion that we have something to fear from the majority, or that the prevailing opinion is suspicious. This is an incredibly dangerous leap in logic, and should be examined a bit more carefully. Just for instance, the prevailing opinions of scientists is usually a pretty reliable guide to the truth. It doesn’t give you certainty, but the stronger the majority consensus, the more reliable we can take the conclusions to be. In fact, we take majority consensus to be one of the most impotant thresholds for the acceptance of a scientific theory there is. A mistaken scientific paradigm might be frustratingly difficult to overturn, but this stability is part of what makes scientific consensus such a strongly reliable indicator of the truth. In other words, there is no tyranny of the majority in science; in fact, it is an case where we all expect the majority to rule, even when we grant that the majority can be mistaken. A mistaken majority is only a problem when they wield the kind of power that we usually only grant to institutional bureaucracies like a state. Democratic states are designed to slow down the zeal of the majority to ensure justice and respect of equal rights. For instance, I don’t think so, but you might […]

I know FB/G+ comparisons are tired and lame, but I wrote up this comment in+Ciro Villa‘s thread, and it seems to lay out a position that I’m not sure has been explicitly stated before. Comments or suggestions in either thread would be appreciated! _ The typical complaint about G+ relative to FB is that “there’s no one here”. This is a curious sort of argument that pervades many aspects of the contemporary popular discussion. It is a kind of argumentum ad populum: an appeal to the people. Consider the following arguments that share a similar form: I’m not going to put solar panels on my roof because no one else on my block is doing it, and I don’t want to be different. I’m not going to conserve energy and reduce consumption, because no one else is doing it and I want to keep up with their lifestyles. I’m not going to reduce my meat consumption, because everyone else’s meat consumption is going up and I don’t want to be left behind. Etc. You get the point. These are obviously bad arguments, but they share the same formal structure of the justifications used to rationalize the use of Facebook. Regardless of the context used, an appeal to the people is a logical fallacy. G+ is a better social network, not just in the “easier to use and I like it more” sense, but in the much more important sense of “open, inclusive, and user-controlled”. I think we have an ethical obligation to prefer open networks over closed networks not just for our own networking experiences, but for the sake of the networks themselves. Moving to G+ for me is closer to a kind of “internet environmentalism” whereby I’m trying to make choices that I hope benefit the whole internet ecosystem. […]

There’s some discussion going around about the number line and innate intuition. This is a good time to talk about Meno’s Paradox! The paradox is raised by the sophist Meno as Socrates attempts to engage him in some philosophical inquiry. Meno wonders how we could possibly inquire into anything without already knowing the subject we are inquiring in to. Here’s the official statement of the paradox from Plato’s dialogue: Meno: And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? Socrates: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the, very subject about which he is to enquire. Socrates rejects the paradox immediately. Instead, he cites “priests and priestesses” who discuss something like reincarnation of the soul. Socrates says that if the soul is reincarnated, then we never really learn anything new. Instead, we simply recall things we’ve already experienced before. He says: “The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, rand having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no […]

“After seeing a triangle beat a pentagon to an object of ‘banana’ status, 12 month olds looked for longer when they were then presented with an incongruent trial where the pentagon gained over the triangle. 9 month olds (understandably?) couldn’t care less. So, on the basis of this social interaction alone, the 12 month olds were able to notice when something unexpected happened.” “To rule out the possibility that this was just the result of some simple heuristic such as “when triangle and pentagon are present, triangle gets the object” and make sure the infants really were assigning some dominance, another experiment (with 12 and 15 month olds) showed the same test video of the two agents collecting little objects. This time, however, the preceding video was of the triangle dominating a little walled-in space that the pentagon also wanted to inhabit. The 12 month olds had no idea what was up, but the 15 month olds generalised from the first “get out of my room” interaction to the “I get the last banana” interaction. So, 15 month olds can extract, just from watching a social interaction, the dominance status of agents and can generalise that information to novel situations. So if a 15 month old watches you lose your favourite seat in front of the TV, they’ll also expect you to miss out on the last slice of pizza, because you’re a loser.” Developmental Psychology News originally shared this post: 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. Infants’ expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Link to PNAS paper: http://goo.gl/WZjRi #infantdpn #socialemotionaldpn Babies know who’s boss, whose boss, and […]

Koen De Paus originally shared this post: ?????????? > measure together 1) An imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically pleasing proportionality and balance; such that it reflects beauty or perfection. 2) A precise and well-defined concept of balance or “patterned self-similarity” that can be demonstrated or proved according to the rules of a formal system: by geometry, through physics or otherwise. When we think of symmetry, we tend to think of option 1, which relates more to our human world of feeling and beauty. When we look at a face we see symmetry but this is an illusion caused by the scale on which we view things and the lack of detail our eyes can pick up. The symmetry we see in our day to day lives is an approximation. If you were to zoom in on a complex object, let’s say a face, there will always be flaws, a scar or even a stray molecule is enough to to break perfect symmetry. Perfect symmetry is almost impossible to attain for complex objects but remarkably, there exists a realm of physics where simple symmetries in real objects cease to be approximations and become perfect. That is the domain of quantum physics, which for the most part is the physics of very small, very simple objects such as electrons, protons, light, and atoms. Why is it that we find symmetry so attractive? Asymmetry can surprises you while symmetry offers you a nearly identical data set. Don’t we like surprises? Perhaps the brain likes simplicity? If it anticipates symmetry, it doesn’t need to process as much information, it can figure out what the right side of a face looks like even if it only gets to see the left side. Which is pretty amazing but also causes quite a bit of trouble […]

No Fun The artists at 0100101110101101.org recently opened their first solo exhibit in London, featuring some of their new installations, like this video game that spews carbon monoxide into the room as you play: http://vimeo.com/20792959 In honor of their opening, I’m linking my favorite piece of theirs below, a 10 minute video short entitled “No Fun”. It’s a few years old, but I think it is probably the most honest artistic commentary on Digital Culture in the first decade of the 21st century. The video is somewhat disturbing and was banned from YouTube, so consider yourselves warned: this is not an easy video to watch. Nevertheless, the piece moves me in profound ways that only good art can, and it offers a perspective on the Digital Age that we all tend to ignore. ““No Fun” (2010) reveals how Chatroulette enables socially perverse responses to horror. On one half of the screen, Franco Mattes hangs from a noose, body limp and facial muscles distorted, aping rigor mortis. In the corner, the alleged suicide victim’s computer screen serves as a blank letter, an indication that the performance is happening in real time (and a visual quote of the volley of gazes in “Las Meninas”). The screen within the screen is not the crux of the artists’ artifice but a telling clue of an uneasy spectatorship. So long as we watch we cannot preside as moral authorities, but become subjects of an artistic play on voyeurism itself. On the left side we witness a rotating cast of anonymous spectators looking at the webcam image on the right. Two girls scream, and then one expresses concern while the other can barely suppress a smile. Teenage boys give the finger, spout profanities, or click off. As expected on Chatroulette, one man is obviously masturbating, indifferent […]