Only HillBillaries Are Left Behind

“Wells, he’s a-gettin’ past us.”

“Why, I heard he don’t see the rain no more, he’s his very own limozeen now.  He’s all up with the big folks these days.”

“Gotta give it to him, but he don’t forget where he come from.”

“Sure, Mah, but he done and forgot us.  Forgot his promises and all.”

“He’ll come back, boy.  You’ll wait and see.  Ain’t no man of his sort can win it without us.  He’ll come back with a beggin’ bowl.”

“You better hope, Mah.  Elsewise, when he wins…who knows what he do?  If he don’t need us, who knows what he do?”

- A conversation overheard upon a front porch in Weston, West Virginia, June 2008

From Where, Mind? Part Deux

Charles Babbage was the first one to see that a stream of consciousness could be produced by a confluence of weights and wheels, gears, pulleys and punch-cards.  Joining together mind and matter, he envisaged a Difference Engine powered by (what else?) fore-sight and steam.

Alas, it was the dream of a man too early born.  A century later, and the great revolution of science has made more of what the mind-machine needs:  electricity to feed the pulses of its thought, silicon to carry its weight, and knowledge – we understand deeper now what thought is.  Thought is not mere mathematical calculations of brute logic:  it is fuzzy and unclear, and it travels not by straight lines, but through neural-networks, synapses made into vast and obscure links.

We have not yet made Babbage’s dream a reality, but it is ever coming closer.  An artificial intelligence cannot be far off, and sometimes seems already to have arrived.  Turing showed us how to recognize when we have made it – it is when something has become indistinguishable from ourselves.

Meet A.L.I.C.E.  Surely we cannot be far now.

poq is spin

poq is symmetry

(courtesy of the NYT)

poq is spin

‘Cause you lived your life, like a candle in the wind

e-poqalypse

One hundred years from now, poq imagines the state of science to be a disastrous wreck.  The British will have completely lost their math skills, and possibly by then our physicists will have solved the mysteries of the universe (but probably not).  But it is the rate of new inventions and discoveries which worries poq the most.

At the moment, the world is discovering and inventing more things, faster than ever before.  So consider this:

1.  By 2108, there will be so much more information that 4 years of post-grad probably isn’t going to cut it.  A theoretical nuclear physicist (for example) would probably be able to start practicing only when they are like, 40 – way past their most productive years.  Eventually, academics might die before they ever reach the cutting edge of their field.

2.  By 2108, there will presumably be more people around, and more people doing science means more people publishing papers.  At the current rates of increase, by then we wouldn’t be able to finish reading a single paper in our field before another ten come out.  This would make it impossible for anyone to keep up with anything much.

All this would cause an electronic apocalyptic overload of information.  How could we possibly deal with it!?  Is the world doomed!?

…Surely not.  By 2100, we can have faith that Google will have the answer.  Or maybe it already does.

Things…My, How They Pass

Divine Gyanendra takes his shining crown

and puts it down,

betrayed by the stars and the signs.

The Lunatic Fringe

“A Lunatic:  one whom the moon inhabits.” - Ambrose Pierce

There has always been a sense in which the madman is the visionary, who sees the moon beyond the clouds.  The mad see things we do not – for that we brand them either insane or genius – and this is what makes them dangerous, for

“The nose of the mob is its imagination.  By this, at any time, it can be led.” – Edgar Allen Poe

And led it has been, to the maw of Auschwitz and the killing fields near Phnom Penh.  When the lunatic and the mob are combined, anything might happen.

Surely by now, we have learned to distrust grand narratives.

Still, poq ponders the relation between the Cloud, the mob and the mad.  The Cloud has opened the ears of the many to the voices of the few.  Words are no longer vetted;  they find your heart directly, like a drug on drip-feed.  In this way a new type of beast has emerged:  a hyper-ventilating, panic-driven, super-sensational echo chamber, where opinions are minted in minutes and forgotten faster.

In the Cloud, the smallest of pins hits the floor like thunder.  A moment later and a million voices will make a mob, noisy voices – maybe not angels – dancing on the head of the pin.  A moment after that, and the whole circus will move on, learning – and earning - little.

In Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, a genius child realizes the potential for power hidden in the anonymous voice, and uses the Cloud to shape the global discourse to his advantage, writing stories and crafting comments as a virtuoso conductor would direct an orchestra.  He carefully creates an atmosphere of fear in which only he can provide the solutions to the world’s ills.  Eventually, the child ascends the ladder of his own making and steals the ears of the world’s leaders, and from there he (somewhat fancifully) steals their thrones too and becomes world leader.  Beware the visionary who comes bearing narratives, because the guardians are all gone now.

Mobs are as mad as the Moon, and where the mad go they follow. In a Cloudy age, we should fear those who shape the shapeless Cloud: they are the most dangerous of all.

(Matt Drudge, we are watching you.)

A Wishlist: Improvements to the Cloud

poq presents three improvements to the Internets which would go a long way towards solving problems such as world peace, global warming, and too much free time:

1.  iSmell – The insertion of a scent-emitter into every computer monitor, capable of a full range of 256 scents.  Surfing Ryanair deals to St Kitts and want to smell that fresh sea air?  No problem!  Checking the city streets of Shanghai for the nearest Starbucks?  Why not check the smog factor too?  Best of all, Amazon would smell like a book store, that crisp perfume of new ink…

2.  GPS 2.0 – Because poq is tired of sending the same old ‘where are you?’ texts, only to find the person being queried is either A) two metres away, or B) in Belgium.  Let’s have an app on Facebook with realtime mapping of personal locations.  We’ve already given away all our other secrets anyway.

3.  More Free Stuff – The Internet has a proven track record of making stuff free.  Let’s keep it up, guys.  Free music, video, phone calls and dictionaries are not enough.  More free stuff might include tennis shoes, Lego Mindstorm Sets, and mortgages (for example).