EDGE Annual Question 2010 – How has the internet changed your thinking?
A book was published with all the responses for people who don't want to read long text on screen nor print out hundreds of pages.
Last year, I summarised some of the respondents' points in a WORD document which I'll copy-and-paste below. Some of the points may not make sense, as they are a summary-of-a-summary. With time, I'll tidy this up.
James O’Donnell
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| John Brockman presiding over an EDGE event at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2007 |
In January 2010, über-impresario John Brockman posted the above question on his World Question Centre part of his Edge site. As usual, dozens of his regular respondents (Dawkins, Pinker, Eno, etc) answered with paragraph-length answers. It's a worthwhile browse....
Generally, opinions are divided between those who praise the internet because:
· Web 2.0 interactivity: comments, feedback, dialogue not monologue
· Knowledge to all, democratic, power to the people
· Ideas spread fast
· Instant access to vast amount of information (ultimate library)
· Instant communication
· Wiki collaborations
· Luddites who reject the internet are frozen in time (intellectually speaking), perpetually before 1995 unless they read a lot of books, while the internet-savy accelerate
And those that suggest caution with regards to the internet
· Wastes a lot of time (ephemeral news, distractions, digital deluge)
· Need to unplug to have deep thoughts
· Social inclusiveness can give a voice to all the crackpots, trolls & other scum
· No substitute for face-to-face interactions
· Anonymity breeds hate
· Big Brother – government/corporations reading emails
· No permanent record (emails deleted, online photographs only exist in a virtual intangible world).
· Can’t outsource all your memory. Still need to know what to look up to get precise details on, in the same way that you roughly need to know how a word is spelt before trying to look up precisely how it’s spelt in the dictionary.
John Brockman
Paper, writing – Externalise memory
Internet – externalise senses, nervous system
Hive mind – there’s only one mind, the mind we all share
Collective externalised mind
Daniel Hills
New era of Entanglement (compare with Enlightenment = independence).
Internet (TV, radio, FTP, www, twitter, email, Facebook) not same as the network
Most people ignorant of the underlying infrastructure
Stewart Brand
One surrounds oneself with a ‘guild’ of intellectual peers
Moderate one’s thinking, cross-checking, error-correcting, etc
A decades-long conversation
Clay Shirky
Shock of Inclusion: professional media replaced by amateur media
Average quality of thought has collapsed
Influx of amateurs means that high-quality material needs different a production
Invisible College / Republic of Letters – sharing.
Now internet is the same thing on steroids.
Eric Fischl
Experience replaced by facsimile
The internet extends the pattern started by the camera & TV (e.g. social interactions)
Dawkins
The internet is a bottom-up network, grown organically
Fast interconnectedness blurs the distinction between a group of individuals and a society – so that the internet is creating a new ‘super-organism’, especially if instant (@ c) direct brain-to-brain communication were possible
Nassim Taleb
A small amount of addition information leads to a disproportionately larger increase in confidence so that we think we know more than we actually do
Unprecedented times: ignorance combined with hubris
Many fields have too low a signal-to-noise ration e.g. epidemiology, economics
Internet makes ‘runs on banks’ global i.e. more moody
To cull noise, need to go on an ‘internet diet’
We’re no wiser than our counterparts from centuries ago (loss aversion of Seneca)
Kevin Kelly
Corpus collosum thicker in literates
Brain affected by literature, which affects brain
Currently no scientific studies of what the internet does to young brains
Do we need to remember facts anymore?
For every fact, there is an anti-fact (counter view-point)
For every expert, an anti-expert (true or fraudulent)
Certainty decreased – one now creates one’s own certainty
Internet blurs the boundaries between work & play
George Dyson
We used to be kayak builders but now are dugout builders
Kayaks – built up from fragments
Dugouts – removing wood from a trunk
So much information, we have to sift through and discard it
Brian Eno
The ‘Net didn’t free the world – the same tyrannical regimes still exist
Protest movements might be better organised but still ineffective
Western governments – can use internet as propaganda
Undermining of truthworthiness
Make one’s own collage (lack of independent objective authority)
Eno now reads books more cursorily
Community:
Used to mean physical/geographical connectedness
Now means shared interests of any arbitrary/banal hobbies
Virtual life at the expense of First Life?
Authentic experience becomes more valuable
Mind is now more linguistic than visual (others experience this vice versa?)
Expert
Used to be someone with access to special information
Now expert is someone with a better way to interpret
Email
Check email several times a day
Resent having to answer loads of unsolicited e-mails
Interrupts thinking
Artists/musicians
Used to do tours to promote their work (album – band)
Now need work to promote their tour
More effort needs to be put into aspects of a artwork that can’t be duplicated
The authentic has replaced the reproducible e.g. live concert
This is the way it used to be before recordings and mass production
Chaos to our society if the internet collapsed
Marissa Mayer
Internet allows better decision-making and more efficient use of time
Still in its adolescence – not all the information is there yet
Martin Rees
Compare the episode of 3 Indian mathematicians in 2002 publishing a faster algorithm for factoring large numbers, with the ‘equivalent’ episode of Ramanujan writing a letter. In other words, today genius gets instantly valuated and recognised.
Death of traditional journals
Andrian Kreye
Internet is boring (in a good way), reducing need to commute, research into IT
Unfulfilled predictions:
Timothy Leary – VR the next psychedelic
Todd Rundgren – rise of the amateur i.e. lots of mediocre creativity
Thinking is faster
Philip Campbell
Night-time ideas instantly acted upon
Breadth of consideration, speed of access
PubMed – biology database index of papers (soon superseded?)
Howard Rheingold
Need skills of how to use the internet (discipline, research, critical thinking, etc)
Internet literacy – attention, comprehension, filtering, etc
Crap detection aka credibility assessment
Esther Dyson
Immediacy – connections, answers, business, charity
Empty calories – analogy to sugar
Larry Sanger
Spread too thin? Unfocussed
Flotsam on the fast-moving digital flood
Should blame be external or internal? Need more self-discipline.
Education curriculum that focuses on collaboration, social networks
Rejection of the hive mind – prefers home schooling of children
George Church
Hypertext and connection is what’s impressive, not knowledge
Internet is not a separate intelligent entity – can’t solve problems, not self-aware
Changes in the way we think more radical in the past: language, writing, brain size
Still need to solve fuel, food, psychological & poverty problems
Lisa Randall
No data as to whether internet is changing how we think. Anecdotes insufficient
Not using a bookmark – forced to find the last text that can be remembered
Is using the search function cheating? Get straight to the point – questions answered
Is a specific question is succinctly answered, do you remember it more than if it were spelled out in a long book, or just more efficiently (knowledge per unit of text).
Serendipity – can get unexpected surprises with traditional newspapers or online
Internet allows one to be bolder in areas one doesn’t know
Plural of anecdotes is not data – Frank Kotsonis
Can one draw new scientific conclusions from the anecdotes/data on the internet?
Gerd Gigerenzer
Center for Advanced Study in Palo Alto – technology initially barred to allow scholars to think deep thoughts
Rules: check email once a day, keep mobile off unless making a call
Writing – more of an impact. Exactitude
Concentration – may be a lost skill, as well memorisation
Internet – outsourcing cognitive abilities
Scott Atran
Bottleneck 70kya – down to 2000 individuals (volcanic?)
60kya – leaving Africa
Global cooling & drying, parching of grasslands, less game
Great Leap Forward i.e. cultural explosion of art & technologies
Recursion – allows language to build complexity
Also facilitates theory of mind – I know that he knows the she knows
Genetic quirk that allowed recursion
Claude Levi-Strauss – hot v cold cultures
Cold – static, eternal myths that ‘explain’, cyclical, no progress, oral memory
Hot – writing, agriculture, forward progress, dynamic
Interchange via the Silk Road crossing Eurasia
Exchange among societies
Promises between strangers, money, writing, contracts, laws
AD0 – just 4 empires: Roman, Parthian, Kushan, Han (China & Korea)
3 religions: Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism (all interacted along Silk Road)
Mutated into Christianity, Islam and Buddhism
Concepts: individual free choice, collective humanity
After the Enlightenment: secular religions e.g. “-isms” such as Fascism
New forms of technology beyond the current internet:
Still bound by the old evolutionary psychology: traits since Palaeolithic times
Love, hate, jealousy, guilt, contempt, pride, loyalty, friendship, rivalry, risk
Political freedom & diversity v dumbing homogeneity & deadening control
Internet – double-edged sword – the oxygen of openness and of terrorism
Globalisation – elites experience it differently from the itinerant underclasses
Driftwood: refugees, migrants, marginal e.g. Indian workers in Dubai
It can strengthen self-identity if set adrift among different cultures
Douglas Coupland
Internet: too many celebrities, they all cancel each other out. Death of the megastar Music collections no longer are static after age 23, but continue to grow, develop
Stephen Kosslyn
Other people can serve as extensions of oneself
Internet has extended memory, perception and judgment
Can only write with a fact-checking browser in the background
Filling up dead time (e.g. audiobooks while commuting), especially with smartphones
Downside is dead time allowed deep thoughts (small price to pay?)
Kai Krause
Less of a feeling of isolation that conventional electronic media generates due to all the rubbish on TV. The internet allows connection with kindred spirits.
W Tecumseh Fitch
Biological analogies to the internet:
Our nervous system evolved over 400 million years
Hormonal system (endocrine): hierarchical, master control cells
Works fine for plants & fungi
Neuronal system – horizontal, for higher metazoans
Organised into networks
With spoken language, allows hunter-gatherer coordination
Writing: similar to endocrine system (e.g. edicts from kings, Papal bulls)
TV/Radio – top-down as well.
TCP/IP & HTML: equivalents of cAMP and neurotransmitters
Wikipedia & Google – hippocampus?
Youtube – occipital lobe?
Analogy falls down:
Internet-as global brain isn’t in control of international power
Political, economic, military ‘organs’ remain insulated from brain
When reading history, you realise how contingent everything was on accidents
Was the messenger delayed? Was there a miscommunication?
Delays are getting fewer – just seconds now, if fact. Essentially instant
Seth Lloyd
About 0.5% of scientific statements on Wikipedia are incorrect
Sex propagates useless information (junk DNA), now the internet does
Life suffers editorial collapse (mass extinctions)
So far editing the internet has not been necessary (cheap ram, ‘unlimited’ space)
If Moore’s Law continues we will run out of resources in which to hold, process all the information, then there will be a need for editing again.
Future projection – the ratio of useless to useful information will continue to grow
Serian Sumner
Imagining life without the internet – empty, isolated, etc
No consequences of actions on the net, with a cost in privacy
Astonishing altruism – giving advice to strangers for hours.
Portal to lazy escapism
Nicholas Christakis
Skeptical that the internet changes the brain
Books & telephony probably didn’t either
Changing social interaction
Most conversations: people talking about themselves
Intelligence evolved as a response to social complexity, not environmental challenges
Aka ‘Social Brain Hypothesis’
Group size will remain at around 120-150 (can’t track more relationships)
Military, education, Facebook groups, etc.
Neri Oxman
Hypermnesia – exceptionally precise memory
Sufferers lack detail suppression, meta-analyses
Can’t induce, deduce, generalise, 1:1 scaling
e.g. Uruguay Funes – eventually driven mad (need dark room for refuge)
Alun Anderson
Not changing thinking per se, but changing interactions
Print journalists, magazines, books – all likely to vanish
Extinction of books – a single isolated voice lacked authority, wisdom, breath
Connecting the dots (using a security phrase) is the key
Impact of rock ‘n roll on the Soviet Union? Apocryphal. Impact of western permissive liberal culture on conservative cultures such as Iran, Saudi Arabia.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Internet = sixth sense
Lee Smolin
Internet has altered the context in which we think & work
Networks will be the new paradigm of thinking
Synchronises & broadens global communities,
Tom McCarthy
Reifies networks, logic of human thought that has always existed
John Markoff
Pessimist – internet opens a Pandora’s Box of dystopian human nastiness
Demise of localism
Just like intelligent well-to-do people have fewer people than poorer, less education people (blue state v red state), the forums are dominated by angry rabid extremists with a lot of time on their hands, while sensible rational people will be proportionally underrepresented in the debates.
Every institution is dumbing down – tabloidization of media
Sam Harris
Own thoughts are uploaded onto internet
Just Google your memories: pictures, video, writings, sent folder, etc
Memory is imperfect – tendency to almost always misremember
Peter Diamandis
Twitter – meet up with friends anyway (iPhone app to see where they are)
Answers – just ask ‘what is the answer to x’ and you shall receive
Analogous to distributed computing – small time from others are put to use
Nick Bostrom
Most important events in last 40 years: end of Cold War, and Internet (6 years)
Dark energy, Human Genome, Guns Germs & Steel
Internet allows contact with people one would normally never meet
Prediction: VR (3D skype) will become more prevalent as a way to meet
Avatar motion capture technology – can meet in a virtual world
Almost like the ‘Holodeck’, but more like The Matrix
Due to high transport costs of matter, compared to 0 costs of info transfer
Disadvantages of transporting people”
Expensive, slow, jet lag in time zones, disruption, C footprint, security
Gap between the virtual and the real will diminish – telephony, skype, second life
It’ll be centuries before the full impact of the internet will be realised
After all look at electromagnetism, discovered in mid-19th century
David Myers
Group Polarisation – tendency of face-to-face discussion to amplify opinions
In the online world, like minded extremists ratchet each other up (echo chamber)
Separation + conversation = polarisation
Internet as social amplifier
Social entrepreneurship: hearing aids as wireless speakers
Rudy Rucker
Data, not algorithms, is what makes the modern inception of AI useful
No intelligence – just an efficient search engine that mines the data
Given enough data, can a computer ‘fake’ intelligence
The anthill organises the data in a hierarchy (feedback) – no czar needed
Linda Stone
More aware of the contract between online and offline world
Real physical offline world: engages the senses – more appreciated now
Barry Smith
Are the socially isolated internet-addicts part of a greater community?
Internet exploits our desire for gossip (useful for tribes, but useless now)
Robert Shapiro
Online data is more fragile than physical data (books), as drives can be deleted
Chris Dibona
Search for maximum efficiency of communicating info: video? Audio? Text?
Information pruning – resigned to not needing to know anything
Nostalgia for making knowledge difficult (Puritanism, protestant work ethic)
Andy Clark
Internet is changing what you think, when you think, how you think
Is it changing brains? Need more research. Armchair philosophers give all answers
Rhetoric isn’t as highly regarded as it was 2300 years ago
Evgeny Morozov
Emphasis on the present – real-time Web updated instantly.
Countless status updates, ephemera,
Good for advertisers to get snapshots of current real-time data
Does it widen the gap between disengaged masses and engaged elites
Cyber-lumpenproletariat – cybergames, gossip sites, xenophobic blogs, poking
Giant online libraries – Google, etc.
Issues of concern: gay marriage, marijuana or nuclear proliferation
Virginia Heffernan
Internet is just another Symbolic System
Does it map onto reality any better than other symbolic systems?
Sherry Turkle
Teens need to learn that posting private info could haunt them for remainder of lives
They need a consequence-free moratorium
New McCarthyism? From employers, school, uni, etc
Loopt – iPhone app that allows you to see where you friends are
Simon Baron-Cohen
1000 hours/year on email alone (18,000 emails/year)
Compare to Darwin’s 15,000 letters in a lifetime (much more meaningful)
Percentage of time attending to email that is useful – about 10%
Need to be strong in reducing time spent on email
Peter Schwartz
Stanford – Well. Predecessor of Internet in 1980s
Extension of the brain – all knowledge instantly
Jason Calacanis
Web allows us to see all sides of debates, test theories, exposure to counter-evidence Web allows us to be jury and investigators in crimes, etc
Trust nothing, debate everything
Joshua Greene
Books from before 1995 are still not outdated, so internet hasn’t changed that much
Ask Jeeves – didn’t work. Internet can’t think
The internet doesn’t supply answers to search queries, it directs you to another human’s answers on the topic.
Marti Hearst
‘Social’ is the unexpected aspect of the internet – corrections, additions, opinions, alternatives, modifications, refutations, confirmations, comparisons, etc of everything posted
News stories always using comments below the line as part of their news. Vox Pops
Software/hardware support services are better than official providers’
Scott Sampson
Internet = Great Source, Great Distractor
Digital Natives: young people who know nothing else
Possible effects on brains: fragmented knowledge, shorter attention spans
Reduction in reflection, introspection, in-depth thought
Terse communications, less face-to-face
Extinction of experience
Video phones with skype – denies multitasking (unlike normal phones)
Still not real-time – unnatural delay
Low-resolution – missing subtle non-verbal communication
Not looking at camera but at screen – un-natural
How can we may telecommunication more meaningful?
Children spent more time in VR world than in real world
Will they care about real world issues – climate change or species extinction?
Haim Harari
It has to change our thinking – from fewer longer messages, to more frequent shorter
Can you summarise all ideas into sound bites?
Many messages are just links to longer blogs, commentary, opinions, reports
Attention devoted to each message has to reduce
It’s always ‘a bit more complicated than that’. Nuances are missing in summaries
Scientific thinking not challenged by internet
Political, social, economic thinking IS changed by internet
Internet’s impact on teaching/learning could be substantial
Education methods have been slow to respond e.g. laptops in classrooms
Douglas Rushkoff
Present tense – as if brain is now in a RAM drive, rather than hard drive
Meanness – encourages resentfulness, short-fused, reactionary
Sense of ‘obligation’ when responding to the masses
Changed from ‘opt in’ to ‘opt out’
Email devolved to SMS, blogs to tweets, drama into reality TV, films into thrill rides
Adapting ourselves to the technologies, or adapting the technologies to us?
Terrence Sejnowski
Youth has omnivorous appetite for new sensations
Hijacking of dopamine neurons, etc.
Extinction of old school luddite CEOs, teachers, journalists, etc.
Donald Hoffman
Will the internet alter our fitness the same way that previous tools did? Arrows?
Internet & epigenetics – parent/children interactions, gene expression, etc?
Thomas Metzinger
Internet as cognitive prosthesis
Addiction – no longer able to focus on old-fashioned serial symbolic info
Attention management – new skill required
Internet as emotional autoregulation – can dial-up anything
Depersonalisation – loss of attention, lose of part of ‘self’
New online environments – could lead to a weakly subjective state
Mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, infantilisation
If we all do this – Public Dreaming
Gregory Paul
Humans will really be redundant when AI develops networked superintelligences
Aubrey de Grey
Likes the convenience of email but not mobile phones which interrupt
Doesn’t like the instant/live aspects of today’s online world (tyranny)
Paul Kedrosky
Must unplug to have big deep thoughts
Too many cheap connections, a problem of scale
Everyone experiences problems that formerly only celebrities experienced
Robert Provine
Socially engaged simultaneous with being physically isolated
Bluetooth headsets – walking and talking to the air
18th century London – up to 6 deliveries per day
Future internet – will be driven by smartphones, not computer terminals
Nigel Goldenfield
Web changed his thinking since 2000 (interactive Web 2.0)
Altruism knows no bounds – create a Wiki page on a topic, write rubbish, and within days it’ll be completely corrected and updated
In this way, the internet ‘talks back’ – the above is a another form of ‘search’
This hack is academic discourse in fast-forward
Human reflection of horizontal gene transfer
William Calvin
Speed is the essential difference with the internet – thoughts remain in working memory for a lot longer, therefore one is able to make better associative connections
You can stand on the shoulders of a lot more giants a lot faster
Leo Chalupa
Since emails can be leaked so easily, privacy is a concern. Have to be PC with email
Serious thinking requires open honest communication
Mark Pagel
Internet changes our thoughts, but not the way we think
Internet is to our attention what sugar/fat is to our appetities
Contagion, false beliefs, neuroses, conspiracy theories, narcissism
Assumption of a small denominator (bottom half of equation)
Therefore just a few examples/samples for the numerator conclude a trend!
Risk assessment and decisions are thrown out
A tiny minority (but large in absolute number) can throw out intuition
Paul Saffo
Samuel Johnson’s Two Kinds of Knowledge: what you know & where to get it
Writing: offloaded memory onto paper/tablet/papyrus
democratised knowledge access
Internet: no longer need to know where to get it
democratised knowledge finding
Comparison with TV: channel surfing, mouse surfing – both can be wastelands
Amuse ourselves to death – lack of discernment
Matt Ridley
50 dull-witted people who exchange & specialise can be smarter than 50 smart people who don’t exchange & specialise
Goethe – everyone knows everything
Frank Tipler
Scientific knowledge becomes obsolete faster (print journals too expensive)
Discoveries can be made by analysing raw data made online
Pictures & videos by amateurs from JPL/ESA missions
Brian Knutson
Internet has to change thinking due to so much time being on it
Mesmerising – forgetting what the task was that one began with
Disparity between present & future self (delayed gratification)
Addiction: aka present-self bias
Some need software that analyses, tracks their time, surfing, etc
Arnold Trehub
Great for more frequent, deeper scientific conferences
David Eagleman
Internet can save humanity
1. Disease epidemics
2. Availability of knowledge
3. Speed by decentralisation: death of central media
4. Minimisation of censorship
5. Democratisation of education
6. Energy savings
Samuel Barondes
Neuroxing (akin to Xeroxing) – immediate, relevant
Tom Standage
Sharpens memory by restoring lost information – can just search for it
Internet great for older people (just like eyeglasses lengthened longevity of scribes)
Spectacles: late 13th century (Marco Polo’s time)
John Tooby
Galileo – God had also written a book of nature that anyone could investigate
No role for authority in evaluating it
Marcel Kinsbourne
Internet in heaven – finally a way to waste infinite time
Instant ratchetting everyone up at same time – progressing as fast as the cleverest
Nick Isaac
Cattle – grazers. Consume large amounts of grass, undiscerning
Chews it a second time (regurgitates)
Deer – browers. Only eat greenest shoots
Nimble, but no second digestion
Eva Wisten
People realise many others have had the same thought before
Eric Weinstein
Can you infer the internet from observing the real world?
Collapse in music stores, DVD sales, newspapers, etc
New theorems in maths published on web, not in refereed journals
Perhaps scientific achievements will be incremental, rather than revolutionary
Thomas Bass
Sentences & thoughts are shorter. Pulses of thoughts e.g. TED
Helen Fisher
Internet suited for social relationships – get to know someone before you meet them
It’s a return to ancestral days from the tribe, avoiding strangers
Lera Boroditsky
Using a fork changes the brain, so the internet is going to as well
London taxi driver study
Eventually technologies become so ingrained we no longer notice them
e.g. numbers, writing, language
Metaphors for explaining the mind: clay tablet, abacus, calculator, computer, network
Internet as metaphor for the brain:
Billions of nodes communicating all sorts of mundane information
Only a few trend above the noise– that’s the conscious part
What is humanity conscious of: celebrities, superstition, amusements, etc?
Karl Sabbagh
People even ignore their own books as it’s still easier to consult the Net
Problem with books – facts are locked in, unable to be updated live
It’s only a tool that does the same things as before, just faster & easier
Jon Kleinberg
Web 2.0 much more human city than a library i.e. graffiti, noise, etc
Information literacy
Alison Gopnik
Similar impact to reading – lost in another world, anti-social
Socrates warned against it (isolation, damage to dialog)
Adults: web feels fragmented, splintered, discontinuous, but not for children
New generation will adjust – great divide
Jesse Bering
Globalisation + internet = Return of ancient Neolithic social psychology
Reputation always with you – digital fingerprints everywhere
Can’t reinvent yourself in another land as there is no other land
Janon Lanier
Internet gripped by reality-denying ideology
Notion of intellectual property destroyed – we all expect everything to be free
How can parents be ‘live performers’, earning their living from touring?
Not compatible with neoteny i.e slow maturation process
Can’t be done by spouses due to Feminism
Can’t be done by socialism due to libertarianism
Disjunction between adulthood and creative life
Keith Devlin
Can’t answer the question re: internet until you define the question
The way we make decisions – more options, customer feedback, reviews
Wisdom of the crowds v elites (got us to this stage thus far)
Customisability of the Internet – does it reflect human nature more than other systems
Daniel Haun
Mistake repetition for truth (if the statement is repeated enough, it’ll be believed)
You believe to be true what you hear most often or what can be recalled easiest
Availability heuristic – what can recall easiest
Google search engine – works by number of links i.e repetitions, not truth
Internet resembles human thought
Michael Shermer
Internet levels the playing field – democratises knowledge
Elites can be shamed/humiliated/out-thought/disproved/’owned’ by lay people
Extraneous factors becoming less important: degrees, family, wealth, fame, etc.
Real power to non-privileged people
Lynn Margulis
Global interactions between scientists, obscure information becomes accessible
Irene Pepperberg
Vocal modulations missing in email
Search functions aren’t always spot on (any non-Google search is weak)
Must embrace positives while minimising negatives of the internet
Emanuel Derman
Efficiency should be a means, not an end
Internet is double-edged sword: more efficient for some tasks, but more distractions
Steven Pinker
Pressure on pundits to pronounce ‘this changes everything’ about anything new
Neophobia – wailing the decline of culture because youth are doing different things
Thinking – often content is confused with process
Multitasking – won’t be any major neural rewiring
Myth – that students can’t write proper papers anymore
We are changing the internet to us, not us to it e.g. GUI, feedback, gossip
Charles Seife
Meta-memory e.g. bookmarks, favourites
Meta-meta memory: search engines
Spend a lot of time organising things so one can find them again
Joseph Ledoux
Consolidation – conversion of short-term to long-term memory via protein synthesis
Reconsolidation – retrieval of memory via protein synthesis, updating
Opportunity to include new information into the memory when retrieved
Latest research – reconsolidation can overwrite existing memories
Your memory is only as good as the last retrieval
The most accurate memories are the ones never remembered
Stanislas Dehaene
Global collaborations can double the speed of a project – as one sleeps, another works
Outsource to another timezone- work is done overnight
The ‘problem’ always faces the sun
Wikipedia is a bit like this – for free
Paid work – third world computer outsourcing for small pay things that PCs can’t do
Anthony Aguirre
Insights generally occur away from the internet
During interactive tasks or during ‘down-time’
Speed of information thrown at you is too fast – no ‘down time’ for the brain
Powerful search – allows you to get straight to the crucial piece of info, but cuts out all the context and lead-up
Pure crack cocaine (versus talks which are inefficient and allow reflection)
Internet tempts many to go off the main thread
No periods of mystery and pondering as we get to an answer instantly
Better to think of the internet as a library
Richard Foreman
Internet encourages idle drifting, not deep drilling
Internet feeds smart people amphetamines & dumb people tranquilizers
Judith Rich Harris
From too-little to too-much
Clifford Pickover
Reliance on IPBs i.e. Internet Aesthetic Brains
Immortality – people in 100 years may still have access to what you wrote
Fiery Cushman
Processing solution instead of memorising solution
Ramifications for education – are teachers embracing or circumventing the ‘net?
Changes behaviour
London taxi drivers – can now use GPS
Geoffrey Miller
Internet changes every aspect of thinking:
Perception, categorisation, attention, memory, spatial navigation, language
Imagination, creativity, problem-solving, theory of mind, judgment, decisions
Internet is like a ‘sixth sense’
Wikipedia – extended memory
Facebook – Theory of Mind
Decision-making – offload onto peers (feedback ratings), e.g. rotten tomatoes.
Wisdom of the masses (versus Roger Ebert saying Phantom Menace is great)
Ebay – online ratings system – very useful
Need to let go of academic/intellectual pretensions
Insulation from hucksterism of marketing, etc
Moral lesson – one’s own thinking is not so different from the masses
Chris Anderson
Re-discovery of the spoken word, replacing print e.g. TED
Return to pre-Gutenberg days – humans more attuned to listening than reading
Good speakers can reach a mass audience, and incorporate video, text, audio, etc
Free advertising for authors, but only the ones who can speak well
Paid speaking appearances – artist as performer, not product maker
Growing craving for live experience – ticket prices up, CD/book sales down
Balance between talk being long enough to explain and short enough for masses
Christine Finn
Evolution of internet from dial-up (privileged, expensive) to universal, always-on
Sue Blackmore
One’s identity is larger online than one’s own self-identity
Taken to its logical conclusion, strangers could know more about you than you do
Much of the organisation of the information on the internet is done outside a brain
Sean Carroll
Internet helps encourage honesty – as everyone can instantly fact-check you
Instant correction – no one can get away with anything now
Optimism – truth wins out
Ed Regis
Academic specialisation of looking things up – now anyone can do the same thing
Giulio Boccaletti
Internet as a platform for global collection awareness, action, discussions
Andrew Lih
Wikipedia defied all expectations
June Cohen
Internet returns us to how we used to be. In other words, print changed us more
Social media tools are new, behaviour comes naturally, as if it’s innate
We adapt the tools to us
If friends & family are globally dispersed, then social media allow world to shrink
Ian Gold
Spectrum of friendship from genuine ones to complete strangers
Double-edged sword – friends source of pain as well as pleasure
Permanent record of temporary off-the-handle behaviour
Large social groups means more free riders and deception, etc
Robin Dunbar – social group size of 150 (villages, etc)
Constrained by time (16 hours), surplus resources, bell curves, etc
Steve Quartz
Plato & Freud: divided mind into 3 parts
Today: two parts for mental conflict (e.g. reason & emotion)
Automatic unconscious intuitive instinct v slower cognitive
Deliberate reflective cognition: standard for complex decision-making
Recent research: unconscious processes better at solving complex problems
Theoretical neuroscience: Pavlovian, Habit, Goal-Directed
Each capable of behavioural control
Confederacy of systems – 4 or 400? Don’t know
Manipulating representations via a mental logic/rules
Modules: vision, memory, learning, problem-solving, decision-making
Mysteries:
How neurons integrate signals
Code that neurons use to encode or transmit
Interaction within and between networks
Phenomenology of experience (consciousness) i.e. hard problem
Introspection: too many experiments have revealed it to be flawed
Laurence Smith
Less tolerant of own ignorant
Is knowing lots of irrelevant stuff being ‘educated’
Synthesise broad new ideas
Paul Ewald
Can’t possibly be an expert on cancer in one lifetime – need 1000 years
Statisticians, who can collate data, will be in demand
Causes of cancer: random mutations versus infections
1970s: 1% of cancers caused by infections
2010: 20% of cancers caused by infections (& growing)
Infections: do they increase mutation rate or remove barriers to cancer
Disabling programmed suicide, maximum cell divisions, etc
Like how the rabies virus changes the behaviour of the infected
Human cancer viruses: spread by kissing, sex
Max Tegmark
The call of the Sirens – ‘you have new mail’ sound
Maintaining Zen-like focus easier in the past – need to disconnect from internet
Internet eliminates the wasted lives in scientists REDISCOVERING the same things
Alexander Friedmann – expanding universe 1922
Georges Lemaitre – rediscovered 1927
Wallace would have beaten Darwin
Don Martian had – get news from Al Jazeera, Fox, and everything inbetween
Dangerous to have dwindling attention spans when problems are more complicated
Sound bites effective when the world has attention deficit disorder
Harder to block truth (double-edged sword)
Roger Schank
Arguments about what is true (with simple facts) can be over quickly
Although Truth-in-911, homeopathy, Freud, etc aren’t helped much
Elitism – smart people getting smarter (as they have critical thinking tools)
Dumb people getting dumber because of all the nonsense on the ‘Net
Internet has changed the arbiters of truth
Timothy Taylor
Allows longer work, in more places,
Internet homogenises us – all plugged into the same paradigm
Shared template for human thought
Neil Gershenfeld
Interoperability – not optimal but still allows for unplanned synergies
Scalability – protocols have allowed 6X increase in magnitude
Address size needed to be fixed i.e. TCP/IP IPv6 > v4
End-to-end principle: what is connected to it that makes it important
Open standards
Daniel Everett
Access to fresh intellectual energy can invigorate one’s own research
Marc Hauser
Social media makes us ‘mind blind’ (social degeneracy)
Opposite extreme of holding hands while talking face to face
Deleted scene in Avatar – link two braids to each other
Informavore
One-click Amazon – click crack cocaine
Nicholas Carr
Library without books – the future.
Words on a computer screen contend with other stimuli for attention
Critical question is: is the content of novels so ‘deep’ that sustained deep concentration is warranted, so will a cursory cliff-notes summary be sufficient to achieve the same result, seeing as the benefit is more texts can be ingested in that way. Quantity over quality.
Natural selection – future will favour those who can adapt to the Net’s noise
David Gelernter
VR of the future will lead to emergent properties
Slow-motion conversations: ratchetting each other up (highlight priority differences)
Filter – simple bold succinct messages will propagate faster in attention-deprived ‘Net
Rodney Brooks
Sugar for the mind – activating dopamine anticipation-reward system
Collaborative mathematical theorems online e.g. Hales-Jewett theorem
Problems to solve with online world:
Stability of pointers
Stability of formats (codecs still readable in the future)
Aggregate digital media into manipulable containers (audio, etc)
Business models – so people can still get paid
Paul Bloom
Amazed that people give away their time voluntarily to correct mistakes
Is the internet making us nicer, or is it just the same impulse to help someone
Howard Gardner
Ideas of ownership/authorship are being renegotiated, undermined, rethought
Older people live in two worlds – digital and non-digital
Daniel Dennett
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we have absolute power with the internet.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Less likely to sustain new lines of thought without checking first
Superficial thought (decontextualised)
Intrapersonal integrated thought
Co-operative sites – transpersonal
Like any technology, a double-edged sword
Yochai Benkler
De-emphasising memory may ultimately change our thinking
Tweeting – many tweets just disappear into the void, unread, unresponded to
Gary Marcus
Let’s reboot our educational system from the 18th century model of memorisation
Critical thinking skills and evidence-evaluation
How to reason, reflect, plan, investigate, evaluate
Only then can the internet change how we think
Ernst Poppel
Thinking is a service function to create a homeostatic state or an internal equilibrium.
Context (aka frame)
Category – about some class of object
Comparison – most basic mental operation
Choice – decisions, action
Causality
Continuity
Constellation – all together, eureka
Anton Zeilinger
Need to write short emails, as people don’t read beyond Line #10
Single issue emails
Unexpected consequences of all this new social media technology
Like the laser, microchip, etc
Juan Enriquez
Immortality – can upload large tracts of one’s life onto the web
Entire Facebook, email, Twitter, Myspace, Flicker, etc histories
Add to this video, audio, etc
Much better than the odd arrowhead that archaeologists have to interpret
Stefano Boeri
Internet is wind – can walk against or with, needing resistance
Richard Saul Wurman
The internet changes what you can think of – more options, new paradigms
New virtual spaces to create in, explore, get lost in, reflect upon, etc.
Robert Sapolsky
Wisdom of crowds – bottom up superior to experts (e.g. professional critics)
ebay feedback, rotten tomatoes, etc – more reliable
resembles bottom-up self-organising complexity
Weirdos – how people have a craving to find others like themselves
The more unconventional, the greater to need to seek camaraderie
Emily Pronin
People are unaware of the particular influences upon their thoughts
We know what we think, but we don’t know why we think it
Why we think what we do: spawns an entire cottage industry of pseudo-intellectuals, self-help books, psychoanalysts, psychologists, theists.
Internet could be influencing our thoughts in new, unknown ways
Sometimes arbitrary the unexpected results Google throws up to searches
Are you driving the machine, or is it driving you (perpetual feedback loop)
Galia Solomonoff
Those born after 1980 – grew up from puberty onwards with computers
No physical maps to remember old routes – everything is in real time
David Buss
No more stigma to online dating services – like in the past, in classifieds
Chances of finding compatible mates significantly improved
Double-edged sword
Positive or negative – can we settle when better prospects always available?
Arms race of deception, counter-deception
Internet markets of sugar-babies and sugar-dadies
Internet hasn’t changed our fundamental nature –
there’s still the male emphasis on looks, female on status
Noga Arikha
Internet born slowly, unfurling, developing limbs (1990-2000)
Internet is adaptable, but also alienating
Dependent, yet horrified by the dependence
The need to leave the house getting less and less
One day the generation will die out that knew life before the internet
Gloria Origgi
What is ‘wasted time’?
Resorting to tactics – switching off modem
If academia is about being part of ‘the conversation’, then what’s wrong with email?
Books can be full of noise too
Dinner parties with stimulating participants – deemed not a waste
Victoria Stodden
Too much data: impossible to derive a deeper intellectual understanding than the mathematical framework of the tools of analysis are geared to uncover
Today most computational results are not accompanied by their underlying code/data
Ian Wilmut
Library of Alexandria, as well as Ephesus in Turkey and Sankure in Timbuktu
Oldest lending library: Chetham’s in Manchester 1653
Carnegie’s 1700 libraries
Overturning the prohibition to teach slaves/peasants how to read/write
Still slow acceleration of progress – in other words, what were they scared of (same with the vote). In other words, institutions of authority (church, government) were once scared what would happen if the people could vote or read or be educated, but such is the innate desire to respect authority, they needn’t have worried. The electorate rarely likes to remove incumbents. Status quo is always easier as you’re used to it, especially with older people that can’t cope with change as well.
Jamshed Bharucha
Minds synced up, coordinated, from all different backgrounds
Risk of herding behaviour, groupthink
Does truth always prevail in the end?
Matthew Ritchie
Lots of inversion to sound different (arty, postmodern) – we don’t use the internet
It uses us
CERN – invented WWW. Therefore CERN has already changed the world\
Jesse Dylan
Only way to make advances was to have five 5 different strategies & hope 1 turns out
Mahzarin Banaji
How you think comes from millions of years of evolution, not 15 years on ‘Net
High volume data for online surveys e.g. morality (trolley problems, etc)
Millions of participants
Tim O’Reilly
Will the pace of the internet continue to accelerate?
Already many are struggling to cope – if it continues another 15 years...
Frank Wilczek
The internet might evolve into the cloud or grid where all free CPU cycles are used for computation e.g. protein folding, solving equations for chemistry to find better materials e.g. high-temp superconductors, efficient photovoltaic cells, space elevators
Previous revolutions to come from quantum mechanics:
fMRI imaging, lasers, materials, microprocessors, etc.
Chess hardware: beat masters 1978, grandmasters 1988, world champions 1997
World computer grid – could change our lives by giving us wonderful new materials
Eric Drexler
Need new ways to detect what knowledge is missing from the web
Improved absence-detection will lead to better decision-making
Development of knowledge
Validation of knowledge
Destruction of anti-knowledge i.e. discrediting false ideas
Absence is the web, followed by absence in the world
Each controversy has systematic for-and-against where opposing ideas are reconciled
Similar to Wikipedia
Single place to look
Climate change, health care, etc
David Dalrymple
Filtering, not remembering is the most useful skill
Maintaining focus must be internally forced (knowledge external)
In the past, it was the opposite
Each minute more gets added than one can read in a lifetime
Having a memorised a large body of knowledge no longer important
Irrelevance of geography
100 years’ time: neural interface – what happens to our sense of identity?
Xeni Jardin
Comforting to be online with in remote, exotic locales
No end to a job – any text or work can always be updated in real time, corrected
Alan Alda
Worries that what he just wrote could be misinterpreted
Emails has no voice modulations
Speed plus mobs – very hasty, no time for thoughthttp://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html
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