Edge in the News: 2019

...[T]here’s a lot to worry about — and get excited about and just mull — in “Possible Minds,” a collection of essays by thinkers on the cutting edge of technology and culture, edited by John Brockman, who has chronicled that world at Edge.org since 1996.

Mr. Brockman asks the 25 essayists to riff off a 1950 book, “The Human Use of Human Beings,” by pioneering tech thinker Norbert Wiener. That tome took a dim view of AI’s implications, warning that “The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.” Today’s essayists take a range of positions on whether that choice is still at hand, or has already been made, and if so, which option we’ve picked.

Mirrors today are so commonplace we barely give their origins a second thought.

In 1999, in a discussion on Edge.org, Bill Gates – founder of the Microsoftcorporation – and his peers mused over the greatest inventions of the past 2,000 years.

Tor Norretranders, the Danish science writer, nominated the humble mirror, which he equated with the advent of clothing, manners and behaviour, noting that it gave us the first notion of self-consciousness.

Do you believe in books finding you? This Idea Is Brilliant, a book edited by edge.org founder John Brockman, found me last week. I don’t know if somebody had gifted it, or did I buy and forget about it? But I am just grateful for it. Published in 2018, it keeps its promise of assembling “lost, overlooked, and under-appreciated scientific concepts everyone should know”.

Most of the concepts are narrated in small essays. But the one that stayed with me is a paragraph—yes, it is only one-paragraph long —by recording producer Brian Eno on ‘Confirmation Bias’. His observation resonated in the week of cricketer Hardik Pandya’s online inquisition or persecution, depending on what your own bias or belief is!

That's what we mean by understanding how our digitized world works. But the science historian George Dyson continues to look and looks for the digital to raise an analogous revolution. And that, he warns, could take the book out of his hands.

[ED. NOTE: George Dyson, Kafka, Heidegger, Pirsig, Arendt, Wiener, and EDGE…] 

George Dyson dedicates an interesting essay in Edge to explore digital evolution from a human system to an algorithm that no longer depends on human programmers, and the worrying implications of this phenomenon. But Dyson does not settle for the diagnosis and explores an original proposal for a solution: returning cybernetics to its analogue heart.

For Dyson, what we know today as a digital revolution has not ended, but it has mutated into something very different, abandoning the possibility of the first years and leaving behind its "childhood". For a long time, computer science has not responded to the old paradigm of machines controlled by instructions that, in turn, have been designed by humans, who supervise execution. . . .

Could 2019 be the year that these and other emergent technologies evolve from merely creepy to potentially totalitarian? In a New Year’s Day column published on Edge, a Web site devoted to discussions about science, technology, and philosophy, George Dyson, the science historian and author, argues that we’ve reached an inflection point. “Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines,” Dyson writes. “Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.” Today, code itself has come alive: algorithms sift through our search histories, credit-card purchases, and geolocation to model our personalities and anticipate our desires. For this, a small number of people such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, have become unimaginably rich.

In the beginning of the essay, Dyson cites the novel Childhood’s End, written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1953, which tells the story of a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious “Overlords” who “bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth.” As Dyson points out, this story, much like our own story, “does not end well.”

Over at EDGE.org, the must-read hub of intellectual inquiry and head-spinning science, Boing Boing pal and legendary book agent John Brockman is launching a new series of essays "from important third culture thinkers to address the empirically-driven and science related hot-button cultural issues of our time." First up is author George Dyson's "Childhood's End," a provocative riff on how the digital revolution has stripped much of our individual agency and that "to those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to look."