User:Yiorgos Bagakis/Essays/Future

FUTURE MAP by Brian Holmes

• Can any creator play a significant game with his own creature? (Norbert Wiener, 1964) Wiener believes: yes (and the creature may win).

• December 1944, a group formed by scientists John von Neumann and Howard Aiken to study the intersection between neurology and engineering - first named Teleological Society then Circular Causal and feedback Mechanisms and finally summed up as Cybernetics (term coined by Wiener in 1947).

• Von Neumann - anti-communist, mathematical genius among the central scientists involved in the creatiion of the atomic bomb - Opposed Wiener's anti-military stance - some believe that he was a main influence for Kubric's Dr. Stranglove.

• Early 1940s: Wiener started working on an anti-aircraft predictor project - pilot and gunner as servomechanisms - machinelike humans and intelligent, humanlike machines.

• Understanding surveillance through a systematic unity of man and machine. surveillance ----> not as something purely negative...

• Key question from Holmes: Can we play a significant game with the cybernetic society that has created us?

• Four characteristic technological systems - They, according to Holmes, both military and civil, reshape the emerging global order. he refers to these technologies as Cardinal Points:

1- The joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System which is adjusted on a pilots helmet and can track where the pilot's head is pointing.

2- InterX privacy preserving real-time analytics Real time pattern recognition analysis for mining data in banks, airports, ticketing agencies, etc.

3- Personicsx customer relationship management system Its database covers about 110 million housholds in the USA...Preemtive Marketing as the developing company, Acxiom, puts it..heavily used by politicians to target possible voters.

4- Orbit Traffic Management Technology video camera records customer movement and correlates them with sales figures and other data. They are basically used aas a guide for adjusting advertising and produxt placement, etc.

• Interesting point: Habermas' notion of structural transformation of the public sphere which pretty much describes the 20th century condition of large-scale advertising and mass media news distortions of the public sphere is now being replaced by a different society where electronic identification, statistical prediction and informed debate are shaping preemptively the consciousness of consumers

• Holmes draws analogies between the current state of things and Orwell's 1984 and the Panopticon.