User:Birgit bachler/readings2/lanier gadget

Jaron Lanier: You are not a Gadget

Abstract:

In his manifesto, Lanier, as a computer scientist, opposes the ongoing developments in technology, referring to the outdated standards that are still prevailing in any new technology. He criticizes the underlying UNIX in any application and gadget and its incapability of distinguish between a person or a program interacting. These misjudgment continues in the emergence of Web 2.0 and the hive mind, that oppresses the existence of individuals. Through cloud computing power, templates, databases quanity has to stand in for quality when a computer,a computer cloud or a user-cloud instead of a single human mind is asked to judge. The connections we make online are brittle as we accept the binary character of our online profiles. Linking to Virtual Reality, and how it has not yet landed in popular culture as imagined in the beginning Eighties, Lanier describes an octopus whose sole brain power is able to morph his body like a advanced 3D-animation. Lanier proposes the idea of "postsymbolic communication" and wishes for computers that are free of protocols and use facial recognition as possible input in order to serve people well and not make people the servants to the requirements of outdated "lock-in" software.

Annotations:

Ideas have increasingly become "lock-in" through software. The so-called freedom of web 2.0 is rather a freedom for machines than for people.
"The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people" - "When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program."
Technologists make up extensions to human beings, like remote eyes and ears or expanded memory. These structures connect you to the world and other people but at the same time change how you conceive of yourself and the world. This direct manipulation could mean that a tiny group of engineers can shape the entire future of human experience within incredible speed. Jaron Lanier argues in his first chapter that the design for a crowd means de-emphasizing the individual. He calls the web before 2.0-templates a web that had "flavor".(p.15) He proposes a list to the reader that contains things that one could do as a person "instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others." (p.21)

• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. (pt 3 of 6)
  

Lanier names the problems of locked-in ideas that are generated by standards and influence the future generations - he names MIDI and UNIX as two examples. MIDI(p.7ff) as a very simple protocol invented to describe the most basic attributes of a piano is nowadays used as a standard for computer music. The idea of a "file" was born with UNIX(p.11ff) and became ubiquitous, so no-one can imagine a system without the idea of a file anymore. "UNIX has become an ambient part of life". (p.12)

He compares the technological belief in the coming Singularity with Rapture in evangelical culture (p.25).
"Bits don't mean anything without a cultured person to interpret them" - (p.26)
The type of software design that tries to predict what you want leads you into spending more time on manipulating the software's expectations. As an example he names Word's sudden, wrong auto-formatting. He states that these functions are not there to make people's lives easier but they promote a new philosophy. "The computer is evolving into a new life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves". (p.28) He also mentions "the race to the most meta" where he describes aggregation of layers (facebook, twitter) in an even more abstract one (friendfeed).
Information is alienated experience, experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. (p.28f)
He mentions Alan Turing, referring to the steam engine as a preferred metaphor to describe human nature durin Turning's time. Turing already imagined a pristine, crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, presenting the Turing test shorty before his death. (p 29ff)
Lanier argues that what the Turing test really tells us is "that the machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder." (p. 31) "You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart." (p.32)
"When my friends and I built the first virtual reality machines, the whole point was to make this world more creative, expressive, empathic and interesting. It was not to escape it." (p.33)
The victory of the computer Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov in 1997 was not a triumph of the computer but one of programming elegance by the team behind Deep Blue. (p.34f)
"The circle of empathy" describes those things in the world that deserve empathy, around every person. "When you change the contents of your circle you change the conception of yourself. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle". (p 36f)
In the following pages, Lanier exercises examples of consciousness, embodiment and the existence of a soul in a machine. "The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down (...) - Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions of arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them." (p. 47)
In one of his recurring religion analogies Lanier refers to "missionary reductionism" in the strategies of Web 2.0.: "Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely." (p. 48)
"It is utterly strange to hear many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are." (p. 48) - >>What tools were used before that increased individual expression?
He criticizes the attitude that quantity will turn into quality at some extreme of scale as well as the believe, that sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine fragments and will eventually yield wisdom. A mass of people contributing a bit to a wiki each could never reproduce Albert Einstein, not even a mediocre physicist.(p. 49f)
In chapter "It is still Possible to get rid of crowd ideology in online designs" (p 52f) Lanier demands a reconsideration of social network designs such as categories to be filled out. (Multiple-choice identities) He references facebook, also mentions the accumulation of friends in online spaces which can "only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced".(p. 53) The extremely valuable information in order to lure investors for facebook is called the "social graph". (p.54) >> term is coined by Mark Zuckerberg, according to wikipedia, "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related" >>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/21/tech/main6418458.shtml
>> when Lanier wrote his book, facebook had "not made any money so far",
"The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."(p.55)
"The "wisdom of crowds" should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool. Unfortunately, simplistic free market ideologues and noospherians tend to reinforce one another's unjustified sentimentalities about their chosen tools." (p. 59)
Regarding the interior dynamics of the crowd Lanier mentions Surowiecki's suggestion that "there should be limits on the ability of members of the crowd to see how other members are about to decide on a question, in order to preserve independence and avoid mob behavior." (p.59)
"If we are to continue to focus the powers of digital technology on the project of making human affairs less personal and more collective, then we ought to consider how that project might interact with human nature." (p.62)
"People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym in order to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean. Buyers and sellers on eBay are a little more civil, despite occasional disappointments, such as encounters with flakiness and fraud." Lanier calls this anonymity transient. Second Life participants are less mean than posters on Slashdot or Wikipedia. He argues that the creation of a pseudonym on Second Life "the pseudonymous personality itself is highly valuable and requires a lot work to create." (p. 63)
"Personal reductionism has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return. Your real life is represented by a silly, phony set of database entries in order for you to make use of a service in an approximate way. Most people are aware of the difference between reality and database entries when they file taxes." (p. 69) Through social networking digital reductionism becomes a casual element, mediating contact between new friends, Lanier sees here a postpersonal world. (p. 69)
Lanier compares No Child Left Behind, the computerized analysis of all US school tests to facebook, life is turned into a database, education as well as friendship. He states that the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationship is a philosophical mistake.(p. 69)
New digital ideologies put young people into the stress of having to manage their online reputations constantly, facing the constant fear of the evil eye of the hive mind. Lanier thinks that the gadget fetishism is driven rather by fear than by love (p. 70) "There is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online." The binary, trouble making character of software engineering is adapted by our relationships. And your designated status, relationship or single, and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between friends all the time. (p. 71)
"What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth." (p. 71)
Lanier romanticizes a forum of oud-players, still embracing the old ideals before web 2.0: the people in the forum are better than the software itself. "It's the people who make the forum, not the software." (p. 72)

Lanier calls the term computationalism "something like a culture", it can be understood as a philosophy where "the world is a computational process, with people as subprocesses." (p. 153) Lanier argues that even if it can be helpful for understanding science, it "should not be used in evaluating certain kinds of engineering." (p. 153)
Considering people as special requires to state where that specialness begins and ends, which is as problematic as positioning the circle of empathy (>>chapter 2).(p. 154)
"If you hope for technology to be designed to serve people, you must have at least a rough idea of what a person is and is not." (p. 154)
Lanier sees a dualism in design a gadget for people that is inert, that only gets a meaning magically through the user and the collaboration with scientists, where the human is studied as a non-magical subject. (p. 154)
He describes different flavors of computationalism, from which he prefers the 4th: Flavor 1: "The meaning of a sentence is the instructions to verify it." (p. 155)
With the computational cloud, there will be no human necessary to interpret data and there is not need for traditional oppositions such as syntax/semantics, quantity/quality, content/context, and knowledge/wisdom (p. 155)
Flavor 2: As Daniel Dennett or Douglas Hofstadter propose, a computer program is similar to a person. A "strange loop" is similar to our consciousness, self-awareness, the process what it is to be a person, according to Hofstadter. (p. 156) Flavor 3: The hive mind can be seen as a human if it is perceived as a person. When we believe in "fictitious beings" we have to change ourselves in order to support our fantasies. (p. 156f)
Flavor 4: "Realism." Bits are a nonabstract continuation of reality. "Realism is based on specifics, but we don't yet know - and might never know - the specifics of personhood from a computational point of view. The best way we can do is right now is engage in the kind of storytelling that evolutionary biologists sometimes indulge in." ... "Such an act of storytelling is a speculation, but a speculation with a purpose. A nice benefit of this approach is that specifics tend to be more colorful than generalities, so instead of algorithms and hypothetical abstract computers, we will be considering songbirds, morphing cephalopods, and Shakespeare metaphors." (p. 157)
Computers are now able to recognize pattern, read facial expression through facial recognition and represent this holistic quality as a value. (p. 159)
Digital algorithms must approach pattern recognition in an indirect way - a Fourier Transform detects how much action is there at particular frequencies in a block of digital information. The Gabor wavelet transform is a mathematical process to identify individual blips of particular frequencies in particular places. (p. 161) We try to understand how a brain might recognize features of its world in order to understand how to make software to recognize a smile. (p. 162)
Colors and sounds can easily be described with numbers, but not odor. (p. 162)
"Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns." (p. 165)
In the chapter called "home at last (my love affair with Bachelardian neoteny)" Lanier describes as extended childhood that children enter the world of sexuality sooner but their sexuality also remains childlike for a longer period of time than it used to. (p. 180)
"Children want attention. (...) Lately, the design of online technology has moved from answering this desire for attention to addressing an even earlier developmental stage." (p. 180)
"Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind." (p. 180) Lanier sees a slowness in software development and mentions Moore's law. While the user interface to search engines is still based on the command line interface, an Apple II has developed to the Macintosh. (p. 181)
Generational cultural change slows down, because improving medicine makes people older, and keeping the Baby-boomers alive to still be the ones contributing to society and culture. (p. 182)
"Bachelardian neotony is found, unannounced, in the occasional MySpace page that communicates the sense of wonder and weirdness that a teen can find in the unfolding world" (p. 183)
When talking about the full-on Virtual Reality experience Lanier explains that the human mind is able to learn to control any body of an avatar. He names as extraordinary that one is "no longer aware of the physical body. Your brain has accepted the avatar as your body. The only difference between your body and the rest of the reality you are experiencing is that you already know how to control your body, so it happens automatically and subconsciously." (p. 187) "The body and the rest of reality no longer have a prescribed boundary." (p. 187) Talking about morphing he references the 1997 underwater-video by researcher Roger Hanlon, starring an octopus, a cephalopod that is capable of morphing. (p. 188)
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CLKyMFHSfg
The difference between humans and the high-tech brain of the cephalopod is our neoteny, our childhood. Lanier equates the following: Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality. (p. 188f)
He mentions the possibility of communicating like a cuttlefish, and names the idea "postsymbolic communication" (p. 190) "I am trying to create a new way to make software that escapes the boundaries of preexisting symbol systems. This is my phenotropic project. The point of the project is to find a way of of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques - similar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognize faces-to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn't be protocol errors if there weren't any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked-in ontologies like MIDI in human-like affairs." (p. 191)