Abstract
This chapter presents a scenario where the Internet and the brain couple such that they work together as two ‘hemispheres.’ Far from being overwhelmed or made vestigial by technology, our biological brain would work in partnership with our technological brain. The chapter explores the possibilities for not only direct implants, but also devices that convert information into sounds, smells, and movements, symbols arriving to us through all of our senses. As the logistics of access to information changes, the meaning of formal education will also be changed. How will we design formal education when we need not be tethered to physical centers of the symbolic storage system? How will we design formal education when our symbols are sonic and haptic, not just oral and textual?
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Notes
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Future Things (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 9–10.
Norman, The Design of Future Things, 22. In 1960, computer scientist Man-Computer Symbiosis J.C. R. Licklider used the term ‘symbiosis’ to describe the relationship between humans and ‘artificial intelligence’. J.C.R. Licklider, ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’ IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, March 1960, 4–11.
Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 113.
On the design implications of information expanding across our environment, see Malcolm McCullough, Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
Andy Clark suggests that even such physical distances are not always present with interfaces, and that such intimate coupling has precedent. ‘We discern an interface where we discern a kind of regimented, often deliberately designed, point of contact between two or more independently tunable or replaceable parts. It does not seem correct, however, to insist that flow across the interface be simple. The idea here seems to be that we find genuine interfaces only where we find energetic or informational bottlenecks, as if an interface must be a narrow channel yielding what [John] Haugeland describes as “low bandwidth” coupling. This is important for Haugland’s argumentative purpose because he means to show that human sensing typically yields very task-variable, high-bandwidth forms of agent-environment coupling and thus to argue that no genuine interface or interfaces separate agent and world. Instead… there is said to be “intimate intermingling of mind, body and world.” But although agreeing with Haugland that sensing is at least sometimes best understood in terms of direct agent-environment couplings … his own conclusion that no genuine interfaces then link agent and world seems premature … An interface, I conclude, is indeed a point of contact between two items across which the types of performance-relevant interaction are reliable and well defined. But there is no requirement that such interfaces be narrow-bandwidth bottlenecks.’ See Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32–33.
Robert Sapolsky, ‘People who can intuit in six dimensions,’ in John Brockman, ed. This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 368.
Martin Wattenburg, ‘Map of the Market’, (1998) http://www.bewitched.com/marketmap.html
John Thackera, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 178. ‘According to the cultural historian Kate Fox, this was not always so: The current low status of smell in the West is a result of the “revaluation of the senses” by philosophers and scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intellectual elite of this period decreed sight to be the all-important, up-market, superior sense, the sense of reason and civilization, writes Fox, “while the sense of smell was deemed to be of a considerably lower order — a primitive, brutish ability associated with savagery and even madness.” The emotional potency of smell was felt to threaten the impersonal, rational detachment of modern scientific thinking.’ See also Kate Fox, The Smell Report: An Overview of Facts and Findings, Social Issues Research Centre, http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell.pdf
See for example Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense: Build Powerful brands Through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight and Sound (New York: Free Press, 2005);
and C. Russell Brumfield, Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age (New York: Quimby Press, 2008).
Craig Wisneski, Hiroshi Ishii, Andrew Dahley, Matt Gorbet, Scott Brave, Brygg Ullmer, and Paul Yarin, ‘Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information,’ Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings (CoBuild ‘98), February 25–26, 1998, 23. The ambientROOM ‘takes a broader view of display than the conventional GUI, making use of the entire physical environment as an interface to digital information. Instead of various information sources competing against each other for a relatively small amount of real estate on the screen, information is moved off the screen into the physical environment, manifesting itself as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color, smell, temperature, or light’.
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 320. ‘Compared with the monotony and redundancy of the hunting-gathering lifestyle,’ he writes, ‘these early centers of graphic invention exploded with symbolically encoded things to be mastered. Large state libraries were already a reality in ancient Babylon, and by the time of the Greeks [external symbolic storage system] products had been systematically collected and stored in several world centers of learning. At this point in human history, standardized formal education of children was needed for the first time, primarily to master the increasing load on visual-symbolic memory. In fact, formal education was invented mostly to facilitate use of the ESS.’
Kieran Egan, The Future of Education: Reimagining our Schools from the Ground Up (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 38.
Anya Kamenetz, ‘How TED Became the New Harvard,’ Fast Company 82, September 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com/1677383/how-ted-connects-idea-hungry-elites. If you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we’re living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you’d curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You’d create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You’d also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you’d give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university’s millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?’ [emphasis mine]
Andy Clark would contend that we have long been cyborgs: ‘We some of the “cognitive fossil trail” of the cyborg trait in the historical procession of potent cognitive technologies that begins with speech and counting, morphs first into written text and numerals, then inot early printing (without moveable typefaces), on to the revolutions of moveable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently to the digital encodings that bring text, sound, and image into a uniform and widely transmissible format. Such technologies, once up and running in the various appliances and institutions that surround us, do far more than merely allow for the external storage and transmission of ideas. They constitute, I want to say, a cascade of “mindware upgrades”: cognitive upheavals in which the effective architecture of the human mind is altered and transformed’, Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.
Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet (New York: Free Press, 2011), 9.
Daniel Pink has written about the increasing importance of ‘right brain’ skills, which he calls ‘R-Directed aptitudes’. These include design, synthesis, play, and meaning-making. As the internet hums along powered by algorithms operating on data, it could very well develop into a ‘Ieft brain’ that engages in analysis, while the biological ‘right brain’ engages in R-Directed aptitudes. We would, in effect, off-load the left-brain to the algorithms of the Internet. See A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). Also note that Daniel Kahneman, and his notion of System 1 (unconscious processes) and System 2 (conscious processes). Both systems co-exist inside the skull, which is suggestive of how the Internet ‘system’ and the biologically-based brain ‘system’ might cooperate and interact. See Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
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© 2014 David J. Staley
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Staley, D.J. (2014). Interface. In: Brain, Mind and Internet: A Deep History and Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460950_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460950_4
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