Subject: Re: technology's role
From: Alan Cooper (acooper@langara.bc.ca)
Date: Sat 06 May 2000 - 06:14:35 MEST
Date: Fri, 05 May 2000 21:14:35 -0700 From: Alan Cooper <acooper@langara.bc.ca> Subject: Re: technology's role
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Muhammad Khalifa Betz wrote:
> Tom Abeles wrote:
> <<
> We are not far from a direct human computer interface- hard wire and not
> just keyboard and optical coupling. ...
>
> Kudos to Leslie for moderating this discussion.
>
> Regarding Mr. Abeles statement above I would like to add the following observation. I personally have not seen technology interfacing directly with humans except to assist disabled or disadvantaged people.... This brings me to a hypothesis: technology cannot supersede human capability as described by pioneers like TA. If we are talking number crunching or rapid production of works of dexterity, humans can benefit. However, technology, as we now see it, can only compensate for delimited human powers. I don't predict
> technology implants that will allow humans to become superhuman. If the bionic heart has fallen so short of its fleshy counterpart, why would an "on-board" processor be an improvement over unaided human physiology?
Technology allows us to fly, to manipulate huge and heavy objects in space and in the ocean depths, to perform surgery on the nucleus of a cell, to write by placing individual atoms, to see planets orbiting distant stars, and to quickly access a vast amount of information. These powers are all beyond *my* "unaided human physiology". So (perhaps with some arrogance in assigning to myself the measure of "humanity") I do consider them "superhuman". And the interfaces with which some of us access our tools are already of striking
immediacy - consider for example the VR glove and helmet used by the remote mind of a robotic microsurgeon. So on the issue of "hard wiring", with regard to Tom Abeles' "not far", I would go the other way from Muhammad Betz and say, on the contrary, that we are effectively already there!
But I suppose the real thrust of Muhammad's posting was to raise the question of whether any of these enhancements, whether remedial or expansive, actually do anything to improve the intellect or affect our educational activities.
I think they do.
It is harder to imagine actually improving the intellect so I'll come back to that later. First let's consider educational activities. For example speling. Or grammer. It is quite possible to be intellectually effective while deficient in either of these, but they were traditionally taught at length in order to give the student social credibility. Nowadays technology allows this emphasis to be significantly reduced (though perhaps not holy eliminated of course:-)
But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The role of memorization is being dramatically reduced. Yes, largely as a result of a social trend towards intellectual laziness perhaps, but also as a result of genuinely decreased need. Over New Year's, the Globe&Mail presented a challenging 'trivia' quiz to identify 50 prominent persons of the past millenium from obscure clues. A friend and I 'cheated' by using the web and dashed through most of them in a couple of hours. Aside from demonstrating to us that the web holds a remarkable amount of genuinely credible information
(compared to say just a year or so ago), it also left me with an alarming sense of competence and erudition. Once I got used to it, it was actually quite pleasant, but with that came doubts as to whether it reflected reality or was merely a delusion.
My thesis tonight is that it was real, and this brings us to the issue of intellectual enhancement.
My own experience in handling a small amount of knowledge is that when we learn stuff we don't immediately "remember" all of it. Sometimes we have to think to "bring it back", and even with older technologies it was often more important to know the existence and location of a lot of information than to recall a smaller part of it in complete detail. We do this "bringing back" by means of mental links - either crude and artificial mnemonics or genuine mental maps of the intellectual landscape. And while technology may not change
the quality of our map or the effeciency of our retrieval process, it may well allow us to devote more of our brain to a kind of biological FAT and less to the actual data items. Thus my friend and I might take some credit for the success of our search by thinking that our ability to generate appropriate starting points even when we lacked the actual information in our own local memories. And with our brains plugged in to the net, we really were "superminds". Wow!
Hey, if it makes you feel good, believe it!
--Alan
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Alan Cooper (acooper@langara.bc.ca , http://www.langara.bc.ca/~acooper)
Dep't of Mathematics and Statistics (http://www.langara.bc.ca/mathstats)
Langara College (http://www.langara.bc.ca )
100 W 49th Ave. Vancouver BC
Canada V5Y2Z6 Tel(604)323-5676,Fax(604)323-5555
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