David Weinberger gave the keynote address:  The Rise of the Implicit

Implicit communication is characterized by the unspoken and the unsaid.  This is how humans communicate.  Everything that we say has references to things, some shared by a large group of people, i.e. a culture, and some shared by a much smaller group like a family or a couple. 

Explicit communication is the external, what can be seen, only what is on the page.  This is how computers think.  There is no world of shared experiences being referred to, there is only the data.  “Informalization” is thinking of the human brain as just a repository of information, a flesh and blood computer where synapses are links, etc.

So, some projects attempt to make computers act more like humans by feeding them more and more information so that they will have a “background,” and then links came along and started to make associations between pieces of data – the way people do.  At the next level, the Semantic Web tries to understand the nuances of human language so that literal, word for word keyword “communication” can be more natural, hence “Natural Language Processing.”

Social networks like FaceBook start out soulless.  They redact a human life into a crude template of fields.  But as things are added, friends, pictures, favorite activities, and so on, the profile begins to develop a “soul” and become more personal, or person-like.

Bottom line:  Humans can be put into Social Networks and dehumanized (or computerized) in order to be processed by the application.

Computers can be “humanized” – or develop a soul – by adding more data, more links and teaching them nuances of languages, etc.

And then what?  Then the Turing test (having a conversation with a computer) is possible, because it will understand references and language or maybe the HAL9000 scenario.  The presenter said HAL was soulless.  He knew what to do, but without any human emotion, and is in fact portrayed as a child.

Humans do not seem to be coming more computer-like (Bionics, Cyborgs), but all of the emphasis seems now to just be on making computers more human-like.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.