Sunday, January 17, 2010

2. Out of the Classroom, on to the Street

See Original

So if we had these digital specters which constantly followed our conversations, how else would they affect the way we interact in real life? It's best to start with a two person model. As in the preceding scene, let us assume that the people talking have already told their devices to link up, meaning that they'll feed each other streams of their owners' speech converted into text. Since the devices "follow" this discussion, they can be both helpful and transformative for the way we converse:

Nigel: "...not a simple test of brawn with no strategy or intelligence- that's why soccer's the real man's sport."
Joe: "Are you kidding? Just a bunch of guys running back and forth and never scoring. It's no wonder baseball has so many more fans."

At this point both Nigel and Joe hear an advisory chime as their respective devices pull up statistics proving Joe clearly wrong in his statement that baseball is more popular [overall sales, viewers, stadiums, and media coverage statistics]. Or it could provide qualifiers such as "....so many more fans in the United States", which would allow the conversation to take a different turn. As long as the feature is turned on, the device would tirelessly follow whatever conversation it hears, no matter how boring or absurd, filling in words when needed, providing evidence to support a claim, and even providing statistical polling of the general populous, or a specific demographic. [If this sounds far fetched, just look at the progress that wolfram alpha has made in understanding natural language. Also remember that every conversation is being recycled as input to enhance the system as a whole, the way in which Google improves itself through use.]
In another context we see two people talking about a book:

Alice: "You know most of these other authors are really contrived and don't say much, but he's not bad."
Matthew: "...yeah, he's really the best. I remember this one part where he said something like, 'he who doesn't know, doesn't know he's knowing'....er.. um….'he who thinks.....'"

While Matt desperately tries to remember the phrase, his device has been following his train of though and knows what book he's talking about, so it simply performs a search of what he's saying: [he + who + thinks + know + knows + knowing + doesn't] and before he's even done stuttering his way toward a bastardized version of the quote, his visualizer shows him this:

"He who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is."
-Michel de Montaigne from On Conversation

Alice: "....wow, that's great. Send it to me."

Matthew taps a button, sending it to Alice's device, which stores it in her quote bank. Since this collection of sayings is specific to her personal device and thought process, her machine will also know to search these first when she's trying to reference something in conversation, as opposed to scouring the whole internet- like conceptual RAM storage, enabling quick recall.

You can already see the desire for this type of thing: …create a personalized library on Google Books which allows you to label, review, rate, and of course, search a customized selection of books [quote bank]. These collections live online, and are accessible anywhere you can log in to your Google account. Once you've built a collection, you can share it with friends by sending them a link to your library in Google Books... .


This entire process is a way for the digital to compensate for the inherent problems of organic consciousness. Since Matthew had read this quote, been effected by it, and stored it, we know that he had placed special significance on the message behind the words. Sadly, however, no matter how influential these words have been on the way he thinks, speaks, and lives his life, the quote itself might become blurred in his mind as the lesson is committed to memory:

"...for when scatterbrains that have not the quote, do by nature the things of the quote, these, not having the words, are quote unto themselves in that they show the meaning of the words written in their hearts."

So for people like Matthew who have absorbed the concept (unzipped, hard to transmit) while loosing the quote (small zipped file containing more information than its size would indicate), this system would enable them to momentarily regain the original intellectual kernel for retransmission, in this case to Alice (who may or may not subsequently "unzip these files" through contemplation).

The system could also automatically remind us of relevant pieces of advice as we go about our daily business. Say Alice goes home and starts reading the Times online. She finds out that a senator she formerly respected was just caught shuttling cocaine wielding hookers into the Hamptons with government funds. She utters a simple "goddamn..." under her breath, which her device hears and analyzes, "realizing" that she is upset about this article (it’s keeping track of what she's clicking on and reading). It then reminds her of one of the quotes she's put into her bank but might have forgotten:

"Corruption of the best becomes the worst."

She might take a few seconds to rank this quote in terms of appropriateness. The device records her relevance rating and submits it to the larger online system which then better understands what quotes are and are not relevant to an article dealing with the subject of political corruption. It's doing this all through a simple analysis of key words and their frequency of use mixed with the results of how people have rated its past suggestions. Perhaps earlier that day before many people had given their input, someone else was reading this particular article and their device, realizing it was about politics [senator + democrat + funds + Washington + hookers], suggested the quote, "The most important political office is that of the private citizen." Our user then told the system that this phrase was hardly applicable to this situation. So based on trends of how people rate certain quotes in relation to certain articles, the system starts to "understand" the relation of subjects, and by the time Alice gets to the article, it has a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't.
In this way, each of us will individually develop a database of a few thousand pieces of wisdom that our devices will help us remember through a Mnemosyne like process. [By the way, if you don’t understand this, take the time to read about “spaced repetition”, because it’s worth it.] These don't have to be limited to small quotes. They could be relevant images of movies, political cartoons, famous photographs, pictures of our friends, sound bites, etc. etc. etc. Basically, anything we don’t want to forget. The system could also be set in ratios of "discovery mode" which would mean that it would occasionally show you pictures, quotes and media that you had never encountered before. This could be things your friends found cool (Del.icio.us model) or interests of "people like you" (who enjoy similar articles based on their ratings profile), or if you become interested in a certain subject you could turn on a filter to give preference to anything involving Glen Gould or the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance.

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