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David Chalmers at Singularity Summit 2009 — Simulation and the Singularity. First, an uncontroversial assumption: humans are machines. We are machines that create other machines, and as Chalmers points out, all that is necessary for an ‘intelligence explosion’ is that the machines we create [...] - Egon, “Ghostbusters” I recently wrote up a very long comment in response to this post on LiteraryGulag. It screwed up the formatting of my comment, so I am reproducing it here for posterity. Let’s see if we can’t get Sheets to show up and respond! I find the recent lamenting over the death [...] If one of the fundamental problems of the technological world is the explosion of information, then it seems to me that the task of ‘sensemaking’ is a burden that must be taken up by both humans and machines. This is where the real power of human-machine collaboration lies: machines are not just tools to [...] The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ from other “studies” disciplines (media studies, gender studies, etc) in that the protocols which govern the interactions between entities within a participatory framework are well-defined, and in most cases are explicit and formal (for instance, IP describes (at some level of analysis) the communication between all networked objects). Exchanges between entities within the framework are interactive, interoperable, and cooperative, and hence they are participatory. Internet studies is also far more interested with the possibilities made available by the infrastructure that supports the participatory framework, than in any particularly realization of those possibilities. For instance, Internet Studies is interested in the question, “what is a blog?”, and what kinds of communication, social organization, and information distribution possibilities that this kind of resource makes available, and is less interested in a question like “How has DKos changed the political climate in 2008?” which in some sense is merely a specific application of the more general social protocol. I’ll talk just a bit more about the three pillars below. |
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