Question Technology

What's troubling about WolframAlpha

From an AP review (dated May 13) of WolframAlpha by Brian Bergstein:

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I'm troubled by the potential for WolframAlpha. I fear the implications of an information butler that is considered so smart and so widely applicable that people turn to it without question, by default, whenever they want to know something.

What's that, you say? We already have such a service?

Well, for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.

Unlike search engines that deliver links that match keywords in your query, WolframAlpha is more of a black box. If you have it perform a calculation, it gives you an answer, along with a small link for "source information." Open that and you'll generally be told the data was "curated"—found and verified—by the company behind WolframAlpha. In other words, "trust us."

The site does suggest ways to track down similar information from other sources, including government statistics, proprietary databases, almanacs and the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. To confirm WolframAlpha's data I went a suddenly old-fashioned route—through Web searches on Google and Yahoo. I didn't find any errors, but taking that step made me wonder why I didn't just use Google or Yahoo to begin with.

Link: Review: Flaws in Web's much-touted WolframAlpha.

Rory Litwin has posted similar comments at Library Juice: Wolfram Alpha: Bad Idea!

Dave Eggers Defends Print and Reading

Novelist Dave Eggers, in a speech excerpted in the New Yorker:

To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. …

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, [email protected]—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

Link: Dave Eggers will prove you wrong (The New Yorker via MobyLives).

"826" is 826 National, a fantastic nonprofit that runs writing and tutoring centers for kids. Eggers was being honored for the project at this event.

NYT on "The Coming Superbrain"

John Markoff writes about AI, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity, and other such things in a New York Times article. Excerpt:

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technologymight be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly. [...]

Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.

That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion. [...]

“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”

Link: The Coming Superbrain

Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Comic

Stuart McMillen has created a nice graphic adaptation of Neil Postman's comparison of Orwell vs. Huxley in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Link to comic: Amusing Ourselves To Death.

(via Josh Sowin)

Twitter, Books and Reading

A few interesting items I spotted in the cyberstreams today related to twitter, books, and reading:

Seth Finkelstein has a nice post summing up what Twitter is all about (in short, ego): Twitter -- I'm not getting suckered again.

Nicholas Carr wrote a very funny piece (Tim Writes a Book) about Tim O'Reilly's new simplified book for the twitter set called The Twitter Book. O'Reilly has said it "reinvents the book in the age of the web" by omitting such troubling things as "a sustained narrative." This book does sound silly and a bit pointless, but to his credit, O'Reilly has also published Steve Talbott's thoughtful critiques of technology (and they're nothing if not sustained narratives), so maybe it balances out.

Meanwhile, in that alternate reality where people still read complicated works of fiction, Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas puts out a call not just for more readers but for new, active "readers of talent":

"In the flames of this dream of mortgages and the golden calf of the gothic novel, the stupid legend of the passive reader was forged. This monster’s fall is giving way to the reappearance of the reader of talent, and the terms of the moral contract between author and the public are being reframed. Those writers breathe once more who are desperate for an active reader, for a reader open enough to permit into her mind the figure of a conscience radically different from her own."

Link: Vila-Matas Calls for Readers of Talent (Conversational Reading)

If you read Spanish (I don't) you can follow that link to the whole column. Two of Vila-Matas's books are available in English and I highly recommend them. I liked Bartleby & Co. so much I accidentally bought it twice.

Book Notes

Jim Knipfel's Unplugging Philco is a great little Vonnegut-esque scifi novel set in an America where surveillance technology and terrorism paranoia have reached extremes following an event referred to as "The Horribleness." The protagonist is Wally Philco who starts to rebel against the technology of the system and ends up working with a gang of "Unpluggers" who quote Ned Ludd and plan a revolution. The humor is a bit cheesy so don't expect high art, but it's still worth your time.

Novelist Mark Helprin wrote a provocative op-ed two years ago in the New York Times called A Great Idea Lives Forever, Shouldn't Its Copyright? (An inaccurate title, for which he blames the Times editors, as he says he never endorsed the idea of perpetual copyright.) That article provoked "three quarters of a million nasty comments" and he has now published a book called Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto that is sure to provoke plenty more. NPR featured a short interview with him today as well as a response by Lawrence Lessig: 'Digital Barbarism' wages Online Copyright Battle. I just picked the book up so I don't yet have an opinion on it... I'm sympathetic to the basic argument, I think (that copyright is important but it shouldn't be forever, and that "free culture" is problematic).

Lost in Cyburbia

This new book by James Harkin sounds interesting. From the cover blurb:

The early twentieth century saw the slow but steady exodus of the population from inner cities to the suburbs. We are currently witnessing a similar transformation as our new century establishes itself, but in an entirely different realm. As new technologies proliferate — personal computers, the communication gadgetry of mobile devices and access to the internet — our culture is participating in a mass electronic migration. James Harkin christens this destination to “Cyburbia” — the ether of “online,” where we spend so much of our lives.

Once upon a time there were no text messaging, no e-mail and no social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and MySpace. The introduction of these new forums for communication has radically transformed the way that we live — and we can only guess what will come next. Innovative and extremely timely, Lost in Cyburbia describes the architecture of our digital life, how it has developed over the past seventy years and how it will evolve in the future. The narrative recounts how the theories of Norbert Weiner (the inventor of cybernetics) and Marshall McLuhan inspired the counterculture radicals in the sixties and seventies, and traces how their pioneering idealistic and theoretical work laid the groundwork for a system whose central idea is bringing about direct communication between peers, outside the reach of authority.

Harkin explores what it means to be in the loop — and our obsession with instant access to information and how it is shared over networks — and considers what has been lost and what has been gained. Are we more connected than ever before or more isolated? Have our thinking processes been forever altered? Is the democratic nature of the net slowly being eroded by corporate interests? Or, as once hoped, will the net enable the awakening of a new kind of global consciousness?

Links:

• Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own (Canadian edition at Amazon)
• Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are (UK edition at The Book Depository)
• Cyburbia.tv -- a web site for the book with videos.

(via Core77)

Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

A syllabus by Robert Lanham in McSweeney's: go read the whole thing.

(via Nick Carr)

Welcome to the Future of Books (Great moments in OCR)

I was checking out Google's updated mobile site on my iPod Touch and noticed that it includes Google Books. The interface is actually not bad, but the OCR could use some work. Below is Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, looking a little like a ransom note or Riddley Walker. To be fair, the regular text is not as messed up as the TOC and list of "illustbations". I fear for a future, though, when all we might have left is crappy OCR'ed e-books of classics. Arga warga.

(Yeah, I know they save the full scans too and you can view the books as images in the non-mobile version.)

Speaking of captcha (and other stuff that bothers David Pogue)

David Pogue writes about the annoyances of captcha and other things: Recent stuff that bothers me.

He links to this site where people share captchas that are unreadable by humans: I Hate Word Verifications. (The KK example in the previous post is one where I could read it just fine but for some reason the system wouldn't accept my answer.)

Sven Birkerts resists the Kindle

Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, has an article in The Atlantic about the Kindle-izing of books. It is probably a disservice to snippet him, but here are some excerpts:

Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

[...]

The Kindle is just a device and the Kindle experience is still mainly about text and reader (and convenience and cost-savings)—I know that. But we should not forget that the sum of reader-text encounters creates our cultural landscape. So if it happens that in a few decades—maybe less—we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button, and libraries survive as information centers rather than as repositories of printed books, we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another. We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators. We may gain an extraordinary dots-per-square-inch level of access to detail, but in the process we will lose much of our sense of the woven narrative consistency of the story. That is the trade-off. Access versus context.

Link: Resisting the Kindle.

I think he has a point, and Birkerts is a valuable voice to have on this issue, but I feel like his arguments against e-books are getting more and more tenuous. He's not so much warning us of a negative effect now as warning us about change itself and the uncertainty it brings.

Regarding the loss of context, I'm tempted to recommend George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context, but honestly I haven't retained a thing from reading that book besides the title... maybe it's relevant, maybe not. I'm clearly failing at literary-luddite comprehension today.

Update: Here's a smarter post by Scott Esposito on the same topic: Sven Birkerts Still Harping on Context.

Techno Tuesday: Search

Sounds like a job for Wolfram Alpha.

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

Book Notes

It's been a while since I did a book post here. Here are a few newish books I think are worth your time.

My pick for best book of 2008 is Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson's main topic is attention, but the book is about much more than that. She surveys the impact of technology on modern society from a wide variety of angles and sources, including science, literature, philosophy, and personal interviews. The style is more journalism than popular science, which seems to have disappointed some of the Amazon reviewers. If you liked the style of Bill McKibben's Enough then you'll probably like this one.

According to Jackson's website the book is coming out in paperback in September.

My pick for best book of 2009 (so far) is the second edition of Hubert Dreyfus's On The Internet. I wrote about the first edition (published in 2001) previously. A lot has changed since then and it shows in this heavy revision. Dreyfus's previous pessimism about whether search will ever work on the Internet is largely gone now, thanks to the success of Google. The book's second topic, distance learning, is less hyped these days so Dreyfus devotes less attention here to debunking it. In new material he describes his positive experiences with podcasting lectures via iTunesU and his not-so-positive experience lecturing in Second Life. For Dreyfus, embodiment is vital to experience, and his critique of Second Life and telepresence in general follows that argument, using ideas from Heidegger and existentialist philosophers.

On The Internet is part of Routledge's Thinking In Action series of books applying philosophy to contemporary topics. Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost philosophers of technology and also possibly the world's leading expert on Heidegger. If you ever decide to tackle Being and Time, as I am thinking of doing this year, then check out Dreyfus's Heidegger course on iTunes. It's probably my only hope of halfway understanding that book.

Finally, just in time for the silliness of switching to daylight savings time this weekend, you may want to check out Michael Downing's Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. This is a revised edition of a book that came out a few years ago at the same time as another book on the same topic by David Prerau called Seize the Daylight. I have not yet read either, but I picked up Downing's book based on the strength of a previous book of his I read (Shoes Outside The Door). There is an excerpt from Spring Forward at Downing's site.

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Bruce Sterling on the idea of Google as a collective intelligence

This is not an especially new thought, but Sterling does have a way with words (correction: see link below for his actual words):

The original sin of geekdom is to think that just because you can think algorithmically and impose it on a machine that this is disembodied intelligence. That is just rules-based machine behavior. Just code being executed. Sure it's an art and science. Calling it intelligence is dehumanizing. It makes you look delusional, sad and pathetic. It's like being an old woman whose only friends are cats. Also, collective intelligence is not your friend. Just as markets aren't your friend. They'll jerk you around.

The quote paraphrase is from a speech he gave about Web 2.0, reported by Annalee Newitz at io9: Why does Bruce Sterling hate web 2.0?

Update: What Bruce Sterling actually said about Web 2.0, a transcript posted by the man himself.

Nicholas Carr Interview in The Sun

The American magazine The Sun (not to be confused with the UK newspaper) has an interesting interview with Nicholas Carr in the current edition: Computing the Cost: How the Internet is Rewiring Our Brains.

You can read it free online but I recommend you pick up a physical copy to read the other contents, including a reprint of a short piece by Wendell Berry called "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer," originally published in 1987.