Sherry Turkle's article reminds me of a host of promises and concrete
experiences. In chronological order:
2001 Space Odissey: didn't HAL ended up with having developed a personality,
a sense of humor and emotional states
Apple's Knowledge Navigator video: this was the future according to John
Sculley. They had a beautiful folding PDA which intelligently answered the
phone, contacted people for advice, knew how to handle unexpected situations
etc. I was at an Apple developer's conference where they showed this video
and immediately followed it with what it could be if the device developed a
bad personality. I wouldn't want to have the latter.
Microsoft Bob: Apart from the fact that it needed 8 MB of memory at a time
when most PCs only had 4, it also came with a host of "intelligent
assistants." I can't forget that one of them had an unreliable character. I
can't understand why one would want one of those. Do we need an assistant
that makes us send a fax to the wrong number or that gives us bad advice?
The most interesting sentence for me is this question she asks: Are we
tacitly acknowledging that we do not have enough "human" time to spend with
them [the children and the elderly]? Maybe this is why we so badly want to
replicate oursevles
Gil
-----Original Message-----
From: Henry van Eyken [mailto:vaneyken@sympatico.ca]
Sent: mardi, 2. mai 2000 12:59
To: unrev-II@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [unrev-II] Relational thinking and improvement
Jack:
First about the Sherry Turkle article. It reminded me immediately of a
famous experiment conducted by experimental psychologists quite a few
decades back. It involved the attachment of monkeys to wire-frame surrgogate
mothers and the effect of clothing it with a fabric. Guess what? Draping the
frame with soft towel did wonders for affection. I should be able to get a
proper reference if you want me to.
I know, I know, Prof. Turkle looks not at soft cloth, but at electronic
intelligence as a discriminating factor in affection. Might it have
something to do with Kurzweil also hailing from MIT? Just suspecting.
As for your TSC, I sincerely believe that you may be better of looking for
the kind of connectiveness you are enquiring into in the domain of
evolutionary psychology - looking along the vector of time rather than
across it, so to speak. Before making any recommendation I want to be
absolutely sure people understand that I am not schooled in psychology other
than having taken a course in the now thoroughly damned behaviorist school
of educational psychology. (I like to believe my mind has not been warped by
that anymore than by programming in BASIC.)
Now the recommendation (which would be some years out of date by now):
there is a book of papers edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Ledas Cosmides, and
John Tooby that is called "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Generation of Culture." One of the most captivating phrases in it is the
title of a paper by Barkow, "Beneath new culture is old psychology." Because
I sensed the subject matter to be important to my personal, 15-year-old
belief that people do well to augment themselves with on-the-person
computers, I extracted a bit of he book in short "report" under the heading,
"The bias that got us places (or Some booby-traps on the way to spiritual
machines)."
http://www.fleabyte.org/archives-computing_to_a_purpose-1.html#The bias
that got us places
As for man-machine affection, you may find some personal affinity in
"Roots: Why Fleabyte?"
http://www.fleabyte.org/archives-computing_to_a_purpose-3.html#Roots, Why
Fleabyte
I salute you in your TSC efforts.
As for my "expertise," I cannot enough emphasize a disclaimer, but
whenever circumstances permit I like to have at least a sense of what's
going on in important domains of human society, and what of it makes sense
or not - regardless of what makes us tick.
Henry
P.S. Thanks for that note I didn't have to write.
Jack Park wrote:
I have, for more than a dozen years, been evolving a theory with which I
could construct a program I call The Scholar's Companion (TSC). TSC was
always intended to be an IQ-enhancement tool. I have been sold on the notion
of "apparent IQ" -- that of the combined efforts of a human and a computer
working together to solve some problem, learn something new. Along the way,
I became acquainted with the work of N. Raschevsky, and R. Rosen. Rosen
took Raschevsky's Relational Biology to its current incarnation complete
with a mathematics founded in Category Theory. Of course, I have been
studying just what it would take to incorporate this thinking in TSC. Today,
I stumbled upon a web site (http://www.edge.org), and a talk by Sherry
Turkle, "A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship." I am
beginning to view the OHS/DKR, and TSC, from a viewpoint articulated in this
paper. I'll be interested in the comments of others with respect to her
views. Jack
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