Reading Reactions – Brandon Pousley

Mastery and Mimicry

Mastery
It is always amazing to witness the inability of individuals to project accurately into the future. Although we have prior experience that enables us to see trends and patterns, we often underestimate future change. We also become accustomed to change quite quickly. We often fantasize about the promise of future technology, but often fail to realize the parts of that fantasy that become reality. Many point to the failed realization of previously lauded artificial intelligences. However, these same individuals fail to recognize the intelligent power of the devices we currently wield. And this power in the tools we wield increase the pace and complexity of the next generation of technologies, feeding into an ever increasing trend of innovation.

What Lies Upstream
What makes a tool powerful is very dependent upon its fit within a culture. In the age of participatory networks, enabled by internet technologies, the author points out that it is not so much the individual power of a single technology, but rather the potential power that tool can have when accessed by many users. In a strong community, a very simple tool can prove to have significantly more power than the most advanced tool that is only utilized by a select few. I think that this most resembles social networks we have today; where the tool itself is of relatively no value. However, the content and connections that people build upon the technology enable the tool to become truly useful.

Augmenting Human Intellect
My first initial thought to this reading is the stark difference between the computer as an individual’s tool to compute and a connective tool to collaborate and network with others. Written in 1962, I certainly understand the lack of discussion of networks, however it is interesting that when I read the title of the article, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” my notion was of the collective intellect of a community of users, which is clearly only attributed to the most recently discovered uses of modern technology.

I find the H-LAM/T system (despite being one of the clumsier acronyms in existence) to be a truly remarkable guide for developing technology concepts. I especially admire the emphasis on processes and sub-processes that pervade humanness. This hierarchy approach highlights the dependance of certain actions upon others and how design choices must be well informed by the end user and task in order to be most effective.

Similar to the other readings on biomimicry, Engelbart is careful to note that what we know as intelligence is very much rooted in natural processes and structures. In his framework, Engelbart seeks to build a superstructure that extends that structure upon which it is built. This allows the author to argue that artificial intelligence is real and occurring at the time of his writing.

Reading Recommendations
Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
The Children’s Machine and Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
Confronting Challenges of Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
Chris Dede’s work on Immersive Environments and Augmented Reality