Friday, July 21, 2006

We are already cyborgs

I wrote a piece on Butler Lampson recently. The article I ran discussed software development processes. Just didn’t seem to have room to fit in his comments about artificial intelligence. Here is what you might call an outtake from the cutting room floor.

Lampson: “The reason philosophy is always in a mess is the same way AI is a mess. Anything that becomes successful gets spun off. For example, machine vision. [AI] will continue to have successes and continue to have a mess.”

Lampson then mentioned intelligence amplification and Doug Engelbart [who was a former colleague] but I really couldn’t pick up his drift.


Then he turned attention to Google and The Big Scan. People worry about the book scanning, and if humans are turning into cyborgs, he indicated, or that human centered cyborgs are arising [Think: “I was a teenage quant!”], but “We are already cyborgs,” he said

“You haven’t been able to function in world without add-ons for quite some time,” he said.

Course, the Wooden Ship People and People in Trees might differ.


Intelligence amplification on Wikipedia

Doublas Engelbart on Fleabyte
Microsoft's Lampson at Usenix: Write software that expects to fail!

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