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Looking to the Future

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• On 03.12.09 Doug Floyd wrote these pithy words:

  This is a fascinating and exciting video, and I enjoy seeing all ways people are connecting and the world is changing. But it can be a bit deceptive. For example, the relation between computers and the brain.

  It might lead someone to think computers will be smarter than humans or somehow replace humans. This is bit deceiving because it uses one measurement: computation.

  The human person is much more than computation. And honestly, scientists understand much less about the human brain than this short video seems to presuppose. We can measure certain impulses or chemicals that indicate activity in the brain. What happens when they do create a super computer more complex than what we know of the brain right now?

  They might discover new forms of measuring activity that will raise more questions about how human brains really work. Rupert Sheldrake is one scientist who is seriously questioning the common models for understanding brain activity.

  Another thing that video assumes that data is increasing and data is real. First, the human brain may be a filter more than a receptor of data. Forget the Internet, the newspapers, the books and more, and we’re still confronted with billions of data impulses from our surroundings. We filter virtually all of it, so we can think and make some sense. If we couldn’t, we may never even have the capacity to master a language, let alone make any sense of anything.

  So more data is not the issue. It is better filtering. More data may actually make the world seem less real than more real. For example, if I hear a story every hour about a human being killed, it won’t take many days for the news to have no impact upon. In other words, it won’t take long to dehumanize me. I fear companies are dehumanizing the customers when raw data becomes the primary means of defining them. Somehow it is easier to steal and even kill people I know only by numbers and charts than it would be to impact people I know be name, face and family.

  I’ll stop there. I would just encourage anyone who sees a video like that to realize they’re only seeing one tiny bit of a much larger more complex story.

  Doug

• On 04.07.09 Are Twitter and Facebook Replacing Search? | Genuine Jeremy Floyd - Established in 1976 - Now With 20% More Attitude wrote these pithy words:

  [...] era of the Internet: professions that don’t exist today may be the top job in 3 years. [check this video for an interesting communication of this [...]

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Genuine Jeremy Floyd – Established in 1976 – Now With 20% More Attitude

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