Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Filling a much-needed gap
What I'm thinking of is some purely mechanical device, that took the basic QWERTY keyboard with Shift and Return keys and so on, but with each key attached to an arrangement of levers connected to a physical representation of the given letter or punctuation mark. These in turn would strike through some ink-delivery system - perhaps, though I'm reaching a bit here, a sort of tape of cloth mounted on reels - onto separate sheets of paper, fed through some kind of rubber roller (similar to that on a printer) one by one. The Return key would have to be replaced by a manual device, to literally 'return' the roller at the end of each line. Tedious, but most writers could do with more exercise anyway.
Corrections and changes would be awkward, it's true, but a glance at any word processor programme gives the answer: the completed sheets could be, physically, cut and pasted.
Someone more patient, less easily distracted, and more mechanically savvy than myself would have to develop such a device, and maybe already has - for all I know, the patent may be gathering dust. Now, its time has come. There's a huge gap in the market for it.
I tell you, someone's going to make an absolute fortune from this.
Labels: squibs
The man who knows what it is like to be a bat
Skillfully chaired by SF writer Justina Robson, who has herself given a lot of thought to transhuman themes, this discussion on transhumanism and what human enhancement could do for - or against - human beings ranged widely. Forum Director Professor Steve Yearley opened by pointing out that, even in popular media discussion, transhumanism was a conspicuous exception to the kind of risk-centred approach to almost all other bio-technological developments (a recent example being the ludicrous panic over milk from a cloned cow). Against this he pointed to the worries expressed by Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future, principally that the acceptance of human universality, of human equality at a very basic level, could be undermined by the emergence of individuals and even 'races' who were demonstrably, inarguably superior to the baseline human.
Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University took the view that a far more dangerous situation would be brought about by AIs surpassing humans, and that human enhancement was the best way for humans to keep ahead of the game. He extolled the possibilities - adumbrated, he claimed, by his own well-known self-experiments in neural-computer interfacing - of having more senses, broader bands of communication, networked memory and so on.
SF writer Iain M. Banks was in lively form, surprisingly less sanguine than Kevin Warwick about human enhancement, but rather more hopeful about the possibility that AIs would show moral as well as intellectual superiority to ourselves. It was on a re-iteration by Iain of this cheerful prospect, after some discussion from the floor and between the panel members, that Justina brought the conversation to a close.
I have to say that in person Professor Warwick quite belies the carping about his penchant for self-publicity: he came across as a warm and sincere guy and passionate researcher who has done a lot of serious work. Over dinner he amazed some of us with his account of what it was like to experience ultrasound as an immediate and precise awareness of the distance between himself and nearby objects. It wasn't like sight or hearing or any sense with which he was familiar. It was something new in his head. Perhaps he's the only person who has some idea of what it is like to answer Thomas Nagel's famous question: 'What is it like to be a bat?'
Labels: amazing things, genomics, local, skiffy
All right on the night
The Word Power event on Red Plenty went very well. The space was filled to capacity, and almost everyone in the audience stuck around for an hour and a quarter of often quite demanding discussion, with good contributions from the floor. The two speakers shared - across a broad political gap - an enthusiastic and informed interest in the subject. I managed to fumble the introduction by (a) garbling the name of the Word Power Edinburgh Book Fringe (b) failing to introduce myself and (c) failing to explain what the subject of the discussion was and why it was worth discussing.
What I should have said was, of course, that the current economic crisis has re-awakened interest in possible alternatives to capitalism and even the market, and that Spufford's book and Cockshott's research have in different ways given deep, critical examinations of one already failed alternative: the Soviet planning mechanism in general, and in particular the attempt in the early 1960s to reform and rationalise it through the use of sophisticated and pioneering mathematical techniques implemented on computers to optimise output.
Thanks to the miracle of market-developed computers, Paul Cockshott recorded the whole thing (mercifully missing most of my introduction) on what looked like a Blackberry, and has made the recording available here. (Don't be put off by the first minute or so - the sound quality does improve, though you may have to turn the volume up.)
Neil Davidson, who was speaking at a another event later that evening, remarked from the floor that looking at the Soviet economy as if optimising the production of consumer goods was a major objective rather missed the point that military competition was the real driving force. Francis's rejoinder that of course they were in an arms race, but this was a 'deforming effect of the Cold War', didn't really seem to answer that. It wasn't just the Cold War: responding to and shaping the international military situation dominated priorities (though not always direct military spending) from the first Five-Year Plan to the last. Another speaker from the floor brought up a different critical theory, that associated with the long-running journal Critique. One of the strengths of Francis's book is the way in which by focussing on facts (albeit through fiction) it forces reflection on the theories of what was actually driving the system, without itself explicating any.
[Picture credit: Scottish Comment]
Labels: local, Marxism, Scottish politics, self-promotion
Red Plenty reminder
This afternoon at 5.30 I'll be introducing and chairing a free event at Word Power, where author Francis Spufford and computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott will discuss Spufford's well-received new book Red Plenty. I've already enthused about this book, as has Paul Cockshott - who has himself worked for many years to bring to academic and political attention the significance of the historical and theoretical questions that lie behind the story. This promises to be a lively and engaging event, so if you have a chance, please come along.
Labels: coming attractions, libertarian, local, Marxism, self-promotion, skiffy
Another reminiscence
Labels: local, self-promotion, writing
Contrivances
'Gangster novel,' he said. 'Brain surgeon scrapes thug's car. Thug threatens him. Brain surgeon notices ...' He summarised the plot in a few brisk sentences.
'If guys like us came up with contrivances like that,' he concluded, 'the critics would throw stones at us.'
'From Dover Beach!'
'Or Chesil Beach.'
All that needs to be said about Saturday was said some time ago.
Blogging for beginners
[Addendum: given that I was supposed to be encouraging science communicators to blog, perhaps amplifying that remark with 'People will be laughing at you on the starships' was not the way to go.]
Edwin Morgan, 1920 - 2010
When I first met Edwin Morgan I told him of how I'd sat watching a documentary about his life, and enthusing to my wife about his poems on love, and it only slowly dawning on me as I watched what his own love was, and what I'd learned from that.
'It's the same emotion,' he said.
Differentiated from a doormat
This quotation from Rebecca West is quite familiar. I've seen it loads of times, often shortened by ommission of the opening phrases or the last three words. But until today I've never come across the context in which it was written: a socialist, trade unionist, internationalist polemic against an article by G. K Chesterton.
As I dislike intensely the condescension with which he slaps the working man on the back I rarely read his political articles. But last week I was sent “The New Witness” of October 30 which contained an article called “I Told You So.” There is no sentiment in that article which would not be a credit to an inhabitant of heaven: in fact it makes one desire to send Mr. Chesterton thither at once. The conclusions of that article are corruptingly foolish and wicked.Rebecca West would have been a formidable blogger.
The subject is that recent incident in Dublin, when the strikers’ children who were being sent over to English or Belfast homes were assaulted by priests and “Hibernians,” and prevented from leaving the city. This incident seems full of quiet beauty to Mr. Chesterton.
Blatant Brotherly Bleg
If any readers should be kind enough to vote for his entry, he would be very grateful. And so would I.
Poetry competion: the new and improved human
'A selection of the winning and shortlisted poems will be published in a special publication of the Forum in 2010.
The Scottish Poetry Library will host an evening of poetry readings based on the winning entries.
First prize is £500, second prize is £200, and third prize is £100.'
Labels: coming attractions, genomics, writing
The Only Reality
the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality.Engels describes this as a realization to which Feuerbach (a German philosopher who greatly influenced Marx and Engels while they were working out their own ideas) was 'driven', but he plainly agrees with it.
Engels was, of course, well aware that some aspects of the world are 'sensuously perceptible' only indirectly, through instruments and what have you, and he would have been far more delighted than surprised if he could have seen such instruments as the Hubble Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider. Numbers, logical categories and other abstractions he regarded as 'reflections' of the same material world, produced by the activity of the material brain: our consciousness and thinking, he goes on to say, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain.
So we know what Engels had in mind when he talked about reality: the reality we inhabit. This, he says, is the only reality.
Now, you may ask how he (or Feurbach) knew this. But the question that occurred to me as a result of Engels's confident statement was this: where did the idea come from that there could be another reality? I'm fairly sure that for the Greeks and Hebrews - or at least, for Homer and the Bible - everything is part of the same reality. The gods really do live on Olympus. God really is in heaven. And heaven really is up there in the sky, as celestial as the stars. Sheol or Hades really is down below, as material as magma. Spirit really is breath. Spirits (ghosts and gods and so on) are sometimes visible, usually invisible. But so is water vapour.
So where did the idea of a reality outside 'our' reality (but not outside in space, outside in some unknowable way) come from? Did it all come from Plato and some muddle along the lines of: because we can understand numbers, where the numbers live is where we go when we die?
'We don't agree with his extremism and starting the second world war'
It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.It's all about maintaining ethnic purity, apparently.
Ghosts
Labels: amazing things, history