The Great Geek Manual

The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper. Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies.

- “The Campus Tsunami/a>” by David Brooks, May 3, 2012.
Originally published by The New York Times.

For Armstrong, the AI we should be afraid of is not the “beatable humanoid robot we see in the movies” but rather a computer program or even a digital avatar that has been freed from our “biological limitations” to demonstrate “skills and abilities beyond what is considered to be human”; whether the ability to plan centuries ahead, to see patterns that we cannot or to link instantly to the internet, or even the social skill of “being always able to say the right thing at the right time” to get what it wants without humans even realising the game play. “AI would be able to use its superpowers to accumulate vast fortunes on the stock exchange, or even ‘be Google’, as AI would be cheaper and more productive than the human workers currently employed. It could even be a Super Clinton or Super Goebbels, able to take over by persuading us to let it.” Or it may gain more powers that we have not even thought of, given that “the space beyond human intelligence is vast”.

Luke Muehlauser agrees that AI is a threat, but believes that a friendly AI can be built that would “be benign to humans”. “Any intelligence is dangerous, and any intelligence that doesn’t share your goals is doubly dangerous, and any constraint we could devise for the AI merely pits human intelligence against superhuman intelligence, and we should expect the latter to prevail. That’s why we need advanced AIs to want the same things we want.

“So friendly AI is an AI that has a positive rather than negative effect on human beings. To be a friendly AI, we think an AI must want what humans want. Once a superintelligent AI wants something different than we want, we’ve already lost.”

- “AI uprising: humans will be outsourced, not obliterated” by Mark Piesing, May 17, 2012.
Originally posted by Wired UK.

There are currently two major revolutions occurring: the enlightenment of man and the awakening of computers. What’s incredible is that they are intertwined in their quest for information and knowledge. The more powerful computers become, the easier it is for man to access information. The better information we have, the better computers we make, and so on.

We have no way of knowing precisely what will happen with our brains. We may lose all feelings, or we might gain extra-human senses that allow for beauty to be not only recognized, but lived within.

It’s looking ahead that allows us to create effective constructs for living. In a time where many things are uncertain, we must individually live with an openness to change in order to feel secure in our lives. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

- “Zach Puchtel: The Future Is No Place for Fear” by Zach Puchtel, May 7, 2012.
Originally posted by The Huffington Post.

The next wave of digital products won’t just be about archiving the web; they’ll be about destroying the archive.

- “Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains” by Megan Garber, May 8 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic.

The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it’s a part of the world we live in. I’ve had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven’t the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I’ve had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I’ve had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don’t understand. Learning to code won’t solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance. Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.

- “A federal judge learned to code” by Mike Loukides, May 16, 2012.
Originally posted to O’Reilly Radar.

The internet is a beast, uncivil by corporal standards, rudely honest in its capacity to include any idea the mind can think of — and any voice, no matter how small, can ring loud in the internet’s ear.

The internet is not a country; it is not a belief system; it is not a government. It belongs to everyone, and no one, and by virtue of its existence, the internet has broken the bond of routine social contracts, conditioning our prejudiced perception of evolution and God. We are now on the path to a new human, our more ethereal counterpart…the Electro Sapien or e-sapien.

How the future supremacy of the Electro Sapien will play out is speculative, at best. Competing themes on how we came to be homo sapien, “modern man,” are still lost in interpretation. What we can infer, by way of all theories on the origin of the homo sapien — from the Aquatic Ape theory to unknown breakaway members of some homo antecessor-group, or a Homo Heidelbergensis / Homo Sapien tryst — is that many possibilities existed, and one survived.
Likewise, with over seven billion human beings living today, it is rational to assume that small, pre-Electro Sapien groups or types, directed by the species’ self-organisation, have begun to break away from the whole.

To establish who these new electro-types are, and why they will survive to establish the next level of species’ expansion, involves the discomfort of disputing or questioning the future validity of traditional interpretations of human purpose.

- “The Internet Messiah Has Arrived” by Thomas Easley, May 11, 2012.
Originally posted to Big Think.

Whilst the pain of finding a parking space will dissipate into the cloud, the cloud will hide other, less apparent costs. The concepts of the “smart” car, “smart” parking and payment systems, and “smart” cities are interesting enough. But all are really just a smoke screen for a much deeper set of political and even philosophical issues that will impact urban dwellers in the near future, especially as more than half’s the world’s population will soon be living in cities. That set of issues centers around the delicate dance between public and private ownership of space, both in the cloud and on the ground.

- “The Networked Urban Environment” by Jan Chipchase, May 3, 2012.

So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.

- “Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age” by Sarah Weinman, May 10, 2012.