What are you optimistic about?
edge.org has posted their Annual Question for 2007: what are you optimistic about? As usual, many are predictable (celebrity athiest Daniel Dennett and nerd prince Cory Doctorow among them) or cloyingly meta (“The Optimism of Scientists”, “Optimism…”), but here are few trends or individual responses I thought were cool.
Secular humanist cheerleading. Plenty (too many to link) of articles touting the final triumph of rationality over willful ignorance and religion (no, seriously, you guys, this time. You guys). The Edge’s bullpen of bigheads is, of course, wildly skewed, but the fact that this message was so oft repeated within their sample still seems interesting.
Evidence. Ok, this is a subset of the secular humanist cheerleading, but I thought it was notable that both Craig Venter and Clay Shirky were both optimistic about the importance of evidence in our lives (also Bart Kosko and others). I don’t really agree, since I think evidence, even when it is good and available, will always take more effort to understand and interpret than entertainment. But time will tell.
Stupidity of the Crowds. Mark Pagel’s “The Limits of Democracy” was a refreshing alternate opinion to the web2.0/crowd-sourced/smart-mob trends of the day. He’s optimistic that we are realizing that majorities are not always (or even often) right, that committees breed mediocrity, etc.
We Can Understand Each Other. Rebecca Goldstein’s piece posits that humans are actually capable of empathy, which, sadly, seems almost radical. Her solution? Literature, qualified with the closer, “So, at the end of the day, I am tethering my optimism to the work of our contemporary novelists‚ which is probably another way of saying that I’m pretty darned pessimistic.”
End of War. Of course the natural contrarian response to our age of war is to believe in (I mean predict! No! Conjecture! Agh! *rationalist implosion*) its ultimate demise, but John Horgan’s “War Will End” and Chris DiBona’s “Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It” are both interesting.
And of course our own Marti Hearst is there, presaging the usable utopia!
Any others people think are cool? Any thoughts on what you’re optimistic about?
Quite interesting, some of these. Although, optimism, or wishful thinking.
Ah, then there are the obligatory AI pipedrea…ahem… visions in there. Marvin Minsky, a celebrity AI academic if there ever was one, describes immortality by cybernetics, downloading/backing up the information contents of human brains into machines and augmenting failure-prone organics with mechanical parts. Going along with the semi-fantasy, a direct mind-machine information interface would go a long way toward alleviating the lossy nature of human-computer interaction. A request to the machine to “do what I mean” could be made far more literally.
Jordan Pollack starts with your basic intelligent agent that learns from user feedback and concludes with digital sentience through self-evolving software, slanting decidedly toward the non-symbolic approach to AI. Seeing that Skynet hasn’t arisen from the orderly and carefully crafted databases of Cyc, perhaps there’s something to the non-logical, throw-everything-at-it-and-make-it-learn-somehow approach. I just don’t know what, besides a lot of hand-waving.
Terrence Sejnowski proclaims that a breakthrough in understanding intelligence is “just around the corner.” We’ve been hearing this for a while now, though. That corner seems rather impregnable so far. Statistical learning algorithms only seem to go so far.
i’m optimistic about localoaf… good reads here
re: Minsky via Yiming, I saw a decent, if low-budget, series of short films called “Robot Stories” @ the Asian Film Festival a few years back. One of the more compelling shorts is about a couple who’s been backing their consciousnesses up for centuries, to guard against the physical failures of their mortal bodies. do we need to feel a sense of loss to be fully human? will we ever have a high-enough resolution recording device that will render loss obsolete? what cannot be recorded and “memorized?”
i was just recently exposed to the edge annual questions when i picked up this book: http://www.amazon.com/What-Believe-but-Cannot-Prove/dp/0060841818
“What Do You Believe, But Cannot Prove?”
highly recommended, i’ll loan it to anyone who wants it.
k7, I think that was the best (first?) Edge question, and certainly got a ton of media coverage. I seem to recall several of those pieces concerning the non-existence of free will, which was interesting. My favorite, though, was Robert Sapolsky’s:
Sapolsky’s books are also great, highly recommended, esp. A Primate’s Memoir.
alas, i never took sapolsky’s undergraduate class when i had the chance. i’ve got a copy of “why zebras don’t get ulcers” on my shelf, which i’ve only read part of. do you ever get guilty for neglecting a book, and then hearing its theses from other people, which causes you to neglect the book further?
while i had a job at the gym, i would see prof. sapolsky work out. i always wondered what he was thinking about when he did pull-ups, given his special insights.
Probably something along the lines of, “SEVEN. My beard is itchy. EIGHT. My beard is itchy. NINE…”