12.2 Quantum inter-relationship thinking

If thoughts shape actions, our thoughts about how we frame the next age will shape what we get from it.

A slow realisation seems to be happening, that the arrival of code’s propelling a digital tsunami of change across commercial and social landscapes. It’s a tidal wave that’s been variously described as we look to create handy shorthands for it.

The fourth industrial revolution’ is a World Economic Forum description. ‘The second machine age’ or ‘next machine age’ are others.

But to grasp the nature of a new age (and of change itself) in its entirety, means we cannot reference it simply through the narrow confines and definitions of the times that have come before, which is what both of these descriptors do.

Part evolution, part disruption, the essential nature of the change we’re dealing with today comes because we live in a wired world for the first time human history. And this new world is radically new because there’s a brand new element, a new ingredient working alongside human life > code.

Code’s allowing us to create scripts informing how things interface with each other in utterly new ways. With this, what matters now is not the machinery but the inter-relationships. In the wired (and the wireless) world we are becoming exponentially connected.

This is an age of connection. From privacy switches being flicked by Facebook and backdoors being opened by the FBI, crowdsourcing, hive minded organisation and the internet of things springing up around us, the dynamic shift in the sociological landscape happening here is not about more machines; nor, when things are automated, is it about heightened concepts of industry.

The crucial, different and determining factor that the digital environment creates and that is enfolding us today is that we are all connected, how ideas intersect, how we fuse (or not) with technology, and how we deal with personal and geopolitical boundaries when the world is dynamic and agile.

This connectivity is not just technical, it’s relational. And it’s about new forms of relationships and inter-relationships happening at compound levels.

In this world of quantum inter-relationship, old ways of dominance and winner-takes-all narratives don’t quite work the way they used to.

If we assume the shift the digital economy brings is about more machines and industry, all we’re doing is overlaying old industrial age attributes onto a brand new and very different paradigm and short-circuiting the potential.

If we forget what the essential nature of change is, that is to say that change is different, we won’t step forward into a new era as well as we might because we will be failing to be as open and receptive as we might be to new thinking.

The connection economy is about win:win as the outcome, balancing resources to make the most gains for the greatest numbers of people, and harnessing ecosystems and systems thinking in order to use biometrics and data well and to manage them holistically.

Since James Lovelock’s Gaia theory opened up human awareness about the connected nature of biological ecosystems, our connectivity has been increasing thanks to technology, making the case for a ‘whole planet’ management approach.

The digital capabilities and the ever-increasing amounts of data we have at our disposal have been reinforcing the idea that connected intelligence and collaborative networking are new critical success factors we must begin to employ, and rapidly.

So, whatever the economics or other drivers that are part of the digital age, if this is a forever recession, it’s because old business managment models no longer work as they once used to in this now-friction-free world built around new forms of connectivity and interaction.

It’s perhaps why reactionary talk of boundaries going up is current. If barriers and walls being mooted go up and nations quit out of conjoined states like the EU, as we are considering in Britain, it’s because we haven’t found a way yet to create and fashion global coexistences, given how joined up thoughts, actions and the consequences of them now are.

If thoughts shape actions, framing the next age as primarily about connection makes a big difference to the value we will get from it. Connection management will promote ethics and governance discussions around how we form global inter-relationships and business models that work well and can co-exist without endless fights for a singular dominant narrative and market share races to the bottom. It will frame what we write in terms of general AI and the code that acts on our behalf as our world becomes increasingly digitally scripted and automated.

Thinking about the next age as one of quantum inter-relationships will shape the nature of the collaboration and the value of co-existing with code, and the human benefits we can derive from it.

Picture credit: http://poetry.house/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/beautiful-sound-waves.jpg

Published March 25, 2016 by Anne McCrossan | 12.0 A new operating system | No comment

2.4 Genetically digital

This 1984 video shows how the connection economy began. Simple technology, joined up using just a few wires. When the terminal linked up to the phone line, moving data around in the form of primitive email became possible.

As we look ahead and think about the code that might end up governing the humankind of our futures, our understanding of our genetic make-up, and how it has evolved so far, is useful.

Science is challenging existing assumptions we’ve had about our biology and yielding insights that reveal there are ‘real time’ changes in our biological systems.

So it is the case with what we code.

In human genetics, exosomes are ‘cell-derived vesicles that are present in many and perhaps all biological fluids’. They are the carriers of a series of flows of information. As digital humans, a similar function is performed by data. This has been happening since that first dial-up.

Now, our relationship to one another and what governs us as digital humans is a connective tissue we choose, in the form of the AI we install.

And we can postulate whether our carriers of genetic information are the coded protocols, apps and scripts we accept and live with, as extensions of ourselves.

 

 

Published March 19, 2016 by Anne McCrossan | 2.0 Web porous and digitally umbilical | , , , | No comment

3.3 Meatware

carcass

The word ‘meatware’ was added to The Urban Dictionary in 2003 by a ‘MrAngryForNoReason’.

It’s definition is ‘the human element in a technological system. The hardware is the system, software runs on the system, the meatware is the user of the system’.

Meatware was a mildly amusing term twelve years ago.

Today, as we emerge as digital humans, our ecosystem can be seen through new lenses and joined-up perspectives.

We can observe inter-relationships to other elements in that ecosystem.

We can begin to appreciate how what we do, and what any creature does, makes a difference.

It has been said that ‘the march of human progress is strewn with dead animals.

In this emerging, coded world, our ethicality is a script that we run.

And contempt for other elements in the ecosystem is a feedback loop, a dealbreaker, that short-circuits the quality of our interactions.

Artificial intelligence, the new ingredient in the planet’s overall food chain, is on the cusp of hacking into the ultimate, previously unassailable, domain of the human mind.

And maybe in that context, being classified as meatware isn’t a great prospect.

It’s worth considering if the ethicality we have meted out to animals, the way we treat meatware down the pecking order from us, holds a portent of the future for the digital human.

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is asking this question.

It is considering if the price we pay for the Internet of Things will be we are skewered by it.

Marcelo Rinesi at the Institute writes that ‘human existence may indeed by redefined as living with a continual vague dread’.

Our relationship with AI may demand feeble compliance, with digital humans as its dumb animals.

Code may usher in a very malicious world unless we put our human conscience to this question.

In China, the signs are already there this is not an entirely idle spectre.

AI may treat us just the way we treat animals.

After all, we’re programming it.

Published October 13, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 3.0 'Is' and 'other' | , | No comment

5.4 Simple and complicated

Simple Complicated Illustrator Pair 3

The simple act of being able to shower in fresh water, set to a temperature of choice, is one of life’s most basic and enjoyable pleasures.

In the 21st Century, in a world with sustainable development goals, joined-up resources, human intelligence and technical smarts, how is it still that only a small proportion of people in the world today have this luxury?

A quality of life, in which everyone can do this, is a simple ‘ask’, but complicated to realise.

Maybe this is the real context of what we might call achievement in the Digital Era; that our metamorphosis, as digital humans, includes being able to reduce the labour of realising simple goals like this without them being difficult, unattainable or complicated.

Even while we talk of minimum viability as geeks, sometimes it’s easy to forget what quality of life actually means as people.

It’s a soft pillow, a good meal, a home.

Human needs can fall by the wayside just because we have low thresholds.

Solving the basics elegantly is about making life’s simple pleasures abundant; having things like drinkable or hot water, homes, and sustainable food choices on tap for everyone.

Joining information end-to-end to make them possible is going to be when we know we’re using code and data to raise us up.

Published September 29, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 5.0 The metamorphosis | , , , | No comment

5.3 Glass half full

Glass half full copyWhile this blue marble we live on spins around, we might fear for its future. We might fight for ours.

And yet that’s not the whole story at all, because nature hates a vacuum.

We can also connect with and look after what we value around us better using digital technology, and the evidence suggests that we need to. Our inventory requires protection and care in the Digital Era.

A paradox in what makes us human is this: Where there is emptiness, so there is a heightened longing and appreciation for good because of it.

This is what makes us different from robots.

So, we can transcend. Like the man says here, we can change our metaphorical residence to heaven, make a better world and improve our state of being for ourselves using data.

This is our emergent code.

 

Published September 25, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 5.0 The metamorphosis | , | No comment

9.1 On invisible powers

IBM 5mb hard drive

As time passes, it’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous amount of labour that used to go into making things that were technologically advanced.

The 5Mb in this picture from 60 years ago today is miniscule. It’s almost negligible in comparison.

The true sense of power code gives us can be easy to neglect because of how small it is.

Because of code, anyone can have a unique url, a digital footprint, make their mark in the world and stand for something.

Because of digital technology, everyone can have a shop window of their own, open to the world online.

Instead of standing at the sidelines and sniggering at those who we think are the powerful, anyone can do work that matters and be counted for it.

We can rise up, we can go beyond sharing linkbait and create mutual value by being connected.

We can be recognised as individuals in networks, each with a unique talent, and make a difference.

The tables have turned from the time of this picture. Now, with code, we have invisible powers.

We can use it and it’s kryptonite.  How about we let the robots and the hard drives with the serial numbers do the grunt work while we focus on something better.

 

Published September 17, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 9.0 Kryptonite for a connection economy | , , , , | No comment

5.2 Minimum Viable Human

Richard Newton suggests soon the machines are no longer going to be nice. His recent interview on Sky News is in three short parts here.

In response to such a prospect, perhaps we should take a step back and ask a simple question:

‘What would be a way to live well in the world?’

Were Freud, Jung, Maslow and others onto something when they said that our biggest cravings are focused on meeting basic needs?

If they are, what are our most basic needs?

Do they include shelter? Do they include food? Do they include good health? Do they include security? Do they include peace? Do they include love?

If you think the answer to those questions is ‘yes’, then think of how much of the world is blighted, unable to meet these needs for so many of us humans.

Think about Aylan as the symbol of a humanity being washed up because, in a connected world, politicians do not know how to join the dots.

Aylan

The Digital Era draws a line in the sand under where we’re headed.

Looking logically at what’s unfolding around the world there’s a real risk that humans are going to fall between a rock and a hard place; with the barren lands, infertile soils and the diminishing resources derived from poor global management on the one hand and the diamond-hard, cold, unfeeling circuitry of robots on the other.

That said, with the logic of a quantified society and data ethics we can put some sense back into this.

We know the costs of living, the conditions for a healthy ecosystem and we can harness code to calculate a quantified and better quality of life. And there are value creation opportunities that can be rewarded in all of them.

These are snapshots from Experian’s latest US data. The Digital Era gives us new levels of insight about the human balance sheets we are running.

Which means that any losses from here on in to human quality of life are unconscionable.

 

cost-of-living-in-americaExperian cost of living index

In short, we have all the information we need to understand what it takes to ensure we can develop better conditions for the minimum viable human than ever.

We talk about minimum viable products without wondering whether the same approach might be needed for us too.

In housing, for example, there is increasingly a crisis in affordability at the very time when we are in, parallel, discussing how to create smarter cities.

A recent FT Alphaville discussion on Housing in the UK, there were these insights:

‘Widespread home ownership is a key driver of social division, argues Rees, because of the fixation with property values that it produces.’

It goes on, ‘This makes developers hypersensitive about anything that could push down the price they can sell homes for, including the presence of a low-income household next door. People live in better societies when they rent.

‘Ultimately the property market in the world’s largest cities suffers from the tragedy of the commons: with individuals acting according to their own narrow self-interest, the best possible overall outcome does not materialise.’

What the closing days of industrialisation are doing is shining a light on the way the economics that have been used to build markets up to now no longer add up.

We have job and salary indexes, development indexes, digital business modelling and all the digital intelligence we need to figure out how to make sure all these things are abundant and part of the basics of human existence by design.

Today we can start from the ground up, designing, developing and delivering products, services and infrastructure that create value for a connected ecosystem.

If we’re so clever, all we need is the simple resolve of putting humanity’s minimum viable needs first, logically, in the face of our own selfish prejudices and the artificial intelligence of machines.

 

Published September 3, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 5.0 The metamorphosis | , , , , , | No comment

5.1 On learning faster than the competition

Learning fasterDo a Google search on the term ‘learn faster than the competition’ and you’ll come up with a number of sources to which that quote is attributed, Arie de Geus and Peter Senge getting the most mentions.

Google is better placed than me to answer the question of where the phrase first came from, because it can call up millions of documents and do a source check far quicker than any human.

At maybe that’s the real point today about learning faster than the competition.

When people discuss the future of work today, they often describe the importance of learning faster than the competition.

But when that competition is code and algorithms and the runtime of an executed script can go a million times faster than you can, faster than any human is capable of… what then?

In a quest for utility, businesses and people alike are discovering the pinch points.

Global connectivity and always-on technology has meant we have lived in a 24/7 world for a while. And as humans we struggle to keep up with factory productivity.

It’s time to be clear on something: No matter how fast we go, a race against machines is one humans are going to lose.

Real adaptability isn’t only about speed.

Maybe learning faster than the competition in this kind of situation means asking the question, ‘What shall we do instead?’

Published August 29, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 5.0 The metamorphosis | , , , , | No comment

11.1 Who wins the internet?

Mark Zuckerberg facebook cropFacebook’s announced it’s reached a billion views in one day.

Go Facebook. It’s no small achievement.

What about the stream of Pavlovian reminders:

  • Someone in your network’s posted something
  • Someone’s replied to a comment you are following
  • Someone’s replied to a comment you’ve posted
  • In fact, pretty much anything

sent to users by phone, by email, by text, on swipe-in screens, by any conceivable means possible, designed to induce people to go look and stay hooked into the service.

That might have something to do with it.

So who wins the internet? The answer is those with the best behavioural scientists.

And what happens when we wise up to human nature and understand better how it can be gamed. What happens when we all become behavioural scientists?

What happens when we develop digital and behavioural literacy, as we’ve developed language, numeric and other literacies.

It would be good to think everyone might then win the internet.

For themselves.

Published August 28, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 11.0 Emergence and enablement | , , , , | No comment

4.1 On achievements unlocked

The centre for useless splendour crop 500Some things feel great to attain. That difficult bar reached after a bit of effort? Well, it’s special precisely because it’s a challenge.

Achievements from doing difficult work provide flow and satisfaction as a result of interaction with elements that test our mettle.

This is why achievements come with a sense of enhanced status, inherently exclusive in character. If everybody could do it, the feeling of achievement would be less for that.

Some achievements though have at their heart a certain nonsense about them. No matter how bright the glare of their halo-effect, it seems as if there is a hollowness never quite filled, a contentment never truly felt. There is always an insatiable quest for more.

The posturings feel shrill, the product of frantic needs powered by an ego’s brittle, constant need satiated and stroked. The rich like to sequestrate what they like to think of as the symbols of an aspirational lifestyle, whatever that happens to be in the moment. But the irony is that cannot ever grasp it, because it is their money and idea that it can be purchased that gets in the way of the real gift of being happy.

There’s something not quite right with the rich kids of Instagram. No matter how much the gilded trappings might try to suggest otherwise, what comes over is a hideous ennui.

Rich people comp small

We’re all on a quest to satisfy our senses. You know, there’s food and then there’s M&S food. Different. Special.

There’s achievement, and then there’s ultra achievement, uber performance, mega states of prestige. There’s the ‘only one winner’ who has ever higher and supposedly more rarified dividends.

But in a connected world, this is a nonsense.

Take a look at this commercial made by Cartier. This is what happens when Cartier take you on an odyssey. I have no idea what it means either.

We are coming to understand, I think, that attainments like these don’t really instill deep feelings of contentment and satisfaction, nor provide as much meaning as we might think.

Indeed, we may be reaching the end of road in believing materialism can provide a route to infinite happiness.

A super, shiny ‘costabomb’ fast car cruising around Bel Air, Knightsbridge or Dubai is still subject to speed limits. There’s only so much more ‘soft’ the luxiest of anything can provide. In fact, there are only diminishing incremental levels of bliss to be had, no matter how fancy the trappings.

The average bottle of red burgundy costs around £16. The world’s most expensive bottle of wine is a red burgundy that comes in at just below £9,900. Does it taste 618 times better? Of course it doesn’t. Do the maths and, proportionately, the amount of  ‘extra’ a fat wallet can buy does not, ultimately, pay off or look like a good deal.

What we’re capable of feeling and enjoying has to expand before that happens. In terms of neuroscience and economics, if one has to pay a high price for happiness then those least able to derive contentment from the simplest pleasures are not, in real terms, the most well-off.

Consider Mbongeni Buthelezi in South Africa, who paints with recycled plastics. He’s finding wonder in the ordinary. Maybe that’s a truer sense of achievement.

The world’s beginning to work against the traditional idea that exclusivity is a recipe for happiness. And, in a connected world, the idea of scarcity commanding a premium is completely illogical.

This blows economic models. Scarcity is a marketable commodity, of course, but it contains a primal fear – the idea that we’re not capable or complete and need to be defined by goods and accessories. This is an industrialized construct, and it feeds the factory.

Being digital gives us a shop window, a chance to bask in the gaze of others and to feel that halo effect. But keeping up with the Khardashians or anyone else for that matter is a hamster wheel that can destroy the very point of the gaze, a form of interconnected slavery for attention. I would put it to you that real happiness runs deeper.

And now that we live online, we are abundantly digital. The world has exploded with virtual resources and possible realities. Our greatest assets are within, in our imagination and our individualism. It is these that give us the power to make our own mark and to resist being defined by algorithms.

We have been thinking in ways that are becoming obsolete.

Power and status is being derived today by developing the value our output has to others as well as to ourselves. Power is coming from being the makers, not just consumers. Power is coming from taking initiative and being masters of our online domains. PewDiPie and Nick D’Alosio are showing how, as self-made entrepreneurs of the natively digital generation.

Today, achievement, power and status come from having a digital identity that will endure beyond the time that you do; your voice, your own bling, as appreciated by the world.

Programme, and be a geek that inherits the earth. Programme, and you can save lives. Programme, and your business will develop value from this shift.

Maybe this is how our achievements will be unlocked as digital humans; how we will develop a new kind of worth.

2.3 On agency


Machine learned art 500This is a piece of machine-learned art. As well as the interesting conceptual metaphor of computer-generated eyeballs, it depicts an important shift in agency.

The Lawn Tennis Association has invested heavily in interactive media analysis at Wimbledon and a few weeks ago, at the 2015 Wimbledon mens’s tennis finals between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, something beyond the tennis took place:

‘As Djokovic cruised toward the Wimbledon title, his fans’ heart rates remained regular’, said Chris Cardew, the joint head of strategy at Mindshare, a media agency network. His comment wasn’t just speculation. On behalf of the car brand Jaguar, Mindshare was recording and analyzing the heart rate variability, localized audio, motion and skin temperature of 20 fans in the crowd, via sensor-equipped cuffs. The goal was to create an interactive display of the crowd’s fluctuating emotions at the match, which Jaguar could then use for living ads.’

At around the same time as this was happening, some hackers were getting into Chrylser’s digital car systems, remotely killing a Jeep engine while on the road. It led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles.

Right now, the gods of Silicon Valley rule our digital world. They are the masters of its domain, developing machines with human-like intelligence.

Five years ago, in 2010, Sergey Brin declared his aim. ‘We want’, he said, ‘Google to be the third part of your brain‘.

Now, wearables, apps and the ‘new normal’ conditions associated with being online are generating new powers of agency for providers vying to have a piece of the space in our heads; they can understand how we behave, know what we do, and share content well outside our own sense of domain.

The human relationship with code’s become porous. Being hooked up digitally means being hooked up to a mass of connections extending beyond us and far outside our control.

We’re talking today about smart cities, hive minds and global ambitions for connected intelligence, not thinking too much about what we might have to give up for it.

The global wired up superbrains being made today can bring a great deal to augment human potential but equally, code has the means to override what we know as a native state of humankind, altering what we choose or define as our essential and preferred state of being.

Before we become fully conditioned by programmatic advertising and algorithmic calculations I think we owe it to ourselves to have a conscious conversation about this.

We’re at the point today where artificial intelligences are – right now – hacking away our human boundaries.

My friend Jon Husband, author of Wirearchy, recently asked a question on Facebook: ‘Is this all an illusion?’. Several people in their responses agreed with the instinctive sense of what he was saying.

Life might be feeling illusory because code is beginning to give us a detached sense of agency. And what we know as the truth, what feels like the truth, seems harder to grasp as a consequence.

As the first generation of digital humans, we haven’t fully comprehended how digital agency may be impacting on us. We’re not fully conscious about the choices we make when we consume and expose ourselves to digital content and how it affects us. Most big online providers aren’t sharing the data. We don’t talk about the digital morality of it, it just is.

But it’s worth remembering it’s us who have the ancient treasures of humankind to protect and maintain as we go digital for the generations that follow.

And we need to defend our sense of human agency by thinking about the umbilical connection we now have with code, asking questions about it consciously with the curiosity of children and making decisions about it collectively with the wisdom of elders.

This may be one of the most important acts of agency we ever undertake.

 

 

Published August 21, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 2.0 Web porous and digitally umbilical | , , , , , | No comment

12.1 Operating system or ecosystem?

On July 10, 1990 in Washington D.C., the Electronic Frontier Foundation, led by Mitch Kapoor and J.P.Barlow published a Mission Statement for the new world of code; the place known, back then, as cyberspace.

This statement said, ‘Over the last 50 years, the people of the developed world have begun to cross into a landscape unlike any which humanity has experienced before. It is a region without physical shape or form. It exists, like a standing wave, in the vast web of our electronic communication systems. It consists of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought itself.

It is familiar to most people as the “place” in which a long-distance telephone conversation takes place. But it is also the repository for all digital or electronically transferred information, and, as such, it is the venue for most of what is now commerce, industry, and broad-scale human interaction. William Gibson called this Platonic realm “Cyberspace,” a name which has some currency among its present inhabitants.

Whatever it is eventually called, it is the homeland of the Information Age, the place where the future is destined to dwell.’

From the earliest inception of the coded world, then, people have been talking about new domains and states of being.

In 1979, twenty or so years before that, James Lovelock was writing about Gaia theory. At the time, it was a revolutionary way of thinking about life on Earth.

Lovelock’s point, as we are beginning to understand through technology, was that we, and the world around us, are connected.

So is the same true in the Digital Era? Arguably even more so.

Lovelock was describing a one-world system. Today, the conversation about the rise of the robots, second machine ages, and the idea of a time when we will inexorably become one with code as part of a ‘singularity‘ puts the metaphors we use and the ideas of ecosystems and operating systems into sharp focus.

At their simplest, an ecosystem emphasises the organic. An operating system, or OS, emphasises the artificial.

We’ve been fixated about machines for a long time now. Ever since the first days of the flint and horse, it’s been obvious to us how vitally important machines and tools are. Boosting our capabilities, they are an indispensable part of what we can do. But the machines are not who we are inside, not yet anyway, and our ecosystem is one that stretches far beyond us.

Technology and machines are devoid of feeling and machines are becoming embedded into our lives in ways that objectify both ourselves and others, treating all content as digital objects. In doing so, we potentially lose a connection with the human spirit. When we can Google everything we lose, perhaps, a sense of wonder about the world around us.

Is Tinder a dating apocalypse? It’s too early to tell how essentially illogical and asynchronous feelings of compassion, bravery or falling in love will stack up as part of a nurturing human spirit in a digital world, or how a fearless or an instinctively fair human warrior spirit standing up for oppression might fare when running against the numbers.  It’s too early to tell if humans will be as irrelevant as cockroaches. What I think we have to think about and consider is the state of humankind we wish to see in the context of the big picture.

A new operating system for digital humans may be on our horizon, but it is nothing without a sense of how code will benefit our own ecosystems and an appreciation of the complexity of those systems, systems that have been up until this time beyond the reach of man.

The world as it is being programmed today, the connected, digital world, can provide the opportunity for a new kind of social fabric woven together out of a connected intention. This offers us a kind of co-operation that can be the fabric for an emergent civilization. As the Global Commission on Internet Governance highlights, we need some basic principles for good global governance.

So far, in their ‘The Internet is’ series of videos, GCIG commissioners have described the internet on film as ‘a technology that links the world together’, ‘infinity’, ‘a garden’, ‘a network of networks’, and ‘freedom’.

Deciding on how we will live in the future is a big deal, and we are just at the earliest stage of picking our metaphors.

Is the coded world going to be capable of cultivating the organic value of the planet or will our efforts be about reformatting it to suit today’s interests? We need to choose whether the coded world is ultimately here to cultivate organic value or to re-programme us.

This is a video from three years ago asking the question.

In the virtual world, mind over matter determines the outcome and the outcome is for all of us to decide. Let’s keep going with the conversation.

Published August 18, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 12.0 A new operating system | , , , , , | No comment

3.2 On fingerpointing

Steve Carrell disgust

Being digital brings us closer to others as we get more connected. Sometimes, that’s uncomfortable.

It seems we’re in a time of making judgments about what we identify with and what we disassociate ourselves from – what ‘is’ and what is ‘other’, that over there, not us, the things at which we do the finger pointing. Them.

Haley Morris-Cafiero’s work is a splendid illustration.

Haley Morris-Cafiero

This Independent article explains how ‘long before she caught them on camera, Haley Morris-Cafiero noticed them: the stares, the glances. Then, while working on a self-portrait series in Times Square in 2010, the photographer captured it by accident. A man looking at her seemingly in disgust’.

Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign supporting her work, she’s now created a book about it, ‘The Watchers’.

Connectivity can breed either intolerance or compassion. It’s a choice.

But it’s not just about us one-on-one. Walls are going up nationally. Reactionary politics is in vogue.

Code has created a one-world economy, shaking existing boundaries around the world at a time where there is a scarcity of resource and a growing accompanying fear.

The fingerpointing reaction is an existentialist one. A reaction to the slightly rancid realization that as we get more connected, things become blurred; and with fewer resources to go around, that gets scary.

Substitute Daily Mail comments for Nazi propaganda and the full extent of human vitriol at that prospect is unleashed. In 2015, we can’t even see the seam between historical crimes against humanity and the everyday asides people are making on social media.

Take a look at Donald Trump or Nigel Farage‘s ratings and you’ll see that someone, anyone, that can make it all go away is seen as an attractive option. Never mind that the methods are draconian. Walls are an old world solution to a very modern challenge.

In a connected world, it seems to me we have to come to terms with how code contains a hidden script: That it is the nature of connection that for every finger we point, three others in our hand are pointing back at us.

Without leadership that can understand this is fingerpointing and can rise above it, what we have is a very modern holocaust, a dispersed an economic kind of war, a disapora, and a fight to win by pitting humankind against itself in the face of a new world order.

There is no single, obvious ‘bad guy’ in the networked world, everything is much more dispersed and complicated. Yet, at the same time, there is unspeakable cruelty in this primitive group mind that is forming of ours, and it is making itself manifest.

The vulnerable are being left to fend for themselves. They are being ostracised, excised out of the future network. The lifeboat of sustainable digital economics is perceived as only having room for so many. The language of persecution, thick in the digital airwaves, is a symptom of how we are wrestling with the dilemma of ‘is’ and ‘other’.

We have the swarm, the marauders, the scroungers, the races, genders and demographic groups that can be picked upon and marginalised to make things easier.

Today, we are all the bad guy and the good guy.

Trying to make sense of where interconnectivity might take us, we can all be intolerant, or we can all be more compassionate, if we understand this and want to be.

It is time to come to terms with the science of disgust and for us to evolve beyond a destructive, binary, human ambivalence.

Paradoxically, code is how we can find the best answers to the dilemma. It is the logic that can soothe the emotional terror of change we don’t yet fully understand.

 

 

View story at Medium.com

 

 

View story at Medium.com

View story at Medium.com

Published August 11, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 3.0 'Is' and 'other' | , , , | No comment

2.2 On digital intimacy

 

Tim Cook has said he would like Apple technology to ‘connect with us intimately’. That’s the relationship Apple wants to have with its customers. Steve Jobs’ original mantra of being ‘user-friendly’ has got more cozy. Apple are one of the biggest generators of code on the planet.

Intimacy is a buzz. Today, you can expect your iWatch to vibrate on your wrist as a soft reminder of your next digitally delivered command. At the same time, the company itself remains secretive.

You could see this dynamic play out in the product launch of the iWatch, part of which involved downloaded an app for itself onto iPhone users. I experienced the launch, somewhat vicariously, by getting an app on my iPhone I didn’t want, and hadn’t asked for, with no clues about how to uninstall it.

Thoughtfulness is one kind of intimacy. When everything is ‘right there on your wrist’ or in your hand, auto-installing and auto-ordering in the name of convenience it can also be called invasive, something like the partner that’s decided you’re a couple and won’t let you break up.

Micahel Leunig cartoon

In the debate about the future of the digital human, the key question is where the boundaries are.

Boundaries between us and the digital, code-driven intimate relationships we now have with our devices now, suddenly, matter. Like, literally, they matter. These relationships are shaping who we are and what to connect to. They are becoming a part of us and having a say in our gene pool.

In less than two decades, the number of people using the internet around the world has rocketed, from 16 million in 1995 to to over 3 billion in August 2015.

50% of the planet is now connected to the internet. This rapid adoption shows how humans have latched onto it very eagerly. The main barriers  have been cost and lack of access, rather than any lack of willingness. As a result, the digital world’s now a porous and highly pervasive element of human life.

Human value can and is being capitalised by digital businesses that can fuse intimately into our lifestyles. Microsoft is investing in Uber right now at a valuation of $50 billion and the corporate valuations of digital businesses including Facebook ($235 billion), Google ($367 billion) Apple (in excess of $1 trillion) have come at least in part from pushing the human envelope around boundaries.

But we have yet to figure out where to draw the line on ease and convenience, if indeed we can.

In human psychology, a state of unhealthy, co-dependent attachments is known as enmeshment. Digital culture today is challenging conventional human ideas about what to tolerate.

When your fridge attacks, but you installed it, who or what is responsible for the outcome?

Published August 9, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 2.0 Web porous and digitally umbilical | No comment

1.26 The futuremakers


Metropolis

What would happen if we were to give up what we know?

If we were to walk away cherished traditions, could it enable us to become more of who we are?

Could we create a new, networked ecology that could sustain a digitally connected humanity?

The coded world makes connections. Rather than the ‘either/or’ conundrum about whether man or machine will dominate this next age, maybe we should think about how we can co-exist better with entities other than ourselves now that we are more connected. Is it too much to ask that we focus on developing better inter-relationships and find a higher ground for the human spirit using data?

We are futuremakers, living in an age when destiny doesn’t have to be entirely random, a world where everything can be made and measured.

We’re living in a time when the prospect of human fusion with machines is real and an age of singularity is drawing near, and we can learn from the patterns of history, from the long data, to figure out how to evolve best in the face of it.

Code provides us with a heightened form of intelligence. Used judiciously, it is a way to create a more conscious and collective understanding of ourselves as an appreciation of how near or far our intentions match up with our actions.

As neuroscience amasses enormous amounts of information about the optimal states of being for the human condition, coding means that our human needs and wants can become increasingly well met and manifested. What might be the outcome of the choices we make then be, with all that we have at our technological fingertips?

Whatever we manifest and choose to manage using technology, the outcomes that ensue as a result will depend on what we focus on, each of us, as the makers of our own digital footprints.

Code enhances the world based on how we place our collective attention as digital humans. Each of us gets to decide whether we will accept arguments made in the absence of good data or settle for the default settings technology sets up as part of their programs for us.

As digital humans, our resources are immense and abundant. A 21st Century enlightenment is on offer in the idea that as we become more technical we can also connect more deeply with our essential selves. We can use technology to answer our soulful cries, and satisfy the aspirations we have to be the best that we can be.

The paradox of the binary Digital age is technology opens up ways we can connect to and understand more fully what it is to be human. The Digital Era’s promise is that smarter sensors can enable us to identify, understand and meet those needs more accurately – needs that include the requirement for food, shelter, purpose identity, security, love and sustainability. The curse of code is the tyranny of data and data alone, without a heightened collective wisdom and quest towards better, and more meaningful life from it.

Our connected world is easier to access than ever before. The Digital Era means we can conscientiously develop the potential that each of us have, as unique identifiers on the web, learning from the best of what’s around us. It multiplies the opportunity and ability humanity has to make itself and the world around it better using data.

This point in human history is one of a great change. It’s a tremendous time to look at where we’ve come from and where we might be going.

We can ask questions about what our identity as humans is, and what we might choose it to be, using code, and we can think about what we do next, as we go past the first spurts of digital growth into a more mindful technical development.

Our finale?

The Director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, has said he believes the advance of technology has already overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t we be taking stock of humanity, and how do we do it?

There are 24 hours to world time, wherever you happen to be on the planet. The basis for scientific time is a continuous count of seconds based on atomic clocks around the world, known as the International Atomic Time. Time is a universal unit of measurement.

The meter is another universal unit of measurement. One length is based on 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. It took seven years to complete the measurement,as established on March 1791 by the Academie of Sciences by Pierre Mechant Jean-Baptise Delombre. The metre is a precise, organic universal measurement of life on earth.

The kilo is a universal measure of weight, based on the mass of one litre of water. These universal and unchanging measurements are how we define and measure matter, and they have established cornerstones of human existence. They are drawn from unwavering truths that come from natural, not synthetic, origins. Interestingly they were all developed after revolution, as a response to it, a means of helping to define a new order.

For ourselves, we’ve yet to create a universal measure for humanity. After code has revolutionised the world and taken over might not be the best time to do it.

How might we identify and nurture fundamental qualities and attributes of the human condition as we enter an age of data, ensuring that with the arrival of code we endure, we preserve our human sense today and code doesn’t end up eroding it? How can we have a relationship with code in which we can thrive as open-source individuals, not robots?

We owe it to ourselves to consider what our birthright is as humans before we cede it to the cloud; how we might protect human identity in the face of code.

‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme’ Mark Twain once said.

I think we can write better poetry using code together, and it starts with us.

Futuregazing 2

Published July 31, 2015 by Anne McCrossan | 1.0 The timeline | , , , , , | No comment

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