Filed under: human, media, politics, technology | Tags: ethics, facial recognition, google, memex, memory, mylifebits, politics, radiolab, slate, technology review
The MIT technology review has posted this article about the new wave of facial recognition software, which, as they succinctly state, is cool but creepy.
In their attempt to make index all information and make it universally available, Google has made another jump: they can now recognize your face in pictures. This brings up a whole new debate regarding the ethics of photography: it is not only the famous who will have to deal with their likeness being used without their explicit permission. Google, while you are tagging photos using their Picassa software, asks you for the real names and email addresses of those in your photographs. This database, as the article points out, is not stored on your computer, but on Google’s servers. Read–this is the same place they store your search history, your documents, which news stories you read, etc… Google may, in fact, someday soon have a nearly comprehensive database of each of us who use Google with photos, email addresses, addresses, pictures of your house (their map software’s “street level” option).
Now, I do not mean to be alarmist, but in light of the serious discussion that attended the birth of the camera and the ongoing discussion of the ethics of photography, should there not be more attention paid to this company that is not-so-quietly indexing our lives? This is no new idea, the indexing of our lives, but whereas it was originally posited as an option by people such as Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project (which creates a searchable database of everything he has ever seen, read, heard, etc…), this indexing is being placed on us from the outside, by our friends who may not be aware that they are indexing our faces, names, and addresses for Google. We all use Google and find it incredibly helpful, but this just seems ridiculous that this is passing over in a relatively uncontested manner.
As for the relationship of this tagging and indexing to human memory: I remember a radiolab (fantastic radio show, by the way) episode in which they discuss the scientific discovery of the physical mechanism used by the brain to store memories. The first step after this was to figure out how to erase them. So, they discuss erasing the memories of soldiers with PTSD–an encouraging idea. It also includes a discussion of the way that a memory is a recreation of your brain-state during the original event. When will we start using free Google software to index our memories? As opposed to Gordon Bell’s project, in which everything is stored on one’s own computer, we will be storing it on Google’s servers. The novelty of it will probably convince us to use it, and likely with little caution: we will use it to remember what we were supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but it will also remember things we may not want it to, like time spent privately with a loved one. Or maybe we do want it to remember that.
In a less ethical and more personal domain: do we really want everything remembered for us this way? Though the nuances of memory can often be frustrating, it is important to remember that to recall a memory is, in a way, to recreate the event. The recalling of a memory actually changes the memory each time it is recalled. I honestly wonder if the undiscriminating indexing of the events of our lives would be detrimental to the processes and mechanisms of our memories, of our own self-creation, of the fictionalizing of the self, for better or worse. Call it the literature of the memory: without it we would have no Proust, Nabokov, etc. etc. etc. etc. Though, it could be argued that there is a part of this mechanism that would escape indexing, I think the remainder in this equation is hardly enough to justify the subtraction of the powers and poetry of our own memories. Maybe I’m a neo-luddite, but I doubt it.
As a result of all these issues, and following the debacle exceedingly well laid out in this Slate Magazine discussion blog regarding Facebook’s “Terms of Use,” (which are not really terms of use), the not-so-distant discussion of the near-impossibility of deleting a Facebook account and your information from its server, and recent controversy surrounding internet-announced (and sometimes carried out) suicides, I think that these are ethical issues that deserve quite a bit more legal, philosophical, and political attention.
I wonder what happens when not only does The Memex nearly become a reality in terms of a consumer product, but also our likenesses and information are stored by a giant American Corporation (we already see just how little accountability American corporations have). What is to stop Google from selling this information without our knowledge? This is quite a bit of political and social power they are storing on their servers, and it seems their ability to index will only grow.
What part of our lives do we want to keep for ourselves? It will only get easier from here on in to index everything about ourselves. Will it someday be seen as daring and/or backwards to refuse the assistance of the internet and computer databases in indexing our lives? Is it daring or backwards to keep yourself to yourself?
Where is our sense of caution? Has it been overwhelmed by our magpie-like fascination with shiny objects and new technologies? Who do we want to be in relation to this new technology? I would like to call for a more stringent system of ethics in response to these developments. The prospects are too terrifying if we fail to act.
Again, the Onion is strangely prescient on this point.
Filed under: biology, human, technology | Tags: dawkins, mcluhan, slate, technology
Slate Magazine has done what maybe some of us wished we could have done – tracked down some real information about that “25 Random Things About Me” meme. It makes for an interesting study in the nature of internet memes, since this one is slightly more trackable than most by nature of the way that the Facebook notes. What interests me the most is the framework used to examine this meme: biology. Important side note from the article: the term “meme” was evidently coined by the world’s favorite petulant child, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who is infinitely more tolerable when he is focusing on evolutionary biology than throwing a hissy fit about religion.
Slate funneled the data gathered through a system meant to model infectious diseases, attempting to discover the “patient zero” of this “epidemic.” They treat the “25 random things” phenomenon as both an organism and as a virus.
This is not new, exactly. Memes have been described as “viral” for about as long as I can remember memes. The important issue at play here is the meme as an evolving organism, not the meme as a thing that spreads. Now, we begin to discuss the robustness of the meme, the ways in which a meme mutates in order to fall on the happy side of the long odds of their survival. This discussion of Facebook memes is an examination of a techno-biological microsystem.
Which reminds me of another thing (I won’t call it a “meme”) you begin to see a lot: articles about technology and biology. This is actually why I started to study new media: the discussion of technology and biology (or, to put it simplistically, nature) seems to suffuse a great number of publications. We see this evidenced in articles about designer drugs, designer babies, biopolitics, bioethics, social networking, etc. We’ve been on this track for a while, since we really started to consider media post-printing-press. After all, McCluhan famously titled a book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and cybernetics, quantum physics, and poststructuralism have all but fully broken down the barrier between who we are and what we create by implicating the observer in every system.
Technology, you could say, has always been in the process of getting out of hand.
It each day seems less and less like something we have created and more like just another part of an open, dynamic system (call that system “nature” if you’d like). We attempt to leverage the system, but then our lever also needs to mutate and evolve to survive the long odds of retaining its usefulness as such a lever. It seems that what we create to help us get away from nature starts to show emergent properties, to get away from us, to show organic, emergent, dynamic, unpredictable behaviors. It simply refuses to stay put, and so we finally, belatedly, learn that our lever, technology, isn’t quite a lever separating man from his world but really just another part of that world we pretended to separate ourselves from.
Technology, assumed once to be the absolute opposite of nature and the apotheosis of “culture,” is really just a part of nature again, though admittedly an interesting and multifaceted one. It is tempting, but it would possibly be a mistake to say that technology is becoming a new nature as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and our ability to manufacture becomes more and more complicated, that being surrounded and “infiltrated” by technology will usher in a new state of nature. Technology always was nature, just as everything is. It’s not going to change, really, but it just might become more and more obvious to us.
I’ve often considered the relationship of consumption to empathy. I have always been particularly fascinated by birds and reading an article about the ortolan has led me to a few questions.
The ortolan, a songbird and classic (though now illegal) French delicacy, reaches something of a poetic end. To prepare ortolan correctly, you pluck out their tiny eyes out with a tiny set of tweezers, leaving the bird alive. Next, you feed the bird until it balloons to twice it’s original size. Last, you drown it in cognac just before you roast it. (more…)
Filed under: book, human, technology | Tags: cyberpunk, ghosts, neuromancer, william gibson
Neuromancer is one of the few books I can think of that manages to blend such a wide variety of styles and themes together so successfully. Drawing on or recalling anything from Blade Runner to the dirty underbelly noir of Raymond Chandler. Frankly, the book is kind of haunting.
Gibson is entirely graceful about the way he pieces his work together, but I found it particularly impressive the way he manages to balance the technology and the humanity in the novel. This does not mean that there is not an obvious fascination with technology, but he does avoid writing a fetish piece for the electronic, or a techno-porn. This is also not to say that there aren’t some seriously pyschosexually charged bits, but that his explorations of technology and humanity never feel cheap.
There are some especially gorgeous and lonely scenes that touch on the inter-relationship of death and technology, or the way that far from only redefining our waking lives, the technology we create begins to redefine their context, being our birth and death. So it seems that Neuromancer is becoming especially salient now that we are gaining control over the engineering of our next generation, and even more so since we are now at some risk of prolonging a semblance of self-aware life indefinitely.
He explores in a very evocative manner the way we have begun to haunt our own technology. The dead in the story live on in simulation and when we meet these characters, we are forced to ask how they are any different to us (or more importantly, themselves) than they used to be. This elegantly gets to the center of a very important issue regarding where the human ends and the technological begins. This serves the narrative, as well, as one of the greatest reasons Gibsons writing resonates with such depth is because he writes people’s ghosts into his machines, which makes a pretty powerful statement about technology all by itself.
Basically, Neuromancer has probably started to read less like a brave new world in science fiction and more like a simple, not so outlandish anymore suggestion of where we might be headed. When the imaginations of our most gifted writers are hardly (if any) stranger than what we are actually capable of, we have officially reached a strange new epoch.
I have always had a special place in my heart for Vladimir Nabokov. The man was smarter than anyone had the right to be: he grew up speaking Russian, French, and English (though he grew up in St. Petersburg, Russian was the last language he learned to speak), he had nearly perfect recall and whats more, he was synaesthetic, a condition in which otherwise normal people experience the blending of two or more senses. Other notable synaesthetes include: Duke Ellington (who blended timbre and color), Thom Yorke (music, color), Richard Feynman (colored alphabet), and well, John Mayer. Nabokov’s synaesthesia is not unique, as it is not uncommon for a synaesthete to see letters in color. What makes his gift unique is its coupling with his incredible command of the English language (a command that he has actually called “second-rate”). He calls his gift the gift of “colored hearing”. In describing his alphabet, he states that:
“Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k.” (From his autobiography Speak, Memory)
The picture above is taken from the book Alphabet in Color put out by Gingko press and illustrated by Jean Holabird. (more…)
