Roboethics: Are we ready to debate this?

Humanist just had an intriguing post about The First International Symposium on Roboethics. This is being hosted by the Home > Benvenuti” href=”http://www.scuoladirobotica.it/”>Scuola di Robotica (School of Robotics) in Genoa which describes itself as a “CyberSchool. I wouldn’t have thought robotics and ethics were mature enough as an area for a symposium, but the section on the site on Roboethics Debate changed my mind. Since Kurzweil published The Age of Spritual Machines the debate has shifted from science fiction circles (Azimov’s 3 + 1 rules) to academic circles.

I should note that the Debate section of the Roboethics site, while interesting, has some inaccuracies. I don’t think Ray Kurzweil was “one of the develop of the Java programming language”. That would be Bill Joy.

Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic

The Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic by John Puterbaugh, is a short “preliminary investigation into memory and its role in technologies used to reproduce sound.” It has one of the best short descriptions of transcription, inscription and acoustic technologies. The investigation leads to the interesting idea of how neural nets might be explored as a form of associative memory device for recording sound which would be closer to how we remember acoustic events than how a CD is a memory of an event.

Would we want recordings that were associative rather than “soley indexical”? Would we want memory technologies that were interpretative rather than literal? I’m not sure I know what that would mean except that it would be the difference between depending on my memory as a record of information (lets say of a conversation) and a transcription to a text file.

How would one use a computer that used associative memory? Imagine calling up a paper and finding it subtly different at each recall the way your partner’s memory of a conversation drifts differently than yours.

Sterne: The Audible Past

When was the modern listener turned? Johathan Sterne in his book The Audible Past introduces an image of the Ear Phonoautograph developed by Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake in 1874 as an emblem of the shift from voice automata to tympanic technologies. The ear phonoautograph used an actual ear attached to a stylus to trace sound – it illustrates the shift from technologies that tried to reproduce voice to technologies based on the ear, in this case literally.

Automata priviledged speech and the human voice; they took particular instances of sound production and attempted to re-create them. Tympanic machines treated hearing and sound as general problems and were oriented toward the human ear. (p. 71)

Sterne goes on to write about how audile technologies like the stethoscope and telegraph led to the development of the disciplined and professional listener (doctor and telegraph operator.)
Continue reading Sterne: The Audible Past

Digital Ethnography: Know Ourselves

How can digital communication tools extend research? Digital Ethnography is a catchy idea for doing cheap ethnography where rather than embedding the researcher into the community, the participants use digital cameras, cell phones, and the web to document and send in their impressions. The idea, as described by Davis Masten and Tim Plowman of Cheskin
Strategic Consulting and Market Research, seems half fulfilled. The real potential of digital communication is for communities to understand themselves through ethnography. Suppose volunteers in a community documents facets of their experience AND interpreted it together?

TPM Online: Battleground God

god.jpgIs a belief in God rationally consistent? Battleground God by TPM (The Philosopher’s Magazine) is a set of (presumably) branching questions designed to test how consistent your belief in God is. I got caught in a contradiction around justifying belief based on inner conviction (how can inner conviction be a source of belief if madmen are so convinced) which demonstrates how such a hypertext can be thought provoking and annoying.

What is strange about the “battleground” is the that contradiction is represented as “health.” Since when is consistency healthy?

Alltogether a good example of interactivity for philosophy, something rare indeed.

Brenda Laurel: Design Research

Can research inform creativity? On Thursday I went to a talk by Brenda Laurel on Design Research. Some of what she says about design research is covered in the online paper, New Players, New Games. What I liked is the humanism and idealism of her approach, both for teaching and research/creation. “Market research tells you how to sell something. Design research shows you what to make” in the first place.
Continue reading Brenda Laurel: Design Research

Greg Crane: What Do You Do with a Million Books?

What Do You Do with a Million Books?, by Gregory Crane talks about the implications of large-scale book scanning projects like the Google Print project that is scanning tens of millions of books. He introduces an interesting term, “recombinant documents”, to describe how software (like what they have at Perseus) can add intelligent connections to documents, but also the way documents can be reorganized and combined into “concordances” or hybrid documents. This is similar, I think, to what Mark Olsen was talking about in Toward meaningful computing. Crane’s answer, drawn from the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) project is three core functions:

  1. Analog to text (digitizing speech and print)
  2. Machine translation (from language to language)
  3. Information extraction (mining for linkable dates, names and so on)

Thanks to Mark Olsen for this link.

Podcasting Conversations: Doug Kaye

Ubiquity has an interview with Doug Kaye about, among other things, The Conversations Network, a non-profit online audio publisher. Here is a quote from the interview on content in universities,

the university situation is fascinating because most universities already have a program to record lectures. They may not be recording classwork per se, because in some cases the class work is proprietary, and they don’t want to let it out without a fee. But in any case there is a lot of stuff that is being recorded that these universities seem to be putting into vaults. They have no distribution plan.

Some universities, like Stanford, now have podcasting strategies, but the deeper problem is that lectures make boring podcasts. There is archival value in them, but they are rarely edited to be easy to listen to and are often detached from their context and slides.

Kaye has a blog called Blogarithms. This is from Humanist.

Mark Olsen: Toward meaningful computing

Mark Olsen and Shlomo Argamon have just published a viewpoint in the Communications of the ACM titled, “Toward meaningful computing” that argues, (among other things)

Current initiatives by Google, Yahoo, and a consortium of European research institutions to digitize the holdings of major research libraries worldwide promise to make the world’s knowledge accessible as never before. Yet in order to completely realize this promise, computer scientists must still develop systems that deal effectively with meaning, not just with data and information. This grand research and development challenge motivates our call here to improve collaboration between computer scientists and scholars in the humanities.

They set an ambitious, but I think, doable agenda for us.