“We live in a time where everything or everyone can be upgraded or ‘pimped’. After the worldwide acceptance of plastic surgery, it was time to subject our worldly possessions (Pimp my Ride) and digital identities (Facebook) to an esthetical and/or functional upgrade. So it’s likely that eventually everything will be pimp-able. Even our own planet.”
The PIMP MY PLANET video, created the good people of Studio Smack, explores the possibilities of redesigning our planet according to ideals or aesthetic values. It is the wet dream of every modernist – I bet Mondriaan would have liked this – and then you wake up and realize that maakbaarheid is never finished and with every attempt to cultivate nature, a next nature arises that is wild and unpredictable as ever.
Farming, industrialisation and more recently tourism, mobility (goods and people), production and therefore globalization have turned our planet into an artificial environment. Built up in a way, under a partially unplanned and iterative process.
Maybe more recently has it become more planned, through globalisation: production of this item into this country (due to low costs of goods and/or human workforce, "good political conditions", good knowledge, etc.), transportation here, selling there. Headquarters in this "low taxes" country, etc.
The problem is that this "planning" (called zoning) approach has failed in cities and landscapes in the late 60ies, revealed itself depleting (due to poor flexibility, diversity and variations) and that there are no reasons why it won't fail in the exact same way at the global level (in fact, it already starts to fail).
This means: we have to start "planning" our planet and come up with fresh theories and "earth architectures" for that! This approach might have to take into account (in disorder, non-exhaustive) weather and seasons, social aspects, technologies, cities, landscapes, architecture, resources, energy, food and goods production, sustainability, tourism, consumption, politics and economy, mobility, sustainability, birth control, satellites, (protection of) fauna and flora, information & communication, networks, physics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, etc.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, a remark made by Thomas J. Watson of IBM in 1943. But what if the number of computing devices connected to each other would reach the number of one trillion? A short animation.
I like the sentence "people in information" and not "information in the computers" which could become our future. Another way to speak about ubiquitous computing.
The shrinking size of electronics allows for the implantation of increasingly sophisticated electronic devices in the human body, paving the way for new prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces – think of the speculative phone tooth, conductive body paint or the brain-twitter interface. But so far a big challenge has been how to deliver power to electronic components embedded within the body.
While currently applied devices, such as cochlea or retinal implants, rely on inductive coupling, which means the power source needs to be centimeters away, engineers at Brown University have now developed an implantable neural sensing chip that is powered via a radio source that can be up to a meter away. The technology is similar to the equipment used to power and read information from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.
So far, the technology has only been tested to measure neural activity in moths, but of course “the real challenges and application potential emerge in work with primates.” says Arto Nurmikko, professor of engineering at Brown University. Another small step in the diminishing of the border between people and products.
Ever since Google pushed other search engines such as Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista out of the water, it has become the jumping off point for any question or query known to connected man, writes Camilla Grey. A quick peek at Google‘s Year End ‘Zeitgeist’ report reveals how much the connected world relies on the service for answers to common issues. And, as the iPhone marketing has recently asserted ‘…there’s an app for that’, insinuating that whatever you need to know, learn, work out, buy and find technology and the internet can help. Great.
But something strange is happening to my brain. Yes, Google helps me work out aspect ratio conversions. Yes, Google told me that Waitrose on Holloway Road opens at 8.30am. But, the other day, when I couldn’t find my favourite pair of earrings, my instinctive response, my first move in solving the problem was to think: ‘I’ll Google where my earrings are.’
So what does this mean? It’s all very well using the internet to solve problems we can’t figure out by ourselves, but the more we use it, the fewer problems we will be able to solve. Our brains, surely, will become less adept at things we’ve always taken for granted, such as remembering names, dates, locations, spellings and sums.
Sounds scary, but evolution is scary. One minute you’re all scuttling around on four legs, huddling in caves for warmth, the next thing you know, your neighbour up the road is towering over you on two legs, warming their hands against a fire and thinking about inventing the wheel.
We’ve taken remembering things for granted because, apart from books and such, we’ve had to. But maybe, as that becomes increasingly unnecessary, think of what we will be able to do with all that extra head space! With petty problem solving and useless memories not such an issue, other parts of our brains, such as our imaginations, can develop and get better. Ray Kurzweil’s vision for The University of Singularity is precisely to harness this opportunity. As they say, ‘With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business and government, SU hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges’. This kind of statement throws into question everything we thought about learning and academia. Even the notion of ‘knowledge’ becomes questionable and possibly irrelevant.
As a member of the generation that bridges the gap between those who grew up with the Internet and those who didn’t, the idea of Googling the location of my earrings feels unnerving. But what about the ankle-biters behind me? A colleague of mine recently watched his child attempt to work a TV using the touch action of an iPhone. The future is snapping at our heels and it’s going to be a case of change, adapt or die.
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"Free you brain, use Google"?
It's interesting because this "free head space capacity" left by the fact we don't need to remember things anymore reminds me of a conference by Michel Serres I heard a few years ago. He was saying exactly the same thing, comparing it to the time we started to use our hands for something else than to support our own weight on 4 feets. We gain an enormous potential through that single act: freeing our hands from their initial function to discover hundreds of new.
We are now freeing our brain from keeping memory of things. We can use this for something else. Make place now to imagination please!
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