Wiring the Global Heart
Project: Polytopia

“I hear a very gentle sound… With your ear down to the ground…”

Talk of the global mind tends to look primarily at intellectual and cultural endeavors, digitized and uploaded to the cloud. In this conception the hyperconnectivity of humanity provides instant access to all the data we’ve thus far gathered and to all the content we’ve thus far generated. As culture digitizes our individual selves grow closer to one another, unbound by the restraints of locality and empowered by the technologies of connectivity, integrating towards some hypothetical merger or emergence of a global mind.

But this conception neglects the emotional body of humanity, arguably far stronger and more willful than our ideations. Beneath much of the mind lies a torrent of emotional content often deeply informing (or barely restrained by) the words released to share those nameless currents. While scientific method offers perhaps the apotheosis of restraint most of what we as humans engage in and communicate is driven by psychology, not intellect.

Witness the very foundation of modern civilization: the global economy. Our economics are radically mathematic and rigorously intellectualized. Most of us have only a basic understanding of how such an enormous interconnected system of numbers actually works, let alone the few capable of articulating the obscene calculus of it’s proactive management. Our markets of commerce are left to the banking and finance wizards whose trust must be infallible to secure their credibility in such an occulted domain upon which our very lives rest.

Yet it’s clear from current events that no one has more than a tenuous grasp of what this enormous nonlinear system is doing at the moment. It’s completely out of our hands and the world’s governing bodies are scrambling to make sense of it all in time to reel it back from the precipice of total catastrophe. They try bail-outs and capital injections and various other methods only to watch the markets plunge in a downward spiral of fear and panic. The machine of global commerce is gripped in depression, tossed in the great and swelling tides of human emotion.

By nature of their abstraction and the collective faith required to sustain them, the markets are more a construct of psychology than finance. Panic and fear become self-fulfilling as investors bail-out as fast as possible when the economic indicators falter. Fight-or-flight takes over and the human animal, who so abstracted the biological imperatives of food and shelter into hedge funds and credit-deferred swaps, is seized by adrenalin and sent running in fear. The sound of chambered bullets grows across the land, hunkering down for a long struggle.

These days I can feel it without even looking at the markets. The Fear grips my gut on mornings of great decline. We’re wiring up very quickly, so engaged by the miracle of communication and content, externalizing our minds for all to witness. We get lost in the news cycle and the blogosphere, and in all the deep and meaningless experiences stuffed into increasingly ineffective syntax. We’re wired to invention and distraction, dimly aware of the currents working their way through our evolution.

Underneath the global mind is the global heart, tremulous and open, more intent on externalizing the Soul than the Mind. We’re sharing our emotional bodies far more than we realize and it’s at times like these that the herd feels it. Danger is on the air. A great predator is rustling through the brush. The vibe is harshed and global. The very foundations of human behavior are shifting and rewriting themselves. This is no market correction. It is a civilization correction. The Great Work of our Age is underway, unifying Heart and Mind and all opposites, comfort and commodity be damned. If we can’t evolve willfully, then the system will evolve for us.

Hear the words of the Rastaman say:
“Babylon throne gone down, gone down.”

Mon, Nov 16, 2009  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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Cognition & Computation: Augmented Reality Meets Brain-Computer Interface
Project: Polytopia

With all the hype flying around Augmented Reality lately, it's easy to assume the nascent tech is just another flash-in-the-pan destined to burn out in a fury of marketing gimmickry & sensational posturing. Yet, it's informative to consider the drivers pushing this trend and to tease out the truly adaptive value percolating beneath the hype. As we survey the last 40 years of computation we see vast rooms of tube & tape mainframes consolidating into single stacks & dense supercomputers. These, in turn, rode manufacturing advances into smaller components and faster processors bringing computing to the desktop. In the last 10 years we've seen computation un-encumber from the location-bound desktop to powerful, free-roaming mobile platforms. These devices have allowed us to carry the advantages of instant communication, collaboration, and computation with us wherever we go. The trends in computation continue towards power, portability, and access.

Specific implementations aside, augmented reality in it's purest, most dilute form, is about drawing the experience of computation across the real world. It's about point-and-click access to the data shadows of everything in our environment. It's about realizing social networks, content markups, and digital remix culture as truly tangible layers of human behavior. Augmented reality represents another fundamentally adaptive technology to empower individuals & collectives with instant access to knowledge about the world in which we're embedded. It breaks open both the digital & mental box and dumps the contents out on the floor.

There is a fascinating convergence at play here that, at a glance, seems almost paradoxical. While the contents of our minds are moving beyond the digital containers we've used to such creative & collaborative advantage, out into the phenomenal world of things & critters, the physical hardware through which this expression is constructed & mediated is miniaturizing and moving closer & closer towards our physical bodies. DARPA is funding research to push AR beyond current device limitations, envisioning transparent HUDs, eye-trackers, speech recognition, and gestural interfaces that release soldiers from the physical dependencies of our current devices. Today's mobiles (and the limited AR tech built on them) compete directly with the other most adaptive human feature: our hands. Truly functional mobile comm/collab/comp must be hands-free... and this is the promise taking form in the emerging field of neurotechnology.

Nanomaterials, optogenetics, SPASERs, advanced robotics, neurocomputation, and artificial intelligence are merely a handful of the modalities shaping up to enable tighter integration between humans, machines, and the digital sphere. Advances in understanding the communication protocols and deep brain structures that mediate the human interface between our sensorium and the perceived world are presenting opportunities to capture & program our minds, to more accurately modulate the complexities of human emotion, creativity, trust, & cognition, and to build more expressive interfaces between mind and machine. Augmented reality is co-evolving with augmented physiology.

In it's current and most-visualized form, augmented reality is clunky and awkward, merely suggesting a future of seamless integration between computation & cognition. Yet the visions being painted by the pioneers are deeply compelling and illustrate a near-future of a more malleable world richly overlaid with information & interface. As AR begins to render more ubiquitously across the landscape, as more & more phones & objects become smart and connected, the requirements for advancing human-computer interface will create exceptional challenges & astonishing results. Indeed, imagine the interface elements of a fully-augmented and interactive merging between analog & digital, between mind & machine... How do you use your mind to "click" on an object? How will the object communicate & interact with you? How do you filter data & interactions out from simple social transactions? How do you obfuscate the layers of data rising off your activities & thoughts? And what are the challenges of having many different opt-in or opt-out realities running in parallel?

Humans have just crossed the threshold into the Information Age. The sheer speed of the uptake is mind-bending as our world is morphing everyday into the science fictional future we spent the last century dreaming of. We may not really need the latest advances in creative advertising (similarly driven to get closer and closer to us) but it's inarguable that both humans & the planetary ecology would benefit from a glance at a stream that instantly reveals a profile of the pollutants contained within, tagged by call-outs showing the top ten contributing upstream sources and the profiles of their CEOs - with email, Facebook, Twitter, and newsburst links at the ready. Examples and opportunities abound, perhaps best left to the authors and innovators of the future to sort out in a flurry of sensemods, augs, and biosims.

There are, of course, many challenges and unforeseen contingencies. The rapid re-wiring of the fundamental interface that such "capably murderous" creatures as us have with the natural world, and the attendant blurring of the lines between real & fabricated, should give pause to the most fevered anticipatory optimists. In a very near future, perhaps 10 or 15 years ahead, amidst an age of inconceivable change, we'll have broken open the box, painted the walls with our minds, and wired the species and the planet to instantaneous collaboration and expression, with massively constructive and destructive tools at our fingertips. What dreams and nightmares may be realized when the apes attain such godhood? When technology evolves at a lightning pace, yet the human psyche remains at best adolescent, will we pull it off without going nuclear? Will the adaptive expressions of our age save us in time? I think they will, if we design them right and fairly acknowledge the deeply biological drivers working through the technologies we extrude.


[Acknowledgements: Tish Shute & Ugo Trade; Zack Lynch and his book The Neuro Revolution; conversations with fellow researchers at IFTF; and many others listed in the Signtific Lab tag for ProgrammableEverything.]

Mon, Aug 24, 2009  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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