Google Glass and the problem of delineation…
Last week Google unveiled Project Glass, their augmented reality eyeglasses designed to help you “explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” Here’s the demo video:
Now, there’s lots of things to say about this - for starters that it’s amazing technology; probably distracting; potentially dangerous; and that it’s likely to have the opposite effect than putting you ‘in the moment’.
However, I noticed something else in the video that I think might be a bigger issue for Google.
On SXSW and culture as therapy…
“Who could be against more communication and conversation, participation and collaboration, transparency and free speech? To question the spread of the web would be like being against dolphins, green space and trees and things that are self-evidently good. Yet many sensible and thoughtful people, not just Luddites and cultural conservatives, have grave reservations about the impact and implications of the web.” - Charles Leadbeater
In his 2008 book “We Think”, Charles Leadbeater wrote a chapter called For Better or for Worse in which he weighed the potential of the web to strengthen democracy, freedom and equality against the possibility that negative effects will overwhelm the gains leaving us worse off, less free, more controlled, more confused.
Much of my experience of the South by South West conference this year seemed like a safari through the jungles of those negative effects and the fears they generate.
SXSW 2012, redux…
Well, it’s two weeks now since Saul and I were at South by South West Interactive (how can that possibly be?!!) and it’s about time I took stock…
I’m going to break this initial post down into a few sections: what the basic experience was like; whether my plans for the conference panned out or not; and what sessions I actually went to. Then I’ll follow up with some more about what I actually learned while I was in Austin in another post…
Preparing myself for SXSW…
So, I’m off to South By South West Interactive, the biggest geek festival in the world. Seven days in Austin, Texas, by all accounts the hippest corner of the lone star state - I suspect Rick Santorum supporters will be thin on the ground at the ACC…
I’m currently sitting towards the rear of a Boeing 777 somewhere over West Virginia, roughly eight hours into a ten hour flight, and thinking about how i’m going to approach this week - not so much what sessions i’m going to go to, but what I want to get out of it all, and, as Amsterdam’s Picnic festival reminds visitors each year, what am I going to bring to it?
Of course, I haven’t only just started thinking about this, but now is a good opportunity to write down my thoughts so far. Also, I’ve spent some of the idle time on this flight, catching up with some recent TED talks and one of them in particular has caught my attention:
One Plus One Equals Three…
Yesterday I spent a wonderfully stimulating evening at the Royal Institution in London, listening to the well-known broadcaster, teacher and journalist James Burke give a lecture entitled 1+1=3. His was the second in a series of three events on innovation that have been guest-curated for the Institute by Aleks Krotoski around the theme of ’Connections’, and Burke is perhaps most famous for his three similarly titled and seminal documentary TV series from 1978, 1994 and 1997. In those programmes, he charted the causal chains of ideas and influences, people and inventions, across the breadth of human history.
On pizza cutters and Tim Harford’s ‘Adapt’…
Pizza cutters fill me with dread.
Not because they are sharp enough to slice through crispy thin-crust pizza even though they are usually just made of plastic, which, admittedly, I do find a bit weird. No, I’m fearful of them because it struck me a few years ago that they only have a single failure mode, and that failure mode is catastrophic.
Home alone with apophenia
My wife has taken our kids to visit the grandparents this week, while I, having to work, am left here on my own. It’s the first time I’ve spent so much time alone in the house in a very long time, certainly since our eldest was born nearly four years ago. And, although it’s gloriously quiet and my consciousness is able to settle over the whole house, I have been noticing that my daily information stream seems to want to remind me of my situation…
The Next Men..?
A long time ago I read a 1960s science fiction short story by Howard Fast called “The First Men”, in which a government project, under pressure of war, assembles gifted children from around the world and creates a radical learning environment isolated from their parents and native culture, in which they gradually develop super-human abilities and ultimately transcend our understanding of ‘human’. The core idea of the story - that our cognitive development is constrained by our cultural environments - has always stayed with me. Over the years I’ve come to hold the view that people’s inability to deal with and understand greater levels of complexity is more constrained by nurture than by nature (Dunbar’s number aside), but I’ve never really had a whole lot of evidence to support that view (and it never used to be relevant to my work).
Recently though I’ve seen some things that lend some extra weight to the idea: Research on cognitive ability and social factors in New Scientist; Robert Kegan’s book “Imunity to Change” in which he presents a bunch of research that shows that our cognitive development doesn’t need to stop at adulthood; and today I discovered an article by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American in which she presents research from cognitive therapy with autistic-spectrum kids that supports the same idea.
As well as her own research, Kuszewski refers to a 2008 research paper by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig called “Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory”, which showed that:
- Fluid intelligence is trainable.
- The training and subsequent gains are dose-dependent—meaning, the more you train, the more you gain.
- Anyone can increase their cognitive ability, no matter what your starting point is.
- The effect can be gained by training on tasks that don’t resemble the test questions.
(I especially love the last finding - that’s education gold in my book!)
So, I’m starting to think maybe it’s not all just liberal-minded wishful thinking on my part… :-)
