Archive

Towards an Artificial Brain

The goal of MICrONS is three­fold. One is they asked us to go and mea­sure the activ­i­ty in a liv­ing brain while an ani­mal actu­al­ly learns to do some­thing, and watch how that activ­i­ty changes. Two, to take that brain out and map exhaus­tive­ly the wiring dia­gram” of every neu­ron con­nect­ing to every oth­er neu­ron in that ani­mal’s brain in the par­tic­u­lar region. And then third, to use those two pieces of infor­ma­tion to build bet­ter machine learn­ing. So let it nev­er be said that IARPA is unambitious.

Humans as Software Extensions

What is this con­di­tion? I would sum­ma­rize it as peo­ple extend­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems by offer­ing their bod­ies, their sens­es, and their cog­ni­tion. And specif­i­cal­ly, bod­ies and minds that can be eas­i­ly plugged in and lat­er eas­i­ly be dis­card­ed. So bod­ies and minds algo­rith­mi­cal­ly man­aged and under the per­ma­nent pres­sure of con­stant avail­abil­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and per­pet­u­al self-optimization. 

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

So here’s what hap­pened. If you tell peo­ple you’re going to have this super-open, absolute­ly non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to sur­vive in this envi­ron­ment that’s based on mon­ey, where it has to make mon­ey, how does any­body square that cir­cle? How does any­body do any­thing? And so com­pa­nies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a cor­ner. There was exact­ly one busi­ness plan avail­able to them, which was advertising.

I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production

Let’s ask a very sim­ple ques­tion. Why are there so many art projects today? Because we live in the world of mass art pro­duc­tion. Basically every­one is an artist nowa­days. Or at least he or she has an artis­tic project. We can speak of a surge in the cre­ation of art. The pro­duc­tion of art is proliferating.