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Tim OReilly Seminar Media

The Long Now Foundation 19/09/2012 21:34

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Birth of the Global Mind

Wednesday September 5, 02012 – San Francisco

 

Audio is up on the OReilly Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Video is up on the OReilly Seminar page for Members.

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The global mind is us, augmented – a summary by Stewart Brand

As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, OReilly was impressed by a book titled The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) OReilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century.

Global consciousness was a recurrent idea in the 1970s—from Teilhard de Chardins noosphere and Omega point (the Singularity of its day) to New Age mumbo-jumbo such as the Harmonic Convergence. OReilly noted that the term singularity for technology acceleration was first used in 1958 by John von Neumann. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled Human-computer Symbiosis. OReilly predicted that exploring the possibility space of human-computer symbiosis is one of the fascinating frontiers of the next decades and possibly century.

Echoing Dale Dougherty, he says the Web has become the leading platform for harnessing collective intelligence. Wikipedia is a virtual city. Connected smart phones have become our outboard brain. Through device automation, Apple has imbued retail clerks with superpowers in its stores. Watson, the AI that beat human champions at Jeopardy, is now being deployed to advise doctors in real time, having read ALL the scientific papers. YouTube has mastered the attention economy. Humanity has a shared memory in the cloud. Data scientists rule.

The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. Its us, connected and augmented.

What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Cultural Memories in the Digital World

The Long Now Foundation 19/09/2012 19:21

A book is much more than a collection of information. It is also a physical object, and this materiality plays an important role in shaping the way we relate to literature. Think of how the pages of your favorite story feel between your fingers, and the way its spine creases as you immerse yourself further and further in the plot. The weight of a thick novel reflects the depth of its story, an illustrated cover helps to seed your imagination, while the font in which the text is printed might convey a certain emotional tone. Perhaps you like to record your own thoughts in the white margins of a books pages; perhaps you prefer to leave those edges clean and allow the story to stand on its own. Either way, the materiality of a book shapes our relationship to its content; it becomes a physical souvenir of our engagement with a story.

So what happens, then, as our media and the culture they convey move increasingly into the digital world? How does the emergence of e-books change the way we experience a story?

These questions were the subject of a brief talk by publisher and technologist James Bridle, broadcast recently on BBC Radios Four Thought. Bridle suggests that the digitization and globalization of our cultural world not only transforms the nature of our cultural artifacts; it changes us, as well.

People are changed by these encounters with the network as much as our cultural objects are. Thats fundamentally important. Even though weve always been connected [to the world] in all these ways, the visibility of that connection that the network brings, is deeply strange. You can reach out across space, and you can reach out across time, as well; the network has this extraordinary flattening effect on time, so things that look distant are just as accessible to us as things that are near. And you can see this process happening in the ways that we write, in the ways that we read, and the things that its doing to the texts themselves.

Whereas it was the physicality of a book that brought its narrative to life in our experience, it is now the instantaneousness and interactivity of information that facilitate our connection to a story. But while this necessarily changes the way we engage with cultural artifacts, Bridle suggests that this need not entail a loss of value. Our collective cultural memory is not in the process of disappearing; it is simply being transformed embodied no longer by physical objects, but rather by the process of sharing.

Heavy Metal Watchmaking

The Long Now Foundation 13/09/2012 00:12

Hodinkee, an online magazine about wristwatches, has an interview with original Anthrax guitarist Dan Spitz. Why? Because he’s also a master watchmaker who studies and works with the best in the world.

As it turns out, he’s a big fan of timepieces that are built to last:

My favorite stuff to work on is older watches because of how they are made. These watches were way overbuilt so that they would never come back for repair. Just look at the mainplates They were built at a time before computers were checking everything. If youve been working on modern stuff all day, theres nothing like getting a vintage watch to work on, and when you open it up, you say Ahhhh, look at that, this rocks! Like an old muscle car, its so basic, so perfect, so overbuilt. It just rocks.

Library of Brewers Yeast

The Long Now Foundation 10/09/2012 19:15

What the seed vault in Svalbard does for the worlds plants, the Cara Technologys Research Laboratory in England does for yeast.

The Guardians Word of Mouth Blog recently published a feature on this labs large collection of brewers yeast strains, and its goal of making both classic and custom-made strains available to brewers everywhere.

Most of the worlds beer and wine are made with a single species of yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. But that one species comprises thousands of different families, each with their own characteristic traits much like the worlds population of Homo sapiens. Since long before Louis Pasteur discovered the actual science behind the magic of fermentation, brewers have been isolating and cultivating these different families to exploit their particular impact on the flavor and qualities of their brews.

Despite brewers notorious protectiveness of their yeast cultures, Cara Labs has managed to create a repository for these different families of saccharomyces. Theyve collected and preserved 850 strains, some dating back more than 100 years, and make them available to brewers everywhere. You can find the strains that give Belgian tripels their characteristically smooth and fruity flavor, or the yeast that was used to make German doppelbocks in the late 19^th century. And for those brewers who wish to create a style all their own, flavor technology consultants are on hand to assist in identifying the perfect strain of yeast. At Cara Labs, tradition meets innovation in the pursuit of timeless creativity:

Deep in the corridors of Cara Technologys research labs in Leatherhead, southern England, a handful of microbiologists and flavour technicians hold both the past and the future of beer drinking in their hands.

Tim OReilly Seminar Media

The Long Now Foundation 08/09/2012 18:18

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Birth of the Global Mind

Wednesday September 5, 02012 – San Francisco

 

Audio is up on the OReilly Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

*********************

The global mind is us, augmented – a summary by Stewart Brand

As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, OReilly was impressed by a book titled The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) OReilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century.

Global consciousness was a recurrent idea in the 1970s—from Teilhard de Chardins noosphere and Omega point (the Singularity of its day) to New Age mumbo-jumbo such as the Harmonic Convergence. OReilly noted that the term singularity for technology acceleration was first used in 1958 by John von Neumann. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled Human-computer Symbiosis. OReilly predicted that exploring the possibility space of human-computer symbiosis is one of the fascinating frontiers of the next decades and possibly century.

Echoing Dale Dougherty, he says the Web has become the leading platform for harnessing collective intelligence. Wikipedia is a virtual city. Connected smart phones have become our outboard brain. Through device automation, Apple has imbued retail clerks with superpowers in its stores. Watson, the AI that beat human champions at Jeopardy, is now being deployed to advise doctors in real time, having read ALL the scientific papers. YouTube has mastered the attention economy. Humanity has a shared memory in the cloud. Data scientists rule.

The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. Its us, connected and augmented.

What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Elaine Pagels Seminar Media

The Long Now Foundation 06/09/2012 19:38

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Truth About the Book of Revelations

Monday August 20, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Pagels Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Pagels Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

*********************

War in heaven – a summary by Stewart Brand

“The Book of Revelation is war literature,” Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.

In the nightmarish visions of Johns prophecy, Rome is Babylon, the embodiment of monstrous power and decadence. That power was expressed by Rome as religious. John would have seen in nearby Ephesus massive propaganda sculptures depicting the contemporary emperors as gods slaughtering female slaves identified as Romes subject nations. And so in the prophecy the ascending violence reaches a crescendo of war in heaven. Finally, summarized Pagels, “Jesus judges the whole world; and all who have worshipped other gods, committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire, while Gods faithful are invited to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends from heaven, where Christ and his people reign in triumph for 1000 years.”

Just one among the dozens of revelations of the time (Ezras, Zostrianos, Peters, a different Johns), the vision of John of Patmos became popular among the oppressed of Rome. Three centuries later, in 367CE, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria confirmed it as the concluding book in the Christian canon that became the New Testament.

As a tale of conflict where one side is wholly righteous and the other wholly evil, the Book of Revelation keeps being evoked century after century. Martin Luther declared the Pope to be the Whore of Babylon. Both sides of the American Civil War declared the opposing cause to be Bestial, though the North had the better music—”He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.” African-American slaves echoed Johns lament: “How long before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

But like many Christians through the years, Pagels wishes that Johns divisive vision had not become part of the Biblical canon. Among the better choices from that time, she quoted from the so-called “Secret Revelation of John”: “Jesus says to John, The souls of everyone will live in the pure light, because if you did not have Gods spirit, you could not even stand up.

“The other revelations are universal, instead of being about the saved versus the damned.”

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Epic Tea Time

The Long Now Foundation 06/09/2012 01:32

Alan Rickman in Portraits in Dramatic Time by David Michalek. Thanks to Laura for sending this in.  Most of our Long Shorts have been time lapses that speed time up, this is a good one on slowing it down…

The project featured an array of glacially paced performances of theater artists and actors all genres and nationalities. With artists featured both singly and in groups, the piece offered a unique and secret glimpse into some of the world’s greatest performing artists.  More at http://www.davidmichalek.net/

Scored by:
Music from Inception – Mind Heist

Created by:
David Michalek

 

Conversation with Laura Cunningham at The Brower Center

The Long Now Foundation 29/08/2012 20:06

The Long Now Foundation will be co-presenting a conversation with artist and naturalist Laura Cunningham on Wednesday, December 5th as part of her fall 02012 exhibit at the David Brower Centers Hazel Wolf Gallery. Cunninghams background in paleontology, wildlife biology and natural science illustration coalesce in her beautiful book A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, which depicts scenes of California ecology as they would have appeared centuries ago – what she calls Old California. She ventures even deeper into the past in some cases, such as in her painting 40,000 Years Ago on the Franciscan Valley, which portrays Pleistocene megafauna grazing the valley floor where the San Francisco Bay now sits.

In October 02011, Laura Cunningham presented the talk Ten Millennia of California Ecology as one of The Long Now Foundations Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summary of her presentation shares some of the insights provided by her work:

Only 300 years ago the whole Bay Area was grasslands, routinely burned by the local Indians. There were oaks in the valleys, redwoods in the Berkeley Hills, and extensive oak savannahs inland. The hills were greener more of the year than now, with fire-freshened grass attracting elk, and native perennial grasses drawing moisture with their deep roots.

To see this imagery beautifully illustrated, visit her exhibit or one of the related events this fall at the Brower Center in Berkeley:

Laura Cunningham: Before California

The David Brower Center
Hazel Wolf Gallery (Fourth Annual Art/Act Exhibition)
Exhibit dates: September 13 02012 – January 30, 02013

Events

• Opening Reception: Thursday, September 13. 5:30-8:00 pm
  • Artist talk from 6-7
  • Wine reception 7-8
• Field Sketch Class: Saturday, September 15, 1pm – 4pm
• Great Animal Orchestra: November 8, 6:30-9:00pm
• A Landscape Flux: Wednesday, December 5, 6:30-9:00 pm

Tim OReilly Seminar Primer

The Long Now Foundation 27/08/2012 20:04

“Birth of the Global Mind”

Wednesday September 5, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Tim OReilly is a prolific maker of sense. For countless hackers and programmers the world over, his publishing companys books have helped make sense of programming languages and web technologies. And more broadly, many of the applications and services built by those hackers have, in the last decade, brought about an unprecedented expansion of our very senses. A web user of today can possess awareness of people and events at a distance, to a depth, and with a quickness that was scarcely imaginable when OReilly Media was founded in 1978.

Our increasing ambient awareness of the inner and outer states of people all over the globe is the result of an important shift in the way web content is created. Viewing the web as a platform on which users can participate rather than simply consume was called Web 2.0, and OReilly was quick to support the skills, ideas and techniques that would enable web developers to embrace this perspective. Steven Levy hinted at why in 02005:

As it turns out, the levers and pulleys of this new Net neatly reflect the operating principles of the man who helped define it: a philosophy of participation and sharing and a sense that collective action will inevitably accrue to the greater good. The crucial technologies that make this happen – the digital infrastructure that makes the online world a perpetual swap meet of goods and ideas – are the culmination of all the stuff he’s been tracking, supporting, and popularizing for the past 20 years.

OReillys focus on the web as an enabling mechanism for social awareness and empowerment (and perhaps ultimately, a Global Mind) looks far into the future, but is also grounded in his interest in writings and thinking done thousands of years in the past. As an undergraduate, he studied Classics and retains an affinity for the lessons he learned from Socrates, Plutarch and others. In an interview about these lessons, OReilly credits them with helping him to spot the trends that have led to his success in business. But more than just spotting trends, he has described and refined them, molding glimmers of ideas into causes and campaigns taken up by large swaths of the digital world. This, too, he credits to his classical education:

In telling the same story over and over again in different ways, Im following in the footsteps of the Greek orator (alas, I forget his name) who said The difference between a man and a sheep is that a sheep just bleats, but a man keeps saying the same thing in different ways until he gets what he wants.) Look at a series of essays like Hardware, Software, and Infoware, The Open Source Paradigm Shift, and What is Web 2.0? and youll see me pursuing the same ideas, refining, clarifying, and advocating till I get what I want.

OReilly has taken to calling the trend hes been mulling over most recently – this interweaving collective oneness of our brains and programs – the Global Mind.

Like open source software and Web 2.0, the idea has been around since before Tim OReilly started discussing and promoting it. But as before, perhaps in his hands – after a few revisions, a few conversations, or a few lectures – the idea of the Global Mind will take the shape of something that can be evaluated, acted upon, and maybe even rallied around.

Tim OReilly makes sense of the emerging Global Mind on September 5th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

Paul Saffo on The Great Turbulence

The Long Now Foundation 24/08/2012 22:39

Forecaster and Long Now board member Paul Saffo will be speaking at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Thursday, September 6th about the next few decades of global economic trends.

The talk, entitled “The Great Turbulence: Economics and the New Global Order,” begins at 6pm and will be moderated by Matt Richtel, author of Our Brain on Computers. Check here for directions and ticketing information.

The 2008 crash was more than a downturn: It marked the end of the Great Moderation, a two-decade period of mild business cycles and growth. Now many fear we are headed toward a prolonged recession (or worse), while others predict a new boom just around the corner. Who’s right? Saffo, with over two decades of experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change, thinks that both groups miss the point. Rather, he foresees that we have entered a new era defined not by boom or bust, but by a new kind of volatility.