I have, for years, tried to expand my biological brain through the use of exo-brains: notebooks, diaries, tape recordings and all of the cultural tools that civilization has provided. Our culture, libraries, civilization, other people, newspapers, television, radio, hand calculators, community and national efforts are all types of exo-brains. But the radical leap forward came with the invention of the personal computer and the hyperlink. That freed us up to carry enormous amounts of otherwise uneasily retrievable information with us. As it progressed to the laptop, the tablet, and eventually the cell phone, almost the entire body of human knowledge could be held in the pocket of a pair of pants. And increasingly, artificial parts, including artificial intelligence, are not simple add-ons. Just as you literally are what you eat, you also are the tools you use. Exo-brains still carry the stigma of unnaturalness. We treat them the way artificial arms were traditionally treated. But as prosthetics increasingly acquire the ability to directly interface with the brain that lack of agency and lack of a sense of ownership will diminish. But, not immediately, Just as we view athletes on steroids as somehow illegitimate and students doing math problems using hand held calculators as somehow cheating, we -- even our traditional stores of knowledge, the universities -- look upon resources like Wikipedia not as a starting point for investigation and learning; but as an unreliable and tainted source of information. Thats because they dont control it. It doesnt carry an official brand name like Harvard or World-book. Even worse to academics is the fact that it is free; and so is available to the riffraff as well as highbrows, middlebrows and even qualified lowbrows. For now, at least, the internet and its virtual world continue to treat the words intellectual and property the way chemistry treats the words oil and water. Information is meant to be free. Only the fascists and propertied corporations think otherwise. Increasingly, and at an ever accelerating pace, we are becoming one big brain, mutually accessible by all of us. This convergence of knowledge will be no respecter of accumulated property and wealth. In the past few thousand years of recorded history, information and knowledge has been seen as a commodity to be hoarded and used against one another. Now it is becoming (hopefully) a resource, to be shared through geomutualism. It is as if academia were to transform itself from a bank into a credit union. If traditional institutions of learning are to survive at all, they had better make that change. ...bz
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 22:28:16 +0000
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