Edge can be read in the form of a Web publication or chronologically in the form of the emails sent bi-monthly (usually) to the third culture mail list (see Edge Editions). The emails are posted to the Edge Editions page in an easy-print form at the same time they are mailed to the list and linked from the home page. The features, posted on the home page in Web Publication form are archived on these pages.

W. Daniel Hillis [7.19.10], David Gelernter [7.7.10] • Neiman Reports [6.21.10] • Stewart Brand [6.18.10] • Steven Pinker [6.11.10] • Reality Club on Steven Pinker: Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, Evgeny Morozov • Emanuel Derman[5.27.10] • Reality Club on Venter Et Al: Freeman Dyson, Kevin Kelly, George Dyson, Antony Hegarty, Dimitar Sasselov, Daniel C. Dennett, Nassim N. Taleb, George Church, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Rodney Brooks • "Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome" By Venter Et Al [5.20.10] • A New Age of Wonder Retrospective: George Church, Drew Endy, J. Craig Venter, Kary Mullis, Svante Pääbo [5.20.10] • The Ash Cloud [4.26.10] • Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky [4.12.10] • Kary Mullis [3.19.10] • Third Culture Responses to Scott Atran: Jesse Dylan • Scott Atran [3/10/10 ] • David Gelernter • Daniel Kahneman • A New Age of Wonder: Edge Dinner 2010 [2.11.2010] • Charles Leadbeater [2.2.10] • Edge at DLD [1.24.10] • Edge Question 2010 [1.9.10]

THE HILLIS KNOWLEDGE WEB
An Idea Whose Time Has Come [7.19.10]

In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

W. Daniel ("Danny") Hillis

In May, 2004, Edge published W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis's essay "'Aristotle': The Knowledge Web" , in which he noted:

...humanity's accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.

In his essay, Hillis asked the Edge community to begin a conversation and a number of people who think deeply about such matters participated: Douglas Rushkoff, Marc D. Hauser, Stewart Brand, Jim O'Donnell, Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Seymour Papert, Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Kai Krause, ans Pamela McCorduck.

In 2005, George Dyson noted in his prescient essay Turing's Cathedral:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

In March, 2007, Hillis announced a new company called "Metaweb", and the free database, Freebase.com, and he wrote second Edge essay: "Addendum to 'Aristotle' (The Knowledge Web)." He wrote:

In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer.

Danny Hillis at SciFoo at the Googleplex, July 2007

On July 17th, buried in the news on a summer Friday afternoon, was the announcement that Google had acquired Metaweb.

It all began with the technological breakthroughs in the realm of massively parallel computers and their associated algorithms. Credit for this goes to Hillis who is primarily responsible for having broken through the von Neumann bottleneck of the serial computer.

At MIT in the late seventies, Hillis built his "connection machine," a computer that makes use of integrated circuits and, in its parallel operations, closely reflects the workings of the human mind. In 1983, he spun off a computer company called Thinking Machines, which built the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture.

Hillis's computers, which were fast enough to simulate the process of evolution itself, showed that programs of random instructions can, by competing, produce new generations of programs — an approach that led to the creation of his Knowledge Web. Hillis's work demonstrates that when systems are not engineered but instead allowed to evolve — to build themselves — then the resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simple entities working together produce some complex thing that transcends them; the implications for biology, engineering, and physics have been, and will increasingly be, enormous.

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett noted that with the idea of a massively parallel architecture, which would be capable of exploring a different part of the space of possible computations, Hillis opened up a vast area:

What the British mathematician Alan Turing did, with the concept of the Turing machine, was to provide a succinct definition of the entire space of all possible computations. The machine developed by John von Neumann was a mechanical realization of Turing's idea. A von Neumann machine is the computer on your desk — the standard serial computer. In principle, the von Neumann machine — which is, for all practical purposes, a universal Turing machine — can compute any computable function; but if you don't have a billion years to wait around, you can't actually explore interesting parts of that space. The actual space explorable by any one architecture is quite limited. It sends this vanishingly thin thread out into this huge multidimensional space. To explore other parts of that space, you have got to invent other kinds of architecture. Massive parallel architectures are everybody's first, second, and third choices.

What Danny did was to create if not the first then one of the first really practical, really massive, parallel computers. It precipitated a gold rush. We had a new exploration vehicle, which was looking at portions of design space that had never been looked at before. Danny was very good at selling that idea to people in different scientific fields and demonstrating, with some of the early applications, just how powerful and exciting this vehicle was.

Two years ago this month, Hillis instigated an interesting Edge Reality Club conversation cross-referenced with a discussion on the Encyclopedia Britannica website on Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (now expanded into Carr's book The Shallows). Hillis wrote:

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

As an optimist, I assume that we will eventually invent our way out of our peril, perhaps by building new technologies that make us smarter, or by building new societies that better fit our limitations. In the meantime, we will have to struggle. Herman Melville, as might be expected, put it better: "well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown."

We create tools and then we mold ourselves in their image. With The Hillis Knowledge Web he has proposed something new, something different. I can make a case that his "Aristotle" (The Knowledge Web) essay is the kind of seminal document, such as Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and MuCulloch et al's What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain that appears a few times in a century. But now, with the Google announcement, we will all find in Internet time, how his ideas play out in the real world.

("'Aristotle': The Knowledge Web"), the ensuing Reality Club conversation, and his 2007 "Addendum to 'Aristotle'", and have a conversation about where we are today regarding what I am taking the liberty of calling "The Hillis Knowledge Web".

— JB

For background reading on Hillis and his Knowledge Web, see:

• Part V: "Something Beyond Ourselves" in The Third Culture: Beyond The Cybernetic Revolution (1995)
• "The Genius" in Digerati: Encounters With The Cyber Elite (1996)

W. DANIEL (Danny) HILLIS is an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and intellectual He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 100 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. He is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock. ...

W. Daniel Hillis's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT
By David Gelernter

Will computers be able to think again? And what Sigmund Freud would have to do with cyberspace? Internet pioneer David Gelernter predicts the next stage of development of artificial intelligence.

This is the second in a series of essays by Gelernter commissioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The German translation was published on June 22nd ("Ein Geist aus Software").

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

David Gelernter's Edge Bio Page

FURTHER READING ON EDGE:
"Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously" By David Gelernter
"Cloud Culture: The Promise And The Threat" By Charles Leadbeater
Edge@DLD: "Informavore": David Gelernter, Andrian Kreye, Frank Schirrmacher, John Brockman
"The Age of the Informavore": A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
"Lord of the Cloud": John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter
"The Second Coming: A Manifesto" by David Gelernter
The Edge Annual Question 2010: "How Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think?"

[...]

A BIG QUESTION

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Last month I received an email from Melissa Ludtke, editor of Nieman Reports:

Writing to you as the editor of Nieman Reports, www.niemanreports.com, certainly not the most trendy Web site you've ever seen, but we hope one offering something of value, primarily I suspect for journalists, though a few others venture our way, too.

Heading toward our Summer 2010 issue — in the planning stage now, and so I'd welcome the chance to talk with you. Topic: your 2010 "big question" -- many of the answers to which I've read on your Web site — which draws a direct line to the core of what we are going to be exploring —-through the voices and experiences of journalists and others — in the Summer 2010 issue of our magazine, to be published in June.

The edition has been published, and my essay on the Edge Question, along with pieces by Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, Sherry Turkle, and Esther Wojcicki, are available at the link below in the Summer 2010 issue of Nieman Reports, a lively, timely, and interesting publication. — JB]

A BIG QUESTION: 'HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?'

Edge posed this question; discover how a wide range of thinkers responded.

By John Brockman

[Keep reading at Nieman Reports »]

AFTERWORD [6.18.10]
By Stewart Brand

And what you have here is only a sample of the time smear I'm attempting with the online version of the book at www.sbnotes.com, where the text (much of it) dwells in a living thicket of its origins and implications. Instead of static footnotes there are live links to my sources, including some better ones that turned up after the writing. You should be able to follow my quotes upstream to the articles and Google Books pages they come from. There you can conduct your own version of my research and perhaps draw different conclusions. I continue to add updates in the margins of the text, along with pages of photographs, diagrams, and videos, plus the kind of additions that usually go in an appendix. I'll try to maintain the service as long as it has traffic. Maybe all nonfiction books will soon offer such online immersive versions of their material.

Foreword to Afterword
By Kevin Kelly

Information wants to be free, but it doesn't want to be final. The merry superconductivity of a bit of information means that updates, corrections, additions, deletions, re-interpretations, misinterpretations, anti-information, and denials of that same bit quickly follow.

The blessings, and curse, of a printed paper book are that its words, once stamped in ink, are fixed. But the rest of our fast-forward lives, and the slippery digital universe we swim in, tear at that fixity and demand that books keep improving, just like our iPhones do. Can books be upgraded?

Many readers of Stewart Brand's recent book, Whole Earth Discipline, praise it for its heretical synthesis of "edgy" ideas on a wide range of frontiers. And that it is. But I found Brand's book far more interesting as case study on how one can use information to adopt a permanent, mindful stance of flexibility. On every vector within his book Brand traced how his thinking was changed by a steady stream of informational evidence. Sometimes he altered his position more than once. The thrill of the book was watching how a top-notch thinker kept upgrading his views.

Whole Earth Discipline was published in the autumn of 2009. Nine months later whole worlds of science have lurched forward, digital news accelerated, and "what we know" is now different. If information wants to change, shouldn't an author have different ideas from the now frozen book he previously wrote?

Someday keeping a text constantly fresh will become both routinely possible and a chore for all of us. While a few authors/publishers have created successfully eternal ebooks, Brand has written a marvelous Afterwood to his book which does several things. First, in great detail it updates the news he first reported. This update is so well written that it can be appreciated even if you have not read the original book. But more importantly, and most remarkably, Brand courageously indicates how this news has changed his mind since he wrote the book.

When the liquid containers of electronic texts demand that we revise them yet again, I hope we can use Stewart Brand's "Afterword" as an inspiration to not only upgrade our facts, but also upgrade our made-up minds.

— Kevin Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants


STEWART BRAND is cofounder and co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation. He is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, and cofounder of Global Business Network.

He is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, (Winner of the National Book Award). The Afterword is written for the paperback edition of latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, which will be published in September.

Stewart Brand's Edge Bio Page
Kevin Kelly's Edge Bio Page

May 2010 . . .

An afterword blurs a book in time. My final draft of April 2009 is here made unfinal.

And what you have here is only a sample of the time smear I'm attempting with the online version of the book at www.sbnotes.com, where the text (much of it) dwells in a living thicket of its origins and implications. Instead of static footnotes there are live links to my sources, including some better ones that turned up after the writing. You should be able to follow my quotes upstream to the articles and Google Books pages they come from. There you can conduct your own version of my research and perhaps draw different conclusions. I continue to add updates in the margins of the text, along with pages of photographs, diagrams, and videos, plus the kind of additions that usually go in an appendix. I'll try to maintain the service as long as it has traffic. Maybe all nonfiction books will soon offer such online immersive versions of their material.

What belongs in an afterword? I did promise in this book that I would change my mind as needed, and I can already report a couple of such veerings. Of course history that has moved on from what I described in 2009 should be indicated. And books have come along that expound some of my topics better than I; I wish I'd had them in hand before. ...

[...continue]

MIND OVER MASS MEDIA [6.11.10]
By Steven Pinker

New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. ...

...The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff

[...continue]

On "Mind Over Mass Media" By Steven Pinker

NICHOLAS CARR
Author, Does IT Matter?; The Big Switch; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Steven Pinker is too quick to dismiss people's concerns over the Internet's influence on their intellectual lives. He asserts that digitalmedia "are the only things that will keep us smart." But the evidence he offers to support the claim consists largely of opinions and anecdotes, plus one Woody Allen joke.

On neuroplasticity, Pinker expresses the skepticism characteristic of evolutionary psychology advocates. When faced with suggestions that "experience can change the brain," he writes, "cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes." But is his opinion really shared so universally? In the reports on the Net's cognitive effects published in the Times last week, scholars like Russell Poldrack, Clifford Nass, Nora Volkow, and Adam Gazzaley offered views that conflict with Pinker's. He may disagree with these views, but to pretend they don't exist is misleading. ...

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Life, Inc.

The main value in Pinker's statement is the implied notion that media technologies cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. Taken alone, neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook profile will diminish one's capacity to think or interact.

But nothing ever happens alone. These media are arising in contexts of business, economics, and other social factors. No one — or at least no one smart — is saying that PowerPoint reduces discourse to bullet points. What they are saying is that combined with the bias of the workplace for tangible metrics and easy slogans over long-term planning and complex solutions, the bias PowerPoint toward bullet points can exacerbate the worst existing tendencies in business. It turns out that PowerPoint is not the best tool for every purpose. ...

EVGENY MOROZOV
Commentator on Internet and politics "Net Effect" blog; Contributing editor, Foreign Policy

...Pinker, I fear, falls into the same conceptual trap as Carr, i.e. he sets to measure the Internet against the printing press, the comic book, and television. However, by viewing the Internet as just another medium, both Carr and Pinker end up significantly downplaying its importance.

But the Internet is not just another medium. Rather, it's a full-blown brand-new dimension to human affairs — and it is poised to profoundly affect all other dimensions. The proper analogy, thus, is not to the newspaper or the telegraph, but to religion and nationalism. However, just like one could not assess the overall impact of religion by looking at the rates of dissemination of religious literature, one cannot assess the impact of the Internet by looking at such a narrow slice of its impact as the consumption of information by its users (and Carr makes that slice even thinner by assuming that the Internet has a "logic" that is not malleable by the social, cultural, and economic environments in which it operates — an assumption I find rather dubious). Just like with religion or nationalism, there is absolutely no guarantee that the vector of social change unleashed by the Internet would be either positive or negative; most certainly, it will be both — so the sooner we find a way to diagnose and minimize its negative effects, the better. ...

...All in all, the debate between Carr and Pinker confirms my long-running suspicion that one can't grapple with the macro-level social implications of the Internet by operating on the micro-level of neuroscience or psychology. These disciplines do provide useful insights — but we need a brand-new Internet-centric social science to make sense of them.

[...continued]

BREAKING THE CYCLE [5.27.10]
A Conversation with Emanuel Derman

Watching that interrogation of the bankers at the Senate hearings, I had the feeling that this is the way karma works in the universe. Everybody is going to do something not quite right as they act out their destiny mechanically, doing what they unthinkingly believe they have to do. The Wall Street people are going to reflexively overshoot and be too greedy. The Senate people are going to reflexively grandstand and be too uninformed and try to rein them in. There isn't going to be an elegant solution to any of this.

Introduction

When The Reality Club (the forerunner of Edge) was launched in 1980, one of it's founding members was the late Heinz Pagels, a particle physicist at Rockefeller University and president of The New York Academy of Sciences.

It was around that time that Pagels began to talk about themes that revolved around "the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics and selective systems, the new understanding of chaos, experimental mathematics, the connectionist's ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing. ..."

He understood that the computer provided "a new window on that view of nature." This led to interesting insights into how the new sciences of complexity would impact global financial markets. He had the intuition that we were on the brink of a new epistemology that would transform the scientific enterprise and the way we think about knowledge.

Pagels was having similar conversations at Rockefeller during this period with Emanuel Derman, one of his fellow particle physicists who soon after left academia for a position at Bell Labs, and from there went on to spend 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he became managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies Group. It was Derman who brought the ideas floating around physics in the 70's and 80's to Wall Street, and in the process came to embody the word "quant."

Writing in the New York Times ("They Tried To Outsmart Wall Street" March 9, 2009) , Denis Overbye observed:

Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, and became managing director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and other scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving from a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent the other way can win you your own private Caribbean island.

They are known as "quants" because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.

Derman, Overbye noted, "fell in love with a corner of finance that dealt with stock options."

"Options theory is kind of deep in some way. It was very elegant; it had the quality of physics," Derman told him.

I recently sat down with Derman to ask about his thoughts on the financial crisis, the role played by Goldman and the other big banks, and what new questions we need to ask to get our heads around the big problems which, to some, seem intractable and unsolvable.

Concerning the last point, Pagels was on to something, when, in his 1988 book Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, he wrote:

Mathematicians and others are endeavoring to apply insights gleaned from the sciences of complexity to the seemingly intractable problem of understanding the world economy. I have a guess, however, that if this problem can be solved (and that is unlikely in the near future), then it will not be possible to use this knowledge to make money on financial markets. One can make money only if there is real risk based on actual uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no risk.

— John Brockman

EMANUEL DERMAN, a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs & Co, is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is the author of My Life As A Quant.

Emanuel Derman's Edge Bio page

[...continue]

"I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet." — Freeman Dyson

ON "CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME" BY VENTER ET AL"

Rodney Brooks, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, George Church, Nassim N. Taleb, Daniel C. Dennett, Dimitar Sasselov, Antony Hegarty, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson

Introduction

On May 20th, J. Craig Venter and his team at J.C Venter Institute announced the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome in a paper published in SCIENCE. As science historian George Dyson points out, "from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells."

This new development is all about operating on a large scale. "Reading the genetic code of a wide range of species," the paper says, "has increased exponentially from these early studies.  Our ability to rapidly digitize genomic information has increased by more than eight orders of magnitude over the past 25 years." This is a big scaling up in our technological abilities. Physicist Freeman Dyson, commenting on the paper, notes that "the sequencing and synthesizing of DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life." But it remains to be seen how it will serve in practice.

One question is whether or not a DNA sequence alone is enough to generate a living creature. One way of reading the paper suggests this doesn't seem to be the case because of the use of old microplasma cells into which the DNA was inserted — that this is not about "creating life" since the new life requires an existing living recipient cell. If this is the case, what is the chance of producing something de novo? The paper might appear to be about a somewhat banal technological feat. The new techniques build on existing capabilities. What else is being added, what is qualitatively new?

While it is correct to say that the individual cell was not created, a new line of cells (dare one say species?) was generated. This is new life that is self-propagating, i.e. "the cells with only the synthetic genome are self replicating and capable of logarithmic growth."

The paper concludes with the following:

If the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis, assembly, and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology.  We expect that the cost of DNA synthesis will follow what has happened with DNA sequencing and continue to exponentially decrease.  Lower synthesis costs combined with automation will enable broad applications for synthetic genomics.

Will the new techniques described in the paper allow us to bring extinct species back to life? Here are three examples of three possible stages after the production of a bacterial cell: 1. generating a human, i.e. a Neanderthal; 2. generating a woolly mammoth; 3. generating a tasmanian wolf.

Generating a Neanderthal, given the recent mapping of the Neanderthal genome by Svante Pääbo, seems to be feasible, but it will raise ethical hackles. Don't hold your breath waiting for someone to try it. Generating a woolly mammoth will not be an ethical problem but it also seems feasible by using an elephant's placenta: inject mammoth DNA into a modern elephant egg from which elephant DNA has been removed, then import the elephant egg into an elephant. A real challenge will be to generate a truly extinct species such as a Tasmanian wolf for which no host cells exist.

What does this mean? We don't know yet, and we may not know for years. For now, all we can do is speculate responsibly. As Freeman Dyson notes:

I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.

Life goes on.. but it won't be the same.

To provide context, we have put together a retrospective of Edge events, transcripts, and videos featuring the pioneers in this area who are among the key players in what we are calling "A New Age of Wonder" [click here]

The Edge Reality Club discussion on the paper, "Creation Of A Bacterial Cell Controlled By A Chemically Synthesized Genome," is below.

...

THE ASH CLOUD [4.26.10]

33 Contributors (to date): Haim Harari, Roger Schank, Charles Simonyi, Peter Schwartz, Stephen Schneider, Karl Sabbagh, Emanuel Derman, Mark Pagel, Joel Gold, George Dyson, Matthew Ritchie, Paul Romer, Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, Greg Paul, Lawrence Krauss, Alexandra Zukerman, J. Doyne Farmer, Martin Menzies, Ross Anderson, Richard Thaler, Delta Willis, James Croak, Gloria Origgi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Kahneman, Matt Ridley, John Tooby, Anton Zeilinger, Dave McKean, Thomas Metzinger, Alun Anderson, Eric Weinstein, James J. O'Donnell

Introduction

On Wednesday April 14th, on the way to London from JFK, the pilot announced a slight delay into Heathrow in order to avoid the ash cloud coming out of the Icelandic volcano eruption. This was the first time I paid any attention to the subject. That flight must have been one of the last to arrive in Heathrow before airspace was closed. That evening, British television was all over the first debate between the candidates in the national election. But I was glued to the news from Iceland. I had gone to London for the London International Book Fair, which was eerily deserted as nearly everyone except the British and French (who took the train) were unable to get there. The talk in London was about who was stranded in London, and out of London, and the heroics of certain individuals who had braved 20-odd hour trips cars, trains, and ferries to get to London from places like Munich, Rome, Umbria.

Tuesday night April 20th in London, I went to bed at midnight, having a confirmed reservation for a 10:30am return flight, but no idea if the airspace would open up in the morning. It did at 10am, and I was very fortunate to be on one of the first planes out Heathrow (only about 2/3 full) arriving at an empty JFK, which, until Wednesday had been a temporary home to hundreds of stranded travelers who slept on tiny cots, and took showers in two specially outfitted trucks outside. Even as of this writing, if you don't have a confirmed ticket to New York, the first available booking is in two weeks. It is very chaotic and it's not over.

Something is going on here that requires serious thinking. We've had earthquakes before, and we've had plane stoppages, but nothing like the continuing effects of the ash cloud.

Why?

I am reminded of the warning call by Freeman Dyson is his Edge feature "Heretical Thoughts About Science And Society" about the use of modeling with respect to global warming. What the ash cloud models apparently showed had little to do with reality, as there were few, if any, actual measurements. What do the psychologists have to say about the way the decision-makers have acted? What do the psychologists have to say about the way the decision-makers have acted? What have the behavioral economists learned from this? I am interested in hearing from the earth and atmospheric scientists, the aeronautical engineers, the physicists. What can science bring to the table?

Read on.

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor, Edge

[continue to An Edge Special Event: "The Ash Cloud"]

The dreams of network utopians vs. the realists. Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels? — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

AN EDGE SPECIAL EVENT!
PUBLISHED BY EDGE, FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG, LA STAMPA (forthcoming)

DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS [4.12.10]
Morozov & Shirky: An Edge Conversation

There is certainly a lot of excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones — about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually invalid today.
— Evgeny Morozov

The Burmese example of communications use during their political struggle, followed by panicked shutdown, or the Ukrainian example from the Orange Revolution, or the successful Moldovan protests of last year, suggest to me that conditions under which a public that can self-identify and self-synchronize, even among a relatively small elite, is in fact a threat to the state. ... This is one of the things I want to understand about your videos, because while you and I are not polar opposites, we obviously have very different points of view about this. Do you believe that the synchronizing effect among a politically engaged public is (a) possible, and, (b) political, and if it is, what should the U.S. reaction to that be?
— Clay Shirky

Introduction

Recently, I invited Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky, both frequent Edge contributors, to sit down for a debate on the subjects of dictators, democracy, Twitter revolutionaries, and the role of the Internet and social software in political lives of people living under authoritarian regimes.

The profound dislocations and disruptions wrought by the Internet are subjects that invite serious thinking. "You very quickly get this kind of vertigo", says Shirky, "where you think you're asking a question about Twitter, and suddenly you realize you're asking a question about, say, Hayek."

What we are exploring here is a very recent phenomena. We have to start somewhere. As Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Life on a Battleship:"

We approach a society
Without a society.

The questions being asked in this conversation are for the most part coming from thinkers who are not situated in traditional academic disciplines and whose authority is not derived from institutional affiliations. This is a crowd of maverick intellectuals. In addition to Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky, participants in the ongoing Edge discussion include David Gelernter, George Dyson, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Yochai Benkler, Douglas Rushkoff, and Charles Leadbeater. Only Gelernter (Yale), Benkler (Harvard), Shirky (NYU), hold academic positions.

Perhaps one reason there are so few thinkers from the psychology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy departments of our major universities contributing to this conversation is that communications theory has long been deemed to be a low-prestige discipline among academics. The best people are likely to be found outside academia.

I am glad Morozov and Shirky are on the case. This is important. I challenge others to get involved.

As the contributor of a number of original pieces, Shirky is well known to readers of Edge and needs no introduction. This debate was my first opportunity to meet Morozov, whose writing, in just the past few weeks, has been featured in newspapers around the world, Prospect, to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to The Wall Street Journal.

Morozov's readers may be surprised to find out that this powerful new voice grew up in a small salt-mining town in Belarus founded by the Soviets to exploit the rich potassium deposits for export markets. Having won a national scholarship from George Soros's Open Society Institute, Morozov left Belarus for Bulgaria, where he completed a degree at the American University of Bulgaria. After a brief sojourn in Berlin and a few years working for a Prague-based tech non-profit, he is now a fellow at Georgetown and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

Versions of this piece are being published by Edge, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and La Stampa. More foreign language editions to come.

— John Brockman

EVGENY MOROZOV, a commentator on the political implications of the Internet, is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's influential and widely-quoted "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics. He is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Evgeny Morozov's Edge Bio Page

CLAY SHIRKY, who coined the phrase "social software" in 2002, divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody. Clay Shirky's Edge Bio Page

Further Reading on Edge:

"Time To Start Taking the Internet Seriously" by David Gelernter [3.4.10]
"Our Algorithmic Culture" by John Brockman [3.4.10]
"A New Age Of Wonder"by John Brockman [2.17.10]
The Edge Annual Dinner [2.17.10]
"Cloud Culture" by Charles LeadbeAter [2.2.10]
"Informavore": A Discussion with Frank Schirrmacher, Andrian Kreye, and David Gelernter [1.24.10]
"The Edge Annual Question 2010: How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?" [1.10.10]
"The Age of the Informavore": A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher [10.27.09]
"Lord Of The Cloud": John Markoff and Clay Shirky Talk to David Gelernter [4.25.09]

[...Continue to "Digital Power and It's Discontents"]

ON "DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS"

Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff, George Dyson, Nicholas Carr, Rebecca Mackinnon

MACKINNON: "...Human society has always been vulnerable to hijack by the worst aspects of human nature unless concerted, determined, and sustained efforts are made in the other direction. There's no reason why cyberspace would be any different. It's important that Morozov is deflating people's utopian fantasies about the Internet. Utopianism is dangerous. It begins with brilliant intellectuals like Marx, inspires a bunch of well-meaning idealistic people, and ends with Stalin and Mao."

CARR: "...To me, the most intriguing moment in the discussion came when Morozov asked, in passing, whether the Net "might be promoting a certain (hedonism-based) ideology that may actually push [people] further away from any meaningful engagement in politics?" That strikes me as a profoundly important question, and one worthy of more discussion. ..."

DYSON: "...Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky are addressing a different question: what happens when the bad guys are within the government, and the good guys without? Unfortunately, in this case the Wilkins doctrine may still hold true: that digital technology advantages the bad guys in detecting the good guys, as much as it advantages the good guys in avoiding detection (and in organizing against the corrupt state). ..."

RUSHKOFF: "...Twitter, for all its faults, and the Internet, for all its insubstantiality, nonetheless serve as the strands of an existential telegraph. By resisting those who would censor history in real time, those flinging messages into the ether are demonstrating their freedom of speech — or, rather, their freedom to speak in spite of all efforts to the contrary. ..."

LANIER: "... It seems apparent, alas, that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have not improved American democracy, and yet we expect these tools to promote democracy elsewhere. ... The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena. There are some nice mob effects, but the intensity of the failures is more profound than the delights of the successes. A flash mob in San Francisco in which people suddenly hold a pose and disperse doesn't compensate for a flash mob in Philadelphia in which people are beaten up. ..."

[...Continue to Reality Club Discussion]

Now we are starting to work with organisms that are more likely to appear in a hospital, like staph and influenza, and we have our sights on Clostridia difficile, Pneumococcus aeruginosa, Acetinobacter baumanii and an alarming number of other bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. We are also working on influenza, which has a convenient little feature called M2e.

EAT ME BEFORE I EAT YOU! A NEW FOE FOR BAD BUGS [3.19.10]
A Talk with Kary Mullis

Introduction

I sat down with Kary Mullis in New York to talk about his current work which involves instant mobilization of the immune system to neutralize invading pathogens and toxins. This comes into play in the fight against Influenza A and drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

"We are devising a drug that will selectively attach alpha-gal epitopes to Staphylococcus," he says, "This epitope is recognized by your immune system as a symbol for, 'Eat me.' The immune system doesn't know what the Staph bacteria is, but since the alpha-gal epitope is attached to it, it complies with protocol and eats it. It doesn't notice, "This is phony, we're being set up."

"If you're driving through L.A. and you get stopped for speeding and a cop throws a bag of marijuana in your back seat and busts you for it, you get outraged. Using our drugs, you've fooled your immune system in the same way. But it's your system; it's okay to do it, as long as you don't stick the epitope on something you need."

Mullis received the Nobel Prize for his invention of PCR, a method of amplifying DNA. PCR multiplies a single, microscopic strand of the genetic material billions of times within hours. The process has multiple applications in medicine, genetics, biotechnology, and forensics. Mullis points out that PCR, because of its ability to extract DNA from fossils, is in reality the basis of a new scientific discipline, paleobiology.

You don't interview Kary Mullis, you turn the camera on, sit back and experience him. He talks, you listen. He's fascinating, exciting. In this regard, I am pleased to present, unedited, the first half-hour of video, followed by the edited text of the complete conversation.

— John Brockman

KARY MULLIS received a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993, for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The process, which Mullis conceptualized in 1983, is hailed as one of the monumental scientific techniques of the twentieth century.

Kary Mullis' Edge Bio Page

[...]

JESSE DYLAN
Film-Maker; Founder, free-form.tv; Lybba.org

It's a compelling idea, and one that we see ourselves moving toward already. It's unfortunate however that the privacy issue is put off for another discussion. I believe that is such a stumbling block that without resolving issues of access and security we will never see full adoption of lifestreams as an organizing principle of the net.

It is a great leap of faith on the part of the user to give such a thorough account of their personal lives over to "the cloud" because, let's face it, "the cloud" will be always be a shorthand for the servers of Google or some similar commercial or governmental entity. As more and more of our lives are lived online, more care must be taken to ensure the same safeguards we enjoy offline make the jump with us.

Making each individual life the data structure around which we organize the internet invites us to bring along the same old injustices, prejudice, and inequality. Protection from abuse becomes all the more important when all the relevant data your life generates is stored a single user account away.

Say what you will of the web's "razor-sharp fragments" but, as currently conceived, lifestreams will redefine the ease and totality of identity theft, surveillance, and unwanted profiling. Right now, the best safeguard against abuse is the very fractured, highly anonymous state of the web. While in many ways the stream as organizing principle makes my life easier, and as Gelernter says, gives the web a missing sense of temporal breadth and flexibility, let us not pretend that it comes without a price.

PATHWAYS TO AND FROM VIOLENT EXTREMISM: THE CASE FOR SCIENCE-BASED FIELD RESEARCH [3.10.10]
By Scott Atran

Statement Before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats & Capabilities
March 10, 2010

"Pathways to and From Violent Extremism:
The Case for Science-Based Field Research" 

A Statement by 

Scott Atran

We are fixated on technology and technological success, and we have no sustained or systematic approach to field-based social understanding of our adversaries' motivation, intent, will, and the dreams that drive their strategic vision, however strange those dreams and vision may seem to us.

SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist, is Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling; Research Associate and Visiting Professor, Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan; Presidential Scholar, Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Director of Research, Anthropology, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; and author, In Gods We Trust.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page

TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY [3.5.01]
By David Gelernter

"In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen."

Introduction: Our Algorithmic Culture
By John Brockman

Edge was in Munich in January for DLD 2010 and an Edge/DLD event entitled "Informavore" —  a discussion featuring Frank Schirrmacher, Editor of the Feuilleton and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andrian Kreye, Feuilleton Editor of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich; and Yale computer science visionary David Gelernter, who, in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds presented what's now called "cloud computing."

The intent of the panel was to discuss — for the benefit of a German audience — the import of the recent Frank Schirrmacher interview and Reality Club discussion on Edge entitled "The Age of the Informavore." David Gelernter, who predicted the Web, and who first presented the idea of "the cloud", was the scientist on the panel along with Schirrmacher and Kreye, Feuilleton editors of the two leading German national newspapers, both distinguished intellectuals.

As a result of the panel, Schirrmacher has commissioned Gelernter to write a regular column for FAZ, which was inaugurated with this essay, published by FAZ in a German translation on March 1st ("Der Mann, der das 'World Wide Web' erst möglich gemacht hat.")

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Here at Edge, we are not immune to such considerations. We have to ask if we're kidding ourselves by publishing 10,000+ word pieces to be read by people who are limiting themselves to 3" ideas, i.e. the width of the screen of their iPhones and Blackberries.

Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know. Book publishers, confronted by the innovation of technology companies, are in a state of panic. Instead of embracing the new digital reading devices as an exciting opportunity, the default response is to disadvantage authors. Television and cable networks are dumbfounded by the move of younger people to watch TV on their computers or cell-phones. Newspapers and magazine publishers continue to see their advertising model crumble and have no response other than buyouts.

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common? All are software engineers or scientists.

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.

Gelernter writes:

The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don't go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don't go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.

It is just about 10 years since Edge and FAZ co-published Gelernter's June, 2000 manifesto, "A Second Coming", which was widely read and debated. I expect nothing less for this powerful and provocative piece by one of the leading visionaries of the cybersphere. I welcome comments and look forward to a rich Reality Club discussion.

— JB

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

David Gelernter's Edge Bio Page

FURTHER READING ON EDGE:
"Cloud Culture: The Promise And The Threat" By Charles Leadbeater
Edge@DLD: "Informavore": David Gelernter, Andrian Kreye, Frank Schirrmacher, John Brockman
"The Age of the Informavore": A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
"Lord of the Cloud": John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter
"The Second Coming: A Manifesto" by David Gelernter
The Edge Annual Question 2010: "How Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think?"

[...Continue to "Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously" By David Gelernter]

Edge @ TED 2010

A number of Edge contributors were among the speakers at the recent TED conference (TED 2010) in Long Beach: Stewart Brand, Nicholas Christakis, George Church, Denis Dutton, Sam Harris, Daniel Kahneman, Benoit Mandelbrot, Nathan Myhrvold, Michael Shermer, and even one of the first speakers at the Reality Club of the early 80s, Stephen Wolfram. And many more individuals in the Edge community as well as friends were in attendance. Below is a link to Daniel Kahneman's recently posted TED Talk — featuring the superb video production values that are becoming the hallmark of the TED Talks — along with links to Kahneman's relevant Edge contributions. —John Brockman

[...continue to Edge@TED2010 photo album]

Daniel Kahneman on Edge...

A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING[7.22.07]
Edge Master Class 2007 EdgeVideo
Daniel Kahneman
Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS [7.25.08]
Edge Master Class 2008 EdgeVideo
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Gaige House, Sonoma, CA

REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS [1.27.09]
Daniel Kahneman & Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Conversation in Munich EdgeVideo

CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT [2.2.10]
By Charles Leadbeater

...A third threat comes from the new media moguls, the cloud capitalists: Facebook, Apple, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, who will seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.

These cloud capitalists are the new powers behind global cultural relations. Their rise has sparked an increasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard led by Rupert Murdoch. This battle between old and new media powers however has distracted attention from the question of how these companies will organise cloud culture on our behalf. Elements of their business models resemble traditional public services: Google's work with a consortium of libraries around the world to digitise books that are out of copyright; ITunes U provides thousands of models of course material for free. However these companies are also businesses: they will want to organise the cloud to make money. By the end of the decade Google will have unprecedented control over literary culture, past, present and future. Leave aside issues of trust, privacy and security, commercial providers of cloud services will have strong incentives to manage their users to maximise revenues and so to discourage them from roaming from one service to another. ...

Introduction

In 1991, David Gelernter, in his book Mirror Worlds, forecast the Web and laid the groundworlk for what is now becomeing known as Cloud Computing. Ten years ago Edge published David Gelernter's now-famous "The Second Coming: A Manifesto", and followed up in 2009 with "Lord of the Cloud: John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter'". The Cloud is now front and center in public consciousness. A recent trip to Europe for a related EDGE-DLD event featuring Gelernter and the Feuilleton editors of Germany's two leading national newspapers, showed that the European views on the subject are in many ways quite different than those in the news, the blogs, and twttersphere in the US.

Innovation consultant Charles Leadbeater represents the European view. He was commissioned by Counterpoint, the think tank of the British Council to write a position paper entitled "Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations" (publication by the British Council on February 8th). The following Edge essay is adapted from that document.

—JB

CHARLES LEADBEATER is a financial journalist turned innovation consultant (for clients ranging from the British government to Microsoft). He is the author of Living on Thin Air, and We-Think.

Charles Leadbeater's Edge Bio Page

[Continue...]

"Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us." — David Gelernter

January 24, 2010 Munich

INFORMAVORE

Edge was in Munich for DLD 2010 and an Edge/DLD event. The event, entitled "Informavore", is a discussion featuring Frank Schirrmacher, Editor of the Feuilleton and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andrian Kreye, Feuilleton Editor of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich; and Yale computer science visionary David Gelernter, who, in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds presented what's now called "cloud computing".

Gelernter's June, 2000 manifesto, published by both Edge and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was at the time widely read and debated. In it, he famously wrote: "Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us."

~~
FURTHER READING ON EDGE:
The Age of the Informavore: A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
Lord of the Cloud: John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter
"The Second Coming: A Manifesto" by David Gelernter
The Edge Annual Question 2010: How Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think?

THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION 2010: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? [1.09.10]

The Edge Annual Question — 2010

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ...

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?

Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species — informavores? — he asks.

W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks?

What do you think?

This year's Question is "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" Not "How is the Internet changing the way WE think?" We spent a lot of time going back on forth on "YOU" vs. "WE" and came to the conclusion to go with "YOU", the reason being that Edge is a conversation. "WE" responses tend to come across like expert papers, public pronouncements, or talks delivered from stage.

We wanted people to think about the "Internet", which includes, but is a much bigger subject than the Web, an application on the Internet, or search, browsing, etc., which are apps on the Web. Back in 1996, computer scientist and visionary Danny Hillis pointed out that when it comes to the Internet, "Many people sense this, but don't want to think about it because the change is too profound. Today, on the Internet the main event is the Web. A lot of people think that the Web is the Internet, and they're missing something. The Internet is a brand-new fertile ground where things can grow, and the Web is the first thing that grew there. But the stuff growing there is in a very primitive form. The Web is the old media incorporated into the new medium. It both adds something to the Internet and takes something away."

This year, I enlisted the aid of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator of the Serpentine Gallery in London, as well as the artist April Gornik, one of the early members of "The Reality Club" (the precursor to the online Edge) to help broaden the Edge conversation — or rather to bring it back to where it was in the late 80s/early 90s, when April gave a talk at a "Reality Club" meeting, and discussed the influence of chaos theory on her work, and when Benoit Mandelbrot showed up to discuss fractal theory and every artist in NYC wanted to be there. What then happened was very interesting. The Reality Club went online as Edge in 1996 and the scientists were all on email, the artists not. Thus, did Edge surprisingly become a science site when my own background (beginning in 1965 when Jonas Mekas hired me to manage the Film-Makers' Cinematheque) was in the visual and performance arts.

To date, 167 essayists (an array of world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers) have created a 130,000 document. (Click here to go directly to the responses).

John Brockman
Editor & Publisher

PERMALINK