. . . ​Current algorithms generally work best when they look at a set number of circumstances and make predictions from those variables. That’s why AI can be good at chess or even the board game Go! In fact, this ability for AI to work within the confines of a specific problem set is what allows it to work very quickly to resolve a specific problem.

In John Brockman’s Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, David Deutsch observes that “a mere AI is incapable of having any such ideas, because the capacity for considering them has been designed out of its constitution.” AI is not creative and has a hard time predicting the unknown. This is a big problem in regard to predicting violent actions. . . .

Picking up C. P. Snow's glove in his famous lecture on the two cultures, the scientific and the humanistic, John Brockman founded three decades ago EDGE, a modern Bloomsbury Circle in which high personalities swarm and that every year asks a question. The one we are dealing with here asks about "the most beautiful, profound or elegant explanation" and is answered by, among others, psychiatrist Judith Rich Harris, neuroscientist David Eagleman, physicist Carlo Rovelli, anthropologist Helen Fisher, philosopher Daniel Dennett, archaeologist Christine Finn and even musician Brian Eno, in an anthology entitled That Explains It All (Deusto). There are, of course, very diverse answers: natural selection, magnetism, entropy, germs, the principle of uncertainty... The result is an attempt at natural philosophy in which the apparent border between sciences and humanities seems to be blurred. Is it that this never existed?

Here are our picks for worthwhile books to read during each year of life, from 1 to 100, along with some of the age-appropriate wisdom they impart.

With time and wisdom to spare, there may be no better moment to ponder life’s big mysteries.

 . . . 4. John Brockman, editor, The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound UNANSWERED QUESTIONS About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life.  My nominated question was: “How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?”  NB: you get only the questions, not the answers. . . .

George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” At the essence of Shaw’s quote lies the notion that questions matter. However, not all questions are created equal and in order to extract the most usefulness from it, the right question needs to be formulated. It’s a case of lock and key. The right question opens doors and allows people to explore what was once stowed away. The Last Unknowns (William Morrow) is a veritable treasure trove of these type of questions. . . .

The Last Unknowns is a loosely organized compendium of queries. One page, one question. Without any guidance, the topics meander but like a flâneur on the streets of Paris, aimlessly wandering but with the solitary purpose of discovery. They run the thematic gamut. . . .

So does The Last Unknowns provide any answers? Not in a single instance. That isn’t what the book was designed to accomplish. Does it get the mental wheels turning in directions they may never have done before? Absolutely. . . .

John Brockman's most recent book, The Last Unknowns poses this interesting question, what would be the question you would like to be reminded of: your last question?

This is how the world's brightest minds must respond . . . to this question from Brockman who is editor of edge.org, probably "the most intelligent place in the world" and through which, by a delicate process, the most creative minds were selected today, including the renowned curator of the City of Ideas, the Mexican Dr. Andrés Roemer, along with personalities such as Steven Pinker or the Israeli Dan Arely.

"Can you prove it?" is the question asked by Dr. Andres Roemer, a question that we also ask in many cases, with his speakers at the Festival of Creative Minds. . . .

John Brockman's Edge Question Series books have been fascinating to follow for over a decade now. With titles like This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos, and What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night, the series clearly doesn't shy away from big questions—and there are so many more like that asked in the series, which has sold over a million copies.  

The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound Unanswered Questions about the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life, the conclusion to the series, hits bookstore shelves today. Being the last of the series, it is fitting that it leaves us with some of today's great thinkers' last questions. ...

Below, we have the introduction to the book, written by another of today's great minds—the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow—Daniel Kahneman. In it, he talks about what makes the series, and the site that it spawned from, so special.

3) Is superintelligence impossible? 

John Brockman, the author of By The Late John Brockman and The Third Culture, chats with David Chalmers and Daniel C. Dennett about the growing world of AI. . . . Mr. Chalmers starts by saying that he believes superintelligence is possible. Then he goes on to explain why and how it can happen and what are the challenges that would arise.

Mr. Dennett concurs with what Mr. Chalmers said. He goes on to talk about the “possible”. There are lots of things that are possible, and philosophers love to talk about what’s possible, but many things that are obviously possible are never going to be actual. It’s possible to build a bridge across the Atlantic. We’re not going to do it, not now, not in a hundred years, not in a thousand years. It would cost too much money and would be a foolish endeavor. He also says that we ourselves are AIs. “We’re robots made of robots made of robots. We’re actual. In principle, you could make us out of other materials. Some of your best friends in the future could be robots” he says. . . .

Mirrors today are so commonplace we barely give their origins a second thought.

In 1999, in a discussion on Edge.org, Bill Gates – founder of the Microsoftcorporation – and his peers mused over the greatest inventions of the past 2,000 years.

Tor Norretranders, the Danish science writer, nominated the humble mirror, which he equated with the advent of clothing, manners and behaviour, noting that it gave us the first notion of self-consciousness.

To ring in the New Year in the most depressing and hope-crushing way possible, Dyson sat down with Edge.org.

That's what we mean by understanding how our digitized world works. But the science historian George Dyson continues to look and looks for the digital to raise an analogous revolution. And that, he warns, could take the book out of his hands.

"The search engine, initially an attempt to map human meaning, now defines human meaning. It controls, rather than simply catalogs or indexes, human thought..." [Continue reading George Dyson's "Childhood's End"]

Powerful short essay on the digital revolution. The map has become the territory. “We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model. This fits our preconception that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere, but it is no longer the way the world works. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled with no central model except the traffic itself. The social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph” (1,250 words)

What is our concern?...This is the question that John Brockman has laid down to dozens of the most influential experts in the world on his Edge.org site (according to The Guardian, "the smartest web site in the world"). He asked them to confess what they were most concerned about, and to show them why the topics should be addressed.... 

Individual responses complement each other and consist of a multi-layered and ambiguous image of the contemporary world. Last but not least, the published texts, some of which have been printed in advance by the Respekt weekly, together, create a fascinating insight into what the leading scholars and thinkers are concerned about, what issues they are worried about or who, on the other hand, have ceased to worry.

John Brockman, curator of the online salon edge.org for current debates on research, has asked 175 renowned experts from, among others, AI research, psychology and brain research: "What should we think of artificial intelligence?" (S. Fischer, 2017). The short essays give a good overview of the current debate and present equally pessimistic and optimistic assessments.

Robots are not afraid that some patient will file their claim, do not have to pay student loans from medical studies, do not accumulate savings in the event of a trial. Maybe that's what they need to entrust to our health?

Everything you would like to know about artificial intelligence, but you are afraid to ask. The book What To Think About Machines That Think, the excerpts of which we present, are 186 short essays by eminent contemporary representatives of people of science, culture and social life. They make up a wide overview of artificial intelligence.

John Brockman, a New York publisher, editor, founder of the Edge.org website and think tank, has been asking the most interesting minds in the world of science and art for more than 20 years, asking for innovative, original answers. 

John Brockman has run out of questions. Brockman, a literary agent, runs the science and philosophy site Edge.org. Every year for 20 years, he has asked leading thinkers to answer a particular question, such as: “What questions have disappeared?” or: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” This year, though, Brockman announced that he has no more questions left. So he asked his final question: “What is the last question?”

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers,” Voltaire insisted. Questions help us define what we don’t know and force us or others to justify what we think we do know.

Asking questions is relatively easy. Asking good questions is surprisingly difficult. A bad question searches for an answer that confirms what we already know. A good question helps to reset our intellectual horizons. It has an answer that we can reach, yet unsettles what we already know. ...

Since 1998...the editor John Brockman has asked these questions on his Edge page ( www.edge.org ) to a hundred long intellectuals...

Brockman...says he has run out of questions and this year he has launched the last one. The question is, obviously: What is the last question? A chrysanthemum is the flower that Katinka Matson has chosen for her ritual illustration. There are many answers to look for. This is from Ryan Mckay , a psychologist at the University of London: "Will we be one of the last generations to die?" Of Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist at Stanford: "Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe and our absolute lack of free will, how is it possible that most people are not clinically depressed?" But the best last question, of a Leibnizian nature, is that of the MIT physicist Frank Wilczek. Given its monumental size it is understandable that answering it can never be among the obligations that a newspaper has contracted with the news.

Why?

Two publishers brought popular scientific books to the market earlier this year, so that the interested layman could simply help to deepen and broaden his knowledge of the current scientific state of affairs. One answers over 100 urgent questions, the other allows nearly 200 scientists to write and explain their most important scientific news item. The questions and the news stories both stem from 2015, but that does not matter. The vast majority has lost nothing to actuality.

Almost daily, newspaper readers get a number of new scientific findings. A remarkable nutritional advice, for example, or a promising medicine, or an ominous event that would point to climate change. For the average newspaper reader, it is impossible to judge whether this is really important, or that the proverbial storm is in a glass of water.

"Scientific pearls" (Know This) wants to offer handles. The composer of the bundle is the American science journalist John Brockman. He is also the administrator of the Edge website, a discussion center for writers, scientists and philosophers. To the most influential scientists and thinkers he has asked the question about what they think is the most interesting and important recent scientific news. 

He has brought together scientists and artists from around the world to bring readers' insights, thoughts, and predictions about artificial intelligence: In a book about brainstorming and learning computers, John Brockman summarizes the state of the discussion.

It is one of the topics about which science and now also society have been discussing, researching, and arguing for decades: Artificial Intelligence. But it begins with the concept. Is not it better to call "designed intelligence"? Because unlike intelligence in humans, an "intelligent" program of a computer has been deliberately designed and created in a certain form. This is one of the suggestions that finds itself in a book that is as stimulating as it is entertaining by John Brockman, which is now available in German: "What do we think of artificial intelligence?"

This is the urgent context for Know This. Even as it distills humankind’s capacity for knowledge and unveils learnings of the workings of the universe — from billion-year megatrends to infinitesimal quantum mechanics — it juxtaposes this astonishing progress with humankind’s wilful ignorance about how our actions blight the planet.

[Know This] encapsulates a convincing case for mandatory science literacy and it should be prescribed reading for government cabinets, company boards, and teachers — anyone shaping policies, people’s attitudes, or prioritising and allocating funds for research and development.

As we understand more, it becomes ever clearer that we live in an incredible world. Much of this is made possible by science, and Know This proves there are still more miracles to come.

This week's roundup of books highlights a diverse and exciting array of nonfiction titles.

Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments

With so much news on scientific developments inundating us today, how do we tell which are truly revolutionary? And what makes them so important? To help condense the most significant of the new theories and discoveries, John Brockman asked 198 of the world's finest minds which recent scientific ideas they found most significant. From technology to medical research to neuroscience to genetics, this book addresses a wide range of scientific developments, from the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Carlo Rovelli, and Peter Gabriel.

We are in a particularly tribal moment in American politics in which “the enemy of my enemy is my ally” is the most powerful argument around.

John Tooby, the evolutionary psychologist, recently wrote that if he could explain one scientific concept to the public it would be the “coalitional instinct.” In our natural habitat, to be alone was to be vulnerable. If “you had no coalition, you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, pre-existing and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership,” Tooby wrote on Edge.org. “This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.” 

We overlook the hypocrisies and shortcomings within our coalition out of a desire to protect ourselves from our enemies.

Today, the right sees the left as enemies — and, I should say, vice versa. ...

Three people are standing in front of a painting in the museum, each one taking a picture of it. The art student copies it with brush and paint; The professional photographer bans it on the film in its analog camera; The tourist presses on the button of her smartphone. Which of these images is different from the other two?

The art student has to spend more work on her copy; But in a sense the tourist is with the smartphone of cross-country skiers. Color on canvas, just like the bit of exposed film, is a purely physical representation; A chemical flower on a susceptible medium. The image can not exist independently of this physical embodiment. In contrast, the image stored in the smartphone is essentially numeric. In an approximate way, the camera divides its field of view into a grid of tiny cells in the smartphone and stores a set of numerical values ​​which represent the intensity of the colors in each of these cells; These numbers are the ones that are transmitted - in compressed form - when the picture is sent to friends or placed on the Internet.

Each year, the director of the website edge.org, John Brockman, asks a question to a group of intellectual collaborators, many of them belonging to the world of science but also personalities from the world of art, technology and of the music. The question he asked on January 1, 2017 was: Which term or scientific concept should be better known? According to psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker the second law of thermodynamics should be better known.

Try to build a tower by stacking irregularly shaped blocks. That is possible; Sometimes you reach a height of eight, nine, ten stones. Such man-made "Zen-Steintürme" or "Steinmannli" can be found along river banks and mountain peaks. They hold for a while, then the wind blows them over, or a bird lands on it and breaks the stone towers into the knee.

What is the relationship between skill and height? Take some round stones from a river bank. A two-year-old child will be able to build two stones; A three-year with advanced hand-eye coordination creates three. It takes experience to get up to eight rocks. And only with tremendous dexterity and a lot of Trial-and-Error attempts is it to be more than ten. Dexterity, patience, and experience are at times boundaries.

This week's most important scientific news was enough that NASA and NOAA in the United States confirmed that 2016 was the warmest year.

The European Copernicus program recounted the same already for more than a half week ago, but since it's not exactly the same data set that underlies the two statements, there was still some uncertainty about whether 2016 was actually warmer than in 2015.

Society Needs Reliable Knowledge. Ask Yourself the Right Questions

Science is the most reliable way to generate knowledge. This is the conviction of the Edge community which every year, for the past twenty years, has gathered around its long-time driving force John Brockman to answer a big question through which we can supposedly arrive at the edge of knowledge. In this period, however, knowledge empirically derived by the scientific method reveals an amount of information of varying quality and varied provenance which would seem to question the credibility of any belief and any consensus on the practical experience of reality. So one might ask: do we know enough about scientific knowledge? And, above all, can the scientific method be recognized as the most reliable? This is probably why Brockman asked his community of scientists, researchers, intellectuals, and creative interpreters to answer a seemingly simple question: "What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?"

Many contributors decided to respond by citing the latest discoveries that are actually not well known. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, described Neurodiversity, a concept that challenges the definition of "autism" and embraces the diversity of ways of being human. Kevin Kelly, a pioneer in the narrative of technology, highlighted the concept of Premature Optimization to show that a success obtained in the first phase of a project’s development can put a brake on a bigger success: which is a recommendation for not only accepting the mistake but also for maintaining a critical attitude regarding what has already been discovered. And the Futurist Paul Saffo wrote about Haldane's Rule of the Right Size, which shows every organism has an optimum size and a change in size inevitably leads to a change in form, which is applicable not only to organisms, but also to technologies and organizations.

But the Edge community, with its distinguishing humility, thought that it was necessary to also take into account those who don’t know the most basic scientific concepts. An example? A couple of years ago a survey from the National Science Foundation reported that 25% of Americans are convinced that the Sun revolves around the Earth, more Americans than those who voted for the new President of the United States. So, with great sense of reality, astrophysicist and author Mario Livio decided to dedicate his contribution to The Copernican Principle, which states that the Earth is not at the center of the solar system. And Steven Pinker, who does research in a vast territory between cognitive science and language, in turn, has devoted his contribution to The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases. It is a basic concept that shows how closed systems not interconnected with the outside tend inexorably to become less structured, less organized, less able to do interesting things, until they fall into a monotonous and uniform situation where they stop. And die. For Pinker, this is instructive for society. Giving up the liaison with the other societies, not accepting energy and information from outside, leads to social death.

In writing about Confirmation Bias, the artist Brian Eno has found a balance between the need to provide information about a new scientific concept and to divulge an element of basic knowledge by dedicating his contribution to the error of perception due to the search for confirmation: “The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway.” In fact, scientifically, what was wrong was the word "automatically." The internet is not the wisdom machine, but only the information machine. But it was conceived in such a way that it is constantly renewed through innovation. This is what Edge pushed us to do.

We generally consider knowledge to be a desirable commodity. But there are situations where people voluntarily forgo information - and those in which ignorance is even practical.

Theories that will change our everyday life in the year just begun according to 206 great researchers and intellectuals from around the world

Imagine taking over 200 international thinkers, including writers, artists and many, many scientists of all disciplines. Place them in front of a challenging question and collect their responses on a web site. It seems difficult to find a better way to greet with understanding the arrival of 2017. To do so we thought the literary agent John Brockman with his Edge Foundation. The ritual is repeated every year and this time the question was the following: “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?” That is, being able to choose freely a bud in the casket of knowledge, which you would show humanity at the beginning of this year. What piece of knowledge do you want to put metaphorically in your pocket, to walk toward the future with a greater awareness of the world? And do it with without pedantry and jargon. According to the novelist Ian McEwan, one of the 206 intellectuals invited to participate, the beauty of this game is that among the rules of engagement there is the invitation to be open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful, to indulge in the unadorned pleasure in curiosity.

Scientific ideas often remain confined among insiders, but sometimes science goes mainstream, and the most versatile and fortunate intuitions breach into the general culture, enriching it, and changing it in turn.

This happened to the memes of Richard Dawkins, to the paradigm jumps of Thomas Kuhn, to Schrödinger’s Cat, just to name some examples. Among the many ideas suggested this year, and candidates to become viral, a recurring theme is that of the peculiarities of scientific thought that would deserve to be exported to other fields of human knowledge and action is that science is a master of failure, critical spirit, intellectual honesty. Sometimes it delivers uncomfortable truths, as it reminds us of the famous phrase attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Birmingham on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Commenting on the embarrassing kinship between men and monkeys she apparently said: "Hopefully it is not true and, if it is true, that you do not know around".

The 206 responses to the 2017 question will eventually be published in a book. Here we have seven contributions, selected because they are particularly surprising and sometimes even useful in everyday life. Their merit? They warn of prejudices, educate complexity, cultivate wonder.

Confirmation Bias (Brian Eno), The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Steven Pinker), Deliberate Ignorance (Gerd Gigerenzer), Included Middle (Melanie Swan), Effective Theory (Lisa Randall), Multiverse (Martin Rees)

[Click for Italian original]

On the occasion of presenting two facilities in the Kirchner Cultural Center, the legendary musician and producer Brian Eno went through Buenos Aires, in what was his first visit to Argentina. ... In 2012 he published one of 125 essays in the book What is going to change everything?, edited by John Brockman, editor of ... edge.com. Most of the responses, written by authors such as Ian McEwan, Nassim Taleb, Steven Pinker or Ricahrd Dawkins, coming down the side of the artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, physics or astronomy.

Eno, which in the past produced albums by U2, Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others, was on the other side. His answer to What is going to change everything? It was "the feeling that things will get worse." "What will change everything is not a thought but a feeling" ...

For Eno, "the development of mankind so far was driven by the idea that things, with high probability, will be better in the future. The world was rich in relation to its population, there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to discover and exploit new resources. the great migrations of history was implemented from the projection that there was a better place. But what if this feeling changes?"

The world of innovation, entrepreneurial and technological singularity is full of parallels with religion: there are prophets, pilgrimage centers (Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Shenzhen), tribes of believers, heretics and revealed truths. The commonalities could become a simple curiosity, a thesis topic of a humanistic career, if not because there is a group of technologists and experts on this agenda who believe this cogency of religious values ​​acts as a bias that could lead to wrong projections. And the forecasts of vehicles without human drivers, lives of hundreds of years, end of employment, to travel by virtual reality and other phenomena that are as inexorable from the field of innovation could be saying more about our present, with its molded psychological and cultural patterns in thousands of years, about the future. . . .

In the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, filmed in 1969, Stanley Kubrick imagines a future of space travel, but all women of history are hostesses, assistants or secretaries: the director did not foresee the gender revolution of the 70s. Steven Pinker talks about this in his essay in the book This Will Change Everything, published by the director of the website Edge, John Brockman.

This approach leads to the conclusion that the existence of certain technology is a necessary and sufficient condition for a large-scale social change associated with that progress in a short time. . . .

This month’s Insights column was an attempt to use simple puzzles to highlight the consequences of the infinity assumption in the physical world. The idea was sparked by an article by the physicist Max Tegmark that was written for the book, "This Idea Must Die." Tegmark’s article is excerpted in a blog at Discover magazine under the title, "Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept — and It’s Ruining Physics." 

...[I]f you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you’ve almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or “AGI.” 

Steven Pinker...for the website Edge.org:

The other problem with AGI dystopias is that they project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. Even if we did have superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to depose their masters, massacre bystanders, or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal, but the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself: being smart is not the same as wanting something. ...

Mathematician/economist Eric R Weinstein is managing director of Thiel Capital, but that doesn't mean that he thinks capitalism has a future.

In a short, but wide-ranging essay in Edge's Annual Question series (this year's question is "What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important?"), Weinstein talks about the fundamentally transformative nature of software-based societies and the challenges they put to the nature of work and economics. ...

In the 1960s he was a performance artist, he is now a literary agent in New York, his specialty: bringing ideas of renowned scientists to the people. John Brockman...put out a new book, and writes the question..."What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"

"Only a few really new ideas are developed, without giving up first older. In other words, science progresses through a series of funerals ahead. [But] why wait so long? What established scientific idea is mature enough to be pushed aside, so science can move forward?" ...

[E]nlightening and very entertaining.

Every year, the site Edge.org a question to about 200 people at the research frontiers. Among those surveyed are geneticists, physicists, philosophers, people who work with artificial intelligence, plus the odd wild card, as Kai Krause (maybe someone will remember the wayward landscape modeling program Bryce; it was his work). The questions of the type "What have you changed your opinion about?" Or "What a scientific idea, it is time to retire?" The aim is to provoke thoughtful responses. This year was the question "What is the most interesting scientific news?"

The answers are not always intellectually dope, but together they provide a snapshot of what is going on in the various research fields. What will we learn about in the next few years? Bacteria. The realization that man is dependent on the interaction with bacteria and parasites are breaking through.The bacteria on us and in us control gene activity in our bodies, writes bioantropologen Nina Jablonski. A poorer bacterial flora can lead to obesity, allergies, possibly autism. Perhaps we will soon see ads for bacterial smoothies to everything from obesity to depression.

Nature and nurture are twin words essentially associated with the developmental process of human beings. ... In their 2014 survey of scientists, Alison Gopnik and Edge submit that many respondents wrote that the dichotomy of nature versus nurture has outlived its usefulness, and should be retired. The reason is that in many fields of research, close feedback loops have been found in which “nature” and “nurture” influence one another constantly (as in self-domestication), while in other fields, the dividing line between an inherited and an acquired trait becomes unclear (as in the field of epigenetics or in fetal development). (Edge.org and Gopnik).

There is a community called Edge, which publishes non-fiction materials written by scientists. In particular, in recent years it has annually announced "the question of the Year" and the answers to it by leading scientists of the world. The question of 2016 was the following: "What do you think is the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important? " In response, 198 scientists participated from different fields ... Each question is carefully thought out ... a sort of voiced firsthand digest of the new learned science ...

Caption: For musician Peter Gabriel it might not take long until we open our thoughts as easily as a can.

Brain scanners are getting better and cheaper. What could this mean for us? A vision. By Peter Gabriel

[ English, Edge.org | German Translation ]

A new study shows that men still hold the power in fields of science and art where supposedly only born geniuses succeed. By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

[ English, Edge.org | German Translation ]

What do the United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea and Tonga have in common?

These countries are among the few worldwide that don't offer paid maternity leave at the federal level for new mothers. ...

In a lovely short essay at Edge.org, psychology professor Linda Wilbrecht, a colleague at UC Berkeley, highlights what we do — and don't — yet know about the impacts of early life experiences on later development. High-quality childcare — whether it comes from mom or other caregivers — and a rich, stable environment could have important downstream consequences for individuals and for society.

Wilbrecht's essay is worth a read...

Nova magazine features contributions from Peter Gabriel, Kevin Kelly, and Bill Joy

Online Thinkers forum frontier (Edge.org) since 1998, has put forward thought-provoking topics every year, such as '98: What questions are you asking yourself?; '99: What is the most important invention in the past 2,000 years?; 2006: What is your dangerous idea?; Last year: What do you think about machines that think? This year, editor John Brockman, got nearly 200 thinkers: What do consider the most interesting recent [science] news? What makes it so important?

As a result, 198 experts from physics, astronomy, psychology, archeology, biology, history, computer science, etc. each wrote an essay, including Steven Pinker, Peter Gabriel, Nina Jablonski, Bill Joy, Michael Shermer, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Benford, George Church. ... Several hot topics ran as expected, including research cancer and other diseases, pollution, genetic research, artificial intelligence, quantum physics and gravity research, to find Earth 2.0 and extraterrestrial life. ...

It is time once again for the Edge Annual Question, a mind-bending and boundary-busting online convening of scientists, technologists, and other big thinkers all responding to a single question at the intersection of science and culture. From physicists to artists, cognitive psychologists to journalists, evolutionary biologists to maverick anthropologists, these are people who Edge founder, famed literary agent, and BB pal John Brockman describes as the "third culture (consisting) of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

This year, John asked: What do you consider the most interesting (scientific) news? What makes it important?" Nearly two hundred really smart people responded, including Steven Pinker, Nina Jablonski, Freeman Dyson, Stewart Brand, Marti Hearst, Philip Tetlock, Kevin Kelly, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Douglas Rushkoff, Lisa Randall, Alan Alda, Jared Diamond, Pamela McCorduck, and on and on.

Advances in biology and cosmology have dominated the science year

Growing a “brain in a dish”, the prospect of creating designer babies, and the possibility of detecting the first signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence – these are just some of the most important scientific news stories of 2015, according to some of the world’s leading scholars celebrating the year’s achievements.

The question posed to the top thinkers was this: what do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news and what makes it important? Back came a smorgasbord of essay-length answers from more than 100 contributors to Edge.org, the online salon for scientists, philosophers and followers of the “third culture” merging science and the humanities. ...

Read highlighted contributions from: Mark Pagel, George Church, Simon Baron-Cohen, Alison Gopnik, Mario Livio, Martin Rees. 

Why should AI scare us? Let’s compare natural vs. artificial intelligence, using Edge’s 2015 big question: What to think about machines that think?

... Alison Gopnik feels machines aren’t nearly “as smart as 3-year-olds.” While AI sometimes outwits Garry Kasparov, it needs millions of pictures (labeled by humans) to learn to recognize cats. Infants need a handful (amazing pattern detectors, + see what babies know, butscientists often ignore). ...

From a blog post, “A Message From Paris,” by British novelist Ian McEwan for edge.org, Nov. 14:

The death cult chose its city well—Paris, secular capital of the world, as hospitable, diverse and charming a metropolis as was ever devised. And the death cult chose its targets in the city with ghoulish, self-damning accuracy—everything they loathed stood plainly before them on a happy Friday evening: men and women in easy association, wine, free-thinking, laughter, tolerance, music—wild and satirical rock and blues. The cultists came armed with savage nihilism and a hatred that lies beyond our understanding. Their protective armour was the suicide belt, their idea of the ultimate hiding place was the virtuous after-life, where the police cannot go. (The jihadist paradise is turning out to be one of humanity’s worst ever ideas; slash and burn in this life, eternal rest among kitsch in the next).

Paris, dazed and subdued, woke this morning to reflect on its new circumstances. ...

Wednesday, Oct. 21: The Loyolan is hosting its second annual "60 Second Lectures" event, co-sponsored by the University Honors Program. Professors from various schools at LMU will deliver lectures on ideas in their field that "must die" in the span of one minute, focusing on the central theme of "This Idea Must Die." "60 Second Lectures" will start at 7:15 p.m. in UHALL 1000.

We all have worries. But as trained observers, scientists learn things that can affect us all. So what troubles them should also trouble us. From viral pandemics to the limits of empirical knowledge, find out what science scenarios give researchers insomnia.

(Inspiration for this episode comes from the book, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night edited by John Brockman.)

Tom Friedman vs. Bill Flack. One is a noted columnist, the other an irrigation specialist. One is world-famous, the other a nobody. Yet Flack is better at forecasting the future...

Daniel Kahneman & Philip Tetlock et al | Edge | 12th August 2015

Expert discussion of forecasting. First case study: The raid which killed Osama Bin Laden. “It’s an interesting fact that in very high stakes national security debates people don’t think it’s possible to make very granular probability estimates. They seem to act as though ‘things are going to happen’, and there’s ‘maybe’ and ‘things aren’t going to happen’. They act as though there will be only three levels of uncertainly” 

We used to think that the sun revolved around the earth and that the earth was flat. These ideas have been thrown into the trash. But who throws outdated ideas like IQ, free will and essentialism in the bin?

Scientific Weed (***) 
The book "Scientific Weed" collects 179 Edge.org persistent ideas that block progress. A book full of interesting observations from top scientists about their field. ...

Dawkins is mostly unconcerned by the possible damage he has inflicted on his reputation, but he has moments of self-doubt. “I genuinely don’t know whether I’m going about it the right way,” he said, in the half-resigned tone of someone who probably couldn’t go about it any other way. Recently, there have been some signs of reputational management – in a video interview on his “Vision of Life” for the Edge website [https://edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-this-is-my-vision-of-life], he discussed Darwinian natural selection without once mentioning his anti-religious campaigning. His memoirs, he pointed out, bypassed his various online wrangles entirely. In conversation, Dawkins seemed concerned that an article about him would draw disproportionately on his Twitter feed – in his eyes, an insignificant late chapter in the context of his whole career. “I’m a scientist,” he said, as if this fact might be forgotten. ...

Perhaps a culture needs someone like Dawkins: his unswerving commitment to a cause, his enormous capacity to inflame and offend. Daniel Dennett, a keen sailor, described Dawkins as his “sacrificial anode” – the hunk of zinc you bolt to the propeller shaft on a boat to protect the propeller from being eroded by seawater. The zinc is gradually worn away while the propeller remains unscathed. “In life you always want somebody out to the left of you to take the heat.”

Over at Edge, John Brockman features British historian David Christian on the need to come up with a new origin story that can serve the global community.

Christian, the author of This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, started his career as a professor of Russian history, and over the years as he refined his lectures on the Cold War, he realized…

…I was giving the subliminal message that humans are divided, at a fundamental level, into competing tribes. Having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember it vividly. I was a schoolboy in England where this tribalism threatened to blow us all up. That was a very vivid experience for me. I thought, for historians to keep teaching this subliminal message—that we’re divided by tribes—is not a good thing.

So Christian began a program to teach ‘big history’–the story of the whole world, from the Big Bang up to the present day. The goal: to help transcend the tribalisms perpetuated by narrower ethnic and religious histories. ...

You've read The News Journal, but have you ever been curious as to what people who put out The News Journal read?

Staffers weigh in with their latest reads

Matt Albright, Education Reporter

What I'm reading: "This Idea Must Die," by John Brockman

Why you should read it: What if you could get some of the world's leading scientists and philosophers in a room and ask them what scientific idea is most inhibiting progress for humanity? This is basically that in book form. I'll admit some of the more highly-technical scientific answers have flown over my head, but this book is really making me think.

The great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the insight that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. It was the discovery of ignorance.

These musings take me back to Edge (www.edge.org), a website founded by John Brockman, a literary agent specializing in serious nonfiction (mostly scientific). Among other endeavors, Edge every year asks a single question of 150-200 leading scientists and researchers. The 2014 question, which particularly titillated me, is best summarized by the title of its published collection of answers (Harper Perennial, 2015):

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

I find it exhilarating to have so much of our scientific elite capable of questioning the generally accepted wisdom that they have helped create or sustain. To me, this is a typically American phenomenon.

Some years ago, two different Chinese journalists interviewed me and asked the same question, which was very popular at the time: “Do you think China can innovate?” I responded, “If you ask whether Chinese people are capable of innovating, the answer is that we have hundreds or maybe thousands of them innovating every day in Silicon Valley. But to innovate you need a degree of chaos, so the real question is, How much chaos is China willing to accept?”

READ: "This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that Are Blocking Progress," ed. John Brockman

"This Idea Must Die" is a fascinating collection of mini-essays from 175 scientific luminaries describing which scientific idea they deem most eligible for falling by the wayside, cushy grants and prevailing vogues be damned. The strength of the essays lies both in their disciplined brevity as well as the remarkable ability of these very brilliant thought-leaders to convey their areas of inquiry in a manner general readers can understand. For those who tend to stereotype the planet's empiricists as plodding, observation-driven technicians, the elasticity of thought and imaginative excursions on display here easily dispel that notion. Surely recognizing and articulating the sacred cows in our midst, as happens here, is one step towards constructing newer, better models. 

...Our innovative journey toward change involves inquiry, curiosity and doubt. Much of this  we do the same way  the Wright’s did – by letting the world know of our thoughts and views. Any proponent of change has to proclaim his/her thoughts. Galileo, one of the greatest astronomers and scientists of all time, defended his views on heliocentrism in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Philosophers such as Plato, Kant and Nietzsche, and many others,  published their thoughts that changed the world in outlook and philosophy. A new innovative book This Idea Must Die edited by John Brockman takes us through scientific theories and practices that are blocking our progress. At a recent interview, Brockman said: "Daniel Kahneman has studied human rationality and found out that characteristics we thought we had as humans aren’t necessarily the case. We are not HOMO ECONOMICUS, we’re not the rational human beings we thought we were. A lot of what we do is pre-conscious and without acknowledgement."...

On his website Edge.org, John Brockman—an idea guru—interviews and opens dialogues with the century’s brightest minds (many of which he represents as their agent). Every year, he publishes a book that poses an unsettling question to philosophers, scientists, and other kinds of big thinkers. This is how he’s come up with his 'question books,' such as WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?, WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?, WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?, and WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? Reading through the answers (both on the website and in these annual question books) would be an excellent way for extraterrestrials to figure out what’s going on in the minds of those crazy humans.

Can the Apple Watch become a must-have accessory for the Bitcoin generation that views currency, forget a watch, as a quaint has-been? ...

Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari brutally likens computer games to a drug-addled brain in a conversation with Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, titled “Death Is optional”, for Edge.org. As robots and technology make us humans redundant, we will have no meaning in life, he says cheerily. We will solve our inner problems by clicking on digital gadgets. Many of us do that already, witness the slew of passengers who attack their anxiety by babbling into phones the minute the plane lands. What will happen with an always-on watch? I shudder to think. ...

Recommendations of recent books from the staffs of a rotating list of Bay Area independent bookstores. This week’s list is from Copperfields Books, Santa Rosa

Nonfiction 

A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION: THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF A KIDNAPPED FILMMAKER, HIS STAR ACTRESS, AND A YOUNG DICTATOR'S RISE TO POWER, by Paul Fischer: A jaw-dropping book about the former North Korean leader’s atttempt to boost the reputation of his country’s filmmaking industry.

THIS IDEA MUST DIE: SCIENTIFIC THEORIES THAT ARE BLOCKING PROGRESS, by John Brockman: Want a dinner party guaranteed to produce intense and lively conversation? Introduce Brockman’s book!

BETWEEN YOU AND ME: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMA QUEEN, by Mary Norris: This is a fabulous meandering ride through language, the pursuit of a good pencil and how best to say what you mean, from the New Yorker’s copy editor.

UNEXPECTED ART: SERENDIPITOUS INSTALLATIONS, SITE SPECIFIC WORKS AND SURPRISING INTERVENTIONS, by Jenny Moussa Spring: Imagine turning the corner toward the harbor in Auckland, New Zealand, to discover a 60-foot bright yellow rubber duck quietly floating there. This modest art book is full of astonishing, inventive and delightful art installations around the world.

NONFICTION Bay Area

The Edge Question Book, This Idea Must Die is #6 on the San Francisco Chronicle's Best-Seller List, March 22nd. 

Brain plasticity, godlessness, Malthusian notions - all should go according to the responses to John Brockman's latest question

There’s something ironic about seeing a promotion for John Brockman’s latest collection of science musings, This Idea Must Die, right under his Edge site’s featured conversation, Death is Optional.

Because a lot of ideas don’t die. They recede for a while–like Lamarck’s notion of the inheritance of acquired traits–and then insinuate their way back into scientific consciousness.

But that’s a minor complaint. Brockman’s new anthology, in which he asks a host of leading intellectuals what ideas should be consigned to the dustbin, is engaging. ...

John Brockman has collected his “angels”: all of the many scientists, philosophers, psychologists, techno-geeks, and mathematicians that he either is an agent for or whom he simply knows, and posed to them a provocative question: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” The results, in the form of 1-4 page mini-essays, are compiled in a new book,This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress. You can buy it for only $11.81 on Amazon.

Although I’m not a fan of “idea anthologies” in general, this one is good, and well worth reading. For one thing, you’ll be surprised at the ideas that people say must be deep-sixed, including “Theories of everything” (Geoffrey West), “Entropy” (Bruce Parker), “Falsifiablity” (Sean Caroll, and I disagree with him), “Humans are by nature social animals” (Adam Waytz), “Mind versus matter” (Frank Wilczek), “Culture” (Pascal Boyer), and “The illusion of scientific progress” (Paul Saffo, whose essay I again disagree with). You can see the entire list of contributors, which number about 150) at the Amazon page, simply by clicking on the bookcover link here. 

...For a mini-education in contrarian thinking in science, this book is essential.

Whether it’s the four bodily humors, the geocentric universe, or the steady state theory, sometimes an old idea has to die before new science can flourish. (Just ask Copernicus.) A new anthology edited by Edge.org’s John Brockman aims to speed that process along by asking scientists and big thinkers which scientific concepts they’d target for extinction. Ira talks with two contributors to This Idea Must Die—theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and quantum mechanic Seth Lloyd— about the ideas they’d like to give a good shove out the door. Read an excerpt from the book here, and vote for which ideas you think should die.

From the self to left brain vs. right brain to romantic love, a catalog of broken theories that hold us back from the conquest of Truth.

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact,” asserted Charles Darwin in one of the eleven rules for critical thinking known as Prospero’s Precepts. If science and human knowledge progress in leaps and bounds of ignorance, then the recognition of error and the transcendence of falsehood are the springboard for the leaps of progress. That’s the premise behind This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (public library) — a compendium of answers Edge founder John Brockman collected by posing his annual question — “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” — to 175 of the world’s greatest scientists, philosophers, and writers. Among them are Nobel laureates, MacArthur geniuses, and celebrated minds like theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, psychologist Howard Gardner, social scientist and technology scholar Sherry Turkle, actor and author Alan Alda, futurist and Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, and novelist, essayist, and screenwriter Ian McEwan.

Brockman paints the backdrop for the inquiry:

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.

Many of the answers are redundant — but this is a glorious feature rather than a bug of Brockman’s series, for its chief reward is precisely this cumulative effect of discerning the zeitgeist of ideas with which some of our era’s greatest minds are tussling in synchronicity. They point to such retirement-ready ideas as IQ, the self, race, the left brain vs. right brain divide, human nature and essentialism, free will, and even science itself. What emerges is the very thing Carl Sagan deemed vital to truth in his Baloney Detection Kit — a “substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.” ...

Complement This Idea Must Die, the entirety of which weaves a mind-stretching mesh of complementary and contradictory perspectives on our relationship with knowledge, with some stimulating answers to previous editions of Brockman’s annual question, exploring the only thing worth worrying about (2013), the single most elegant theory of how the world works (2012), and the best way to make ourselves smarter (2011).

Love is… at root, biology. A host of endocrine-system-regulated hormones relay chemical messages around the body and brain. Complex loops of physiological feedback between endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems regulate our sexual responses and maintain homeostasis via hormone-producing glands such as the pituitary and thyroid. We feel the effects of ‘love’ throughout our bodies; even with the reproductive system completely excised our hormones would continue their thrilling course. And we feel it in our brains, in our minds. Modulated by hormones such as oxytocin, neurotransmitting chemicals at synapses lead to inhibition or firing of networks of neurons (baby, you flood my synaptic clefts like no other). Firing or inhibition consolidates or weakens these networks – thus do we fall in, or out of, love.

According to Steven Pinker, ‘Love is not all you need, and does not make the world go round.’[1] That is true. However, this fluke of natural selection can come to be our everything. Sometimes, the end of love can be the end of meaningful life (and for an unhappy few, literally the end of life). The neurochemical, neurostructural resonances within close relationships – couples, families, tribes – can gift members a sense of shared purpose. When we draw significance from these bonds, from their apparent strength and continuity, we are often driven to try to shape our environments to uphold and sanctify them. This drive has myriad positive effects, but it can also be perilously narrow. If we are to avoid relationship conservatism – and exclusion of those who do not identify with the love paradigm – we must allow the flourishing of love in the widest possible sense. ...

[1] Steven Pinker, “Evolutionary Genetics and the Conflicts of Human Social Life,” in This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, ed. John Brockman, 1st ed (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 45.

There are few more damning responses to a new study or book or proposal than to say that it relies on “anecdotal” evidence — implying not just that the underlying idea lacks seriousness and objectivity, but that the author is lazy or even untrustworthy. Editors also tend to recoil from anecdotal openings for news stories (in part because most anecdotal ledes are awful), and book critics love to display their smartypants-ness by dissing some new volume as anecdotal.

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” (2010), wants to rehabilitate the anecdote. So when Edge.org asked him and other thinkers to answer the question “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” he had his answer. In “This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress,” a collection of 175 short essays from top thinkers, Carr makes his case against anti-anecdotalism in two sharp paragraphs: ...

“This Idea Must Die,” edited by John Brockman, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial on Feb. 17.

Stephen Hawking famously warned in 2010 that based on the history of humankind, an alien, more-advanced civilization would probably destroy us. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," he said. Hawking expressed a similar fear of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) machines. In 2014 he pronounced, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Taken seriously, these two statements could even imply that we should neither search for extrasolar advanced civilizations nor strive for superior AI machines.

I was contemplating these issues when I received the annual EDGE question from "intellectual impresario" John Brockman. Every year Brockman sends to about 200 thinkers a single question, and he posts all the answers on his website, edge.org. The question for 2015 was "What do you think about machines that think?"... I strongly recommend reading all the answers, since they are quite fascinating. ...

This year’s Edge question is "What do you think about machines that think?" My response is less about their likelihood and more about how we should respond, as a society, if this ever comes to pass. Specifically, it involves naches, the Yiddish term for pride and joy...

Read the rest here.

Every January the intellectual impresario and literary agent John Brockman (who represents me, I should disclose) asks a large group of thinkers a single question on his website, edge.org. This year it is: “What do you think about machines that think?” There are lots of interesting answers, ranging from the skeptical to the apocalyptic.

I’m not sure that asking whether machines can think is the right question, though. As someone once said, it’s like asking whether submarines can swim. But we can ask whether machines can learn, and especially, whether they can learn as well as 3-year-olds. ...

Over at BB pal John Brockman's Edge.org, nearly 200 very smart people, like Daniel C. Dennett, Brian Eno, Alison Gopnik, Nina Jablonski, Peter Norvig, and Rodney Brooks, ponder the EDGE Annual Question of 2015: What do you think about machines that think?

During the year just ended, Edge.org put to discussion the question What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Jerry Coyne pointed out in response to the idea of free will: "When pressed, Nearly all scientists and philosophers most admit this. Determinism and materialism, They agree, win the day. But they're remarkably quiet about it. Instead of spreading the important scientific message que our behaviors are the deterministic results of a physical process, they'd rather invent new "compatibilist" versions of free will: versions que comport with determinism. "Well, When We order strawberry ice cream we really Could Not have ordered vanilla, "They Say," but we still have free will in another sense. And it's the sense only that's important. "" * Essayist, core member of Studies of Science, Technology and Society (ICPD). Writes under the new orthographic agreement...

...2014 Edge Annual Question Video by Jesse Dylan from Edge Foundation on Vimeo.

Every year, BB pal, legendary book agent, and Edge.org founder John Brockman asks very smart people like Daniel C. Dennett, David Gelernter, Alison Gopnik, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Kevin Kelly a big question at the intersection of science and culture. Here's filmmaker Jesse Dylan's impressionistic documentary on last year's Edge Question, "What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?"

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that Are Blocking Progress
Edited by John Brockman 

Brockman (What Should We Be Worried About?), founder of the Edge Foundation, has compiled a series of humorous and thought-provoking short essays from a wide array of scientists, science writers, and assorted academics. Several essays deal with concepts that aren’t fully understood, even by experts; string theory, for instance, is addressed in several sections, each from a slightly different angle. More philosophical topics receive consideration as well, such as free will, nature vs. nurture, and the difference between the brain and the mind (if there is one). Even economics is included. Some topics, like the lament over the term rocket scientist or the problem with artificial intelligence, are arguments about definitions, while other discussions contemplate the morality of certain practices in science. One fascinating result of having several authors address the same topic is seeing firsthand the ways experts disagree with one another. A common thread throughout is the reminder that science and its practitioners do not exist in a vacuum: those who work in areas that many consider esoteric still fight traffic and worry about what their work will do to make the world better. Brockman succeeds in presenting scientific work that will appeal to a variety of readers, no matter their background. 
 

News & Events

Penn State Brandywine Common Read "kickoff" event set for Sept. 11

9/5/2014 —Penn State Brandywine will host its first Common Read event of the academic year—a panel discussion titled, "What Is Brandywine Worried About"—on Thursday, Sept. 11, at 11:30 a.m. in the Vairo Library Amphitheatre. Students, faculty and staff are invited to this thought-provoking dialogue, which mirrors the theme of this year’s Common Read book, "What Should We Be Worried About?"

The event will feature six panelists, including Brandywine faculty, staff and students, who will discuss topics that concern each of them in today's world. Topics will range from educational issues to scientific reasoning and beyond.

"What Should We Be Worried About?," edited by John Brockman, is a collection of short essays revealing the planet’s most hidden threats. The essays are written by some of the world’s most influential scientists who were asked to disclose unknown situations that worry them. The result was a book that changes the way people view biology, economics, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, psychology, war, technology and much more.

The campus Common Read was created to provide an opportunity for the entire Brandywine community to participate in knowledgeable conversation about a shared text, allowing the campus to develop a dialogue focused on one central idea or question.

In the event of inclement weather, the panel discussion will be held in the Tomezsko Building, room 103. For more information about this year’s Common Read selection, visit Penn State Brandywine’s Common Read webpage.

I was fascinated by this book from the moment I picked it up at Barnes & Noble. I had heard of a few of the writers Brockman tapped for this volume, but I was unfamiliar with most of the names listed in the table of contents. Moreover, I could not find any rhyme or reason to the authors selected to present their various perspectives on what should, in fact, be on our radar screens when it comes to what we should be distressing about. Although everyone arguably has some connection to science, I found it impossible to identify a common thread characterizing all of the contributors.

Most of the selections run only two to three pages, which made the book particularly easy to digest in a series of short sittings. Over the week it took me to get through all of the vignettes, I probably spent no more than an hour reading the book at any one time. Still, many of the ideas resonated with me on several levels. I found myself thinking about what I had read as I was involved in other activities throughout the day. For example, I spent my entire run one afternoon reflecting on the chapter by Martin Rees, “We are in denial about catastrophic risks.” Rees is an emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.

This Will Change Everything

...provides more than 100 specialists in various fields to answer the question" What will change everything?"... Sometimes frightening, but very scenic professors, books, authors, public figures, insights and predictions reflect the innovative new ways of thinking and perception of the surrounding environment options. Intellectuals considerations, covering areas from genetics to computer science, points to the inevitable changes that will determine both the public and the rebuilding of the universe. Any thoughts expressed declares a new idea that appears small, but important piece of the future map.

A popular Washington Post article by my colleague Michael S. Rosenwald said that researchers were finding that the habit of scanning and skinning material online was changing the human brain and hindering people’s” ability to read long, complex and dense material. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, is highly skeptical. ...

… "The truth is, probably, that the brain is simply not adaptable enough for such a radical change. Yes, the brain changes as a consequence of experience, but there are likely limits to this change, a point made by both Steve Pinker and Roger Schank when commenting on this issue. If our ability to deploy attention or to comprehend language processes were to undergo substantial change, the consequences would cascade through the entire cognitive system, and so the brain is probably too conservative for large-scale change."

Pinker and Schank were among a group of people who responded in 2010 to Edge.org’s question: How is the Internet changing the way you think? Pinker, a renowned experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist at Harvard University, gave this answer: Not at all. He wrote in part: …

"What Should We Be Worried About?" is the title of a new 2014 book edited by John Brockman, in which 153 scientists, professors and leading thinkers write two- and three-page essays in response to the book title.

One essay highlights an issue that will worry governments increasingly in the future. The issue is the current unsustainable expectation of infinite economic growth.

The essay title is a question: "A World Without Growth?" by financial risk expert Satyajit Das. To paraphrase, all modern societies, whether capitalist, socialist or communist, depend on continuing economic growth as a universal solution for all political, social and economic problems, which includes improving living standards and reducing poverty.

Also, growth is now expected to solve the problems over overindebted individuals, businesses and nations.

Over the past 30 years, globalization and debt-driven consumption across the planet became the tool of generating economic growth. That planetwide growth is destroying the Earth's environment and using up finite resources, especially water.

Those factors, plus unsustainable debt levels rising in all nations, threatens to end an unprecedented 200 years of growth and expansion. ...

They say a fool and his money are never as much time together in this blog are very concerned about your money going to help make it ready and so the little money they have always be with you.

Editors of Edge.org  asked some of the most influential thinkers of the world, including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians, what they considered the most important scientific concepts of the modern age. The result is the book This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking...a collection of 200 essays exploring all kinds of concepts. ...

Any political ideology involves some idea of the state of fiscal spending and tax scheme. And the practical tools of public policy (whether laws, regulations, taxes, or government subsidy programs) are directly influenced by the ideology of officials who create the advisers they hire, and the voters who elected to the first.

....And since we have an ideology formed, it acts as a "filter" that we use to make sense of the reality around us. As explained Gerald Smallberg...(see "Bias is the Nose for the Story" on "This Will Make You Smarter", 2012), humans do not appreciate the objective reality to filter the incredible amount of data they receive... Bias says Smallberg "is an intuition-a sensitivity, receptivity, which acts as a lens or filter our perceptions [...] These biases mediate between our intellect and our emotions to create, from perceptions, opinions, judgments, categories, metaphors, analogies, theories and ideologies through which we frame the way we see the world." This notion...is related to the argument of Daniel Kahneman (a psychologist and Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, see "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011) in the sense that our brain cohabiting two systems, one operating biases..."automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and without feeling voluntary control" and another that "directs attention to activities that require mental effort, including complex calculations [...] and are associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration".

A man would not be human if he did not care would reveal himself.But what if scientists worried?

Annually John Brockman, founder of the famous discussion platform allows Edge.org , a question for a selection of the most interesting scientists, authors and artists in the world. The responses are then collected and published in book form. This time, Brockman asked the question: "Where should we should be worried about?"

The result can be read in the book recently published 153 x caffeine for your mind. Include Nicholas Carr (The shallow), Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate), Brian Eno (musician and producer of U2), Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Black Swan) and 148 others to answer question posed by John Brockman. They talk briefly and powerfully about the concerns that keep them busy, such as more and more people are becoming increasingly stress the consequences of a major Internet outage, and that we have ceased to explore the space ...

Cosmologist Sean Carroll is one of many who have recently answered the annual question posed by Edge.org, which this year was: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Sean, whom I’ve met at the Naturalism workshop he organized not long ago, and for whom I have the highest respect both as a scientist and as a writer, picked “falsifiability.”

Which is odd, since the concept — as Sean knows very well — is not a scientific, but rather a philosophical one.

Now, contra some other skeptics of my acquaintance, at least one of whom was present at the above mentioned workshop, Sean is actually somewhat knowledgable and definitely respectful of philosophy of science, as is evident even in the Edge piece. Which means that what follows isn’t going to be yet another diatribe about scientism or borderline anti-intellectualism (phew!). ...

The book also focuses on lesser-known ideas, such as the modular mind. These sections are the ones who make the work fun and interesting.

One or the other essay is difficult to understand for the layman, most texts but present themselves as easily digestible and entertaining. No contribution is longer than four pages. The shortest essay is even only three words: "Keep it short." He brings an idea from philosophy to the point - that of Occam's Razor. It says that one should be frugal in the formation of scientific theories: If you have the choice between several possible explanations of the same facts is to bring forward the simplest theory - that is the one that gets by with as few hypotheses. The tightness of the contributions makes the book even to the profitable reading if you just only has ten minutes time to read.

...The compilation of the brilliant, sometimes even stunning ideas can be recommended to all who are interested in science.

The telescope, that allows us to see far in space and thus back in time, giving us an unprecedented understanding of our own existence, is a far superior tool

Reese regards the internet as the greatest human invention of all time. In barely two decades, it has become so essential to our lives and work that one cannot imagine doing almost anything without it. Indeed, in a book that comes out this week, a collection of essays titled What Should We Be Worried About? by a hundred or so prime thinkers of the world, philosopher Daniel Dennett and historian of science and technology George Dyson consider the possible breakdown of the internet as the issue that they are most worried about. ...

A cross-disciplinary kaleidoscope of intelligent concerns for the self and the species.

In his famous and wonderfully heartening letter of fatherly advice, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his young daughter Scottie a list of things to worry and not worry about in life. Among the unworriables, he named popular opinion, the past, the future, triumph, and failure "unless it comes through your own fault." Among the worry-worthy, courage, cleanliness, and efficiency. What Fitzgerald touched on, of course, is the quintessential anxiety of the human condition, which drives us to worry about things big and small, mundane and monumental, often confusing the two classes. It was this "worryability" that young Italo Calvino resolved to shake from his life. A wonderful 1934 book classified all of our worries in five general categories that endure with astounding prescience and precision, but we still struggle to identify the things truly worth worrying about — and, implicitly, working to resolve — versus those that only strain our psychoemotional capacity with thedeathly grip of anxiety.

In What Should We Be Worried About? (public library), intellectual jockey and Edge founder John Brockman tackles this issue with his annual question — which has previously answered such conundrums as the single most elegant theory of how the world works (2012) and the best way to make ourselves smarter (2011) — and asks some of our era’s greatest thinkers in science, psychology, technology, philosophy, and more to each contribute one valid "worry" about our shared future. Rather than alarmist anxiety-slinging, however, the ethos of the project is quite the opposite — to put in perspective the things we worry about but shouldn’t, whether by our own volition or thanks to ample media manipulation, and contrast them with issues of actual concern, at which we ought to aim our collective attention and efforts in order to ensure humanity’s progress and survival. . . .

. . .What Should We Be Worried About? is an awakening read in its entirety. For more of Brockman’s editorial-curatorial mastery, revisit the Edge Questions compendiums from 2013 and 2012, and see Nobel-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and flaws of our intuition.

These scientific ideas will drive you crazy

Much has been made of this year's question at John Brockman's Edge, generally described as an online salon. Brockman asked for recommendations about which scientific ideas should be retired, and some 170 salonists replied. Dennis Overbye plucked up a few proposed discards for consideration at Out There, concluding, "No matter who you are, you are bound to find something that will drive you crazy."

SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
FEUILLETON 
Von Andrian Kreye
No. 15, Montag, 20. Januar 2014

Once a year, the New York literary agent John Brockman on his online forum for science and culture edge.org, asks one question. He gets answers from his network of scientists, intellectuals and artists. For 2014 was the question was "What Scientific Ideas Should We Retire?" Among the 174 responses received to date by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ("Essentialism"), the science historian George Dyson ("Science and Technology"), the neuro-scientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore ("Left Brain/Right Brain"), as well as the response of the SZ-Feuilleton Editor, Andrian Kreye" Moore's Law.)

The latest assault on our uniqueness comes from Edge.org, which asked the world’s supposedly most “brilliant minds” to come up with ideas that should be retired in science. 

We must accelerate the pace at which science corrects itself. Because science can remain reliable. For this is as the strategic question that arises Edge this year, the community of researchers led by John Brockman: what scientific theories are ripe for retirement? Over 130 scholars - including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Aubrey de Grey, Sherry Turkle, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly - responded. Surprises abound. The findings are published edge.org .

Yesterday, I discussed some of this year's "Annual Question" answers at Edge.org, which was:

What scientific idea is ready for retirement?

The responses were a diverse set of scientific ideas from scientists and thinkers across a wide range of disciplines. 

This year, I was invited to contribute to the Edge Foundation’s Annual Question. Other contributor include Helen Fisher, Irene Pepperberg, Alan Alda, Nina Jablonski, Jay Rosen, and, well 150 others: http://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement

The question was, “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”

My contribution: The Way We Produce And Advance Science

Unlike rock stars, scientific ideas do not usually burn out. They fade away and outlast their usefulness.

This is what motivated a new survey of 166 scientists and intellectuals, asking which ideas ought to be “retired” from science, not quite because they are wrong, but because they are old and ineffective, like nature versus nurture, left-brain versus right-brain, or carbon footprints.

As with Newton’s law of gravity, which gave way to Einstein’s, many of these ideas were once on the cutting edge, but have since been revealed as incomplete, outdated and bland. So the survey, released Tuesday by U.S. literary agent John Brockman, founder of the web salon Edge.org, is like spring cleaning for science. The point is to clear away junk, but sometimes you rediscover something useful under the couch.

It is unrealistic to believe that everything science believes today will continue to be believed into the future ... and I frankly know of no scientist (except perhaps Sheldon Cooper) who believes such a thing. New evidence will cause scientists to revise the thinking and models, and the understanding of reality will shift accordingly. This is as it should be.

But which current assumptions or theories are, here and now, most ready to be retired?

That's the question posed by this year's "annual question" over at Edge.org. You can find the responses from the 176 respondents - amazing intellects from all over science and academia - over at the website, and they are all extremely fascinating. 

Pre-Publication Serialization

"The online salon at edge.org is a living document of millions of words charting the Edge conversation over the past 15 years. It is available, gratis, to the general public.

"As the late artist James Lee Byars and I once wrote: 'To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.' At the centre of every Edge project are remarkable people and remarkable minds—scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists and entrepreneurs."

But they do like to talk about beauty, a lot, at least when mass media are listening. Edge.org, a gathering point for celebrity scientists and public intellectuals, spent the whole of 2012 mulling over a question proposed by Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker: “What is your favourite elegant, deep or beautiful explanation?” The 194 submissions, which included quantum theory and Einstein’s explanation of gravity, were recently published by Harper Perennial under the title This Explains Everything. 

However, Tetlock found two distinguishable groups of thinkers among the experts: hedgehogs and foxes.

...These findings taught Tetlock, the author of Expert Political Judgment, a few lessons about pundits. They "were hard pressed to do better than chance, were overconfident, and were reluctant to change their minds in response to new evidence. That combination doesn't exactly make for a flattering portrait of the punditocracy," he recently told Edge.org. 

Question: "What should worry us in the future?" Answered 150 of the most respected people for their research or their remarkable intelligence. And how many people, so many answers about what people should pursue in the future.

List of people interviewed includes winners of Nobel prize, authors of science fiction and a lot of scholars in psychology, physics or biology. Below is a short list of the most interesting answers ...

Computer scientist David Gelernter answering the 2013 annual question of Edge.org, "What should we be worried about?"

If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word's value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society's ability to communicate in writing decays. ...

Each December for the past 15 years, John Brockman, a literary agent, search among business cards to invite the best scientists and writers discuss what occasion of scientific concepts can improve the cognitive ability of humanity. The topic we discussed in December last year is "What do we have to worry about in 2013?" ...

The crisis of the Internet

Does not need to fear that any young person is inventing nuclear weapons in some neighborhood low, because this work needs a lot of financial resources and it is difficult to do it without being noticed by people. However, if this young man has a laptop with access to the Internet, you can devote a few hours every day to take advantage of electronic defects in the world, and hardly anyone notices. In addition, the cost is very low, also the risk of being punished after being caught.

Anxiety is not only the most common mental problem in the United States, it verges on a national obsession. Last year, New York Magazine declared it the signature diagnosis of our time with Xanax as its pharmacological mascot, taking over from depression and Prozac in the 1990s. The New York Times devotes an entire ongoing series to probing the anxious mind. And the online forum the Edge asks as its key question for 2013: "what should we be worried about?" All this worrying represents our own apocalyptic myopia. Before we know it, we're not just worrying about love, death, sickness, children, money—we're worrying about the worrying itself.

Stanford professor and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky chooses to discuss swarm intelligence.

"Observe a single ant," he notes, "and it doesn't make much sense – walking in one direction, suddenly careening in another for no obvious reason, doubling back on itself. Thoroughly unpredictable. The same happens with two ants, with a handful of ants.

"But a colony of ants makes fantastic sense. Specialized jobs, efficient means of exploiting new food sources, complex underground nests with temperature regulated within a few degrees."

What's fascinating about all this, Sapolsky goes on to say, is that "there's no blueprint or central source of command." Rather than "the wisdom of the crowd," the complexity of an ant colony depends on simple behavior algorithms "that consist of a few simple rules for interacting with the local environment and local ants."

Around the same time, I was checking out responses to a question that science-book agent John Brockman just posted Edge.org: “What should we be worried about?” Brockman has been posing questions like this to his stable of professional eggheads, or Edgeheads, annually since 1998. Reading over responses to Brockman’s question, I was struck by how many Edgeheads are fretting over the future of particle physics in particular and pure science in general. Here are edited excerpts from Edge.org: ...

If you, without any reference, enter Edge inadvertently, you might think that you have come upon a useful digital magazine. It will be a mistake. Edge is not a magazine but a conversation, probably the most useful space at the moment for anyone who wants to peer into the flowering of the most advanced human thought. In Edge, there is no stable of contributors who write eye-catching articles on different topics that have come to be called culture; There is a surprising territory where one finds, in rigorous disarray, the vanguard of scientific knowledge, at this technological and humanistic moment.

That which has come to be called the third culture.

....Edge is the opposite of Twitter: there is only room for those who have something to say, things that say they are solidly argued and, of course, there is no way to synthesize anything in 140 characters.

Stop by there....Edge is an online salon that has preserved millions of words that trace the most fascinating cultural conversation of the last fifteen years. Cultural, of course, in the best sense of the word. The seventeen Edge Questions formulated as of today have resulted in a total of over two thousand responses, and provide one of the most complete ready-to-wear knowledge bases, ideal for incorporation into the wardrobe of our particular wisdom.

It's not useful nor does it make sense to summarize. You have to go and read it daily, to have intellectual food for a few months because each of these reflections is a micro-essay on a specific topic that opens doors to reflection and study in all fields of human knowledge. 

Edge.org is a website that is definitely worth reading, and rightly enjoys being known as "The world's smartest website." It has a great form of online debate in which world experts, the most meritorious scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, are invited to answer a question. The get the year off to a good start, Edge asked the question: "What *Should* We Be Worried About". The answers are often quite abstract, drifting in the direction of loose discussion of broader, long-term problems. Some, however, relate to current problem that sooner or later will catch up to us.

…A long, but extremely nutritious and useful reading, which I recommend to all.

"A COLLECTION of essays by big thinkers answering big questions may never be a page-turner, but should still be deeply satisfying. And This Explains Everything delivers."

Every year John Brockman, editor of the online salon Edge, puts forth a question that he hopes will inspire fascinating answers from leading scientists and thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and Sherry Turkle. He has done it again. This time he asked, "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" A multiplicity of answers are offered in the compact, accessible essays that form "This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works" (Harper), edited by Brockman. If you want to increase the intellectual heft of your reading while keeping it entertaining, "This Explains Everything" will do nicely.  

Science salon Edge.org is permeated with a sense of wonder. Maybe that's what lured in the many brainy contributors (Steven Pinker, Brian Eno) to This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, edited by John Brockman ($18, Harper Perennial).

All these kinds of pedestrian worries are horrible enough, but the Edge list makes it clear that we haven't considered all the delicious possibilities out there.

I had no idea, for example, that I needed to be worried about "data disenfranchisement," as David Rowen, the editor of Wired UK, suggests, or the end of what Adam Alter calls "hardship inoculation."

I was amazed at how many smart people (psychologist Susan Blackmore, MIT researcher David Dalrymple, roboticist Rodney A. Brooks) were worried about robotics. While I have wasted far too much time worrying about "men," just as biological anthropologist Helen Fisher did in the survey, and "stress," as aggregator Arianna Huffington responded, I don't think we are talking about the same things.

As is the case every year, Edge.org, the prestigious site disclosure and debate, throws down the gauntlet to his question of the year: what should we care? From his website, whose identity definition reads: "To reach the bank of knowledge of the world, look for more complex and sophisticated minds, reúnalas in a room, and have to question each other the questions that are being raised" - the aristocracy of thought, science, philosophy or art takes stock of the concerns of our time, presenting an assortment of Gordian knots. And there is more shade than is pinched inside the question: we care about the concern. community today lives with the feeling that his days are no longer a blank canvas to fill, not even moral competition coup and epistemological. ... 

For 15 years, the literary agent John Brockman has been posing open-ended questions on his Web site Edge.org. Last year’s question — “What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?” — drew responses from more than 150 scientists and creative thinkers. The geographer Jared Diamond wonders at the 1950s experiments that revealed how plants and animals generate electricity; the anthropologist Helen Fisher thinks we can transcend the old nature-nurture debates by studying how the environment can turn genes on and off. But the meta-award goes to the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for answering one question with another: “Where do we get the idea that the beauty of an explanation has anything to do with the likelihood of its being true?

... Kevin Kelly thinks we should worry about the "underpopulation bomb" - the first time in human history to experience a diminishing number of young people combined with an increasing number of robots. ... Paul Saffo worries about a coming fight between two extreme classes he calls "engineers" and "druids", basically optimists and pessimists respectively who either want to use technology or ban technology. "Druids fear that robot cars are unsafe; Engineers wonder why humans are allowed to drive at all." Andy Clark says we don't need to worry about Super-AIs ruling the world, unless they get culture first. That's just a sampling of the many references to robots, robotics, and machine intelligence. As it has been in past years, the full set of responses is well worth a read for anyone with an interest in the future of the world.

China at home

This week's question came Annual  Edge . The suggested science historian George Dyson: "What should concern us?". The answers make up an interesting catalog of contemporary concerns ...

"...fun and inspirational collection of brief essays...that present wonderful explanations of the world around us. The result is 150 brief essays that present wonderful explanations of the world around us. The authors include Richard Dawkins, Eric Kandel, Alan Alda, and Brian Eno; all have something worthwhile to contribute. VERDICT This engaging collection can be read from cover to cover or browsed as interest dictates, but all inquisitive readers will enjoy it. Highly recommended."

... This year, that query was "What Should We Be Worried About?", and the idea was to identify new problems arising in science, tech, and culture that haven't yet been widely recognized. 

This year's respondents include former presidents of the Royal Society, Nobel prize-winners, famous sci-fi authors, Nassem Nicholas Taleb, Brian Eno, and a bunch of top theoretical physicists, psychologists, and biologists. And the list is long. Like, book-length long. There are some 150 different things that worry 151 of the planet's biggest brains. And I read about them all, so you don't have to: here's the Buzzfeedized version, with the money quote, title, or summary of the fear pulled out of each essay. Obviously, go read the rest if any of the below get you fretting too.

What keeps the smartest folks in the world awake at night? Here goes:

1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist.

2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb

3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher

4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher

5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist ...

A spat has broken out between Hungary's Economy Ministry and Roubini Global Economics about who is to blame for the downward spiral of the national currency, the forint, after Roubini's firm Roubini Global Economics (RGE) recommended shorting the currency. ... Hungary's Ministry for National Economy said in a statement that the forint began to depreciate after economist Nouriel Roubini - dubbed Dr Doom for his pessimistic forecasts - said in a newsletter that failure to secure a deal with the International Monetary Fund was bad news for the currency. ... But Roubini economists cited comments made by Economy Minister Gyorgy Matolcsy in a newspaper column [ED. NOTE: A review of This Will Make You Smarter, the 2011 Edge Question book], in which he seemed to favor the country adopting more unorthodox economic policies as the reason for the currency's weakness. 

The discussion is seeded with contributions from dozens of philosophers, futurists, academics, writers, artists and scientists. They don't warn of topical issues of the day — such as gun control or government debt or whatever is in the headlines right now.

They are thinking a little ahead. ... Such as this from biologist and author Colin Tudge: Science, in short, is in danger of losing its integrity and its intellectual independence—of becoming the handmaiden of big business and the most powerful governments. ... And this from journalist and author David Berreby: What worries me is the ongoing "greying" of the world population, which is uneven globally but widespread. It is not "on the radar" (except for occasional gee-whiz news stories and narrow discussions about particular problems for this or that trade).    

Among the other responses, I noticed a number with the post-rational theme that we ought to worry about the ways we worry—because of the way our minds are organized, these writers think, we can't fret about the right things, even as we wear ourselves into a frazzle about the wrong ones.

For instance, Dan Sperber worries that we generally worry in ways that are futile but wasteful of our limited time and energy.

Another "meta" theme this year is the unexamined consequences of the human race's process of taming itself. For instance, Scott Atran worries that the rich variety of human experience is turning into one homogenized global beige, the way that the planet's rich diversity of edible plants has been crowded out by a few monocultures. And Nicholas Humphrey worries about the ease with which people now access any knowledge they seek.

I was also struck by Alison Gopnik's worry about our misplaced notions of childrearing, which causes people to worry about inconsequential things (which way the stroller faces, which form of "sleep training" to use) while missing the consequential ones (like the fact that so many American children grow up in poverty, thus missing out on the "long, protected, stable childhood" that best serves a developing human being). That one ties together the threads of misplaced anxiety, reliance on technology, and the effects of today's experiences on tomorrow's people. It also is one of those mind-altering posts which causes you wonder "how could I have not seen that?"

All in all, it's a stimulating collection. Well worth a look.

A (ambitious) recipe practiced by Brockman since 1996, after a period of contacts, meetings and dialogues with the guru of the "new knowledge", the most advanced frontiers of science, technology, philosophy, when brought together in a virtual room a hundred the likes of Murray Gell-Mann, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Niles Eldredge, Paul Davies, John Barrow, Jared Diamond — to name but a few - asking them the question: "What questions are you asking youirself?".

This led to edge.org and soon the "room" has become an apartment and then a palace from which pass the best brains that Brockman is able to intercept and willingly agree to talk to each other and to the public the content of these dialogues . Cornerstone of the initiative - and that is the common thread of what would otherwise be (and in part) only a juxtaposition of extravagant opinions - are precisely the questions that initial took the form of "annual question," which launches Brockman beginning of each year and that over the months you will find answers, more or less agree, the new intellectuals of the third culture.

Just yesterday, on time in advance via Twitter, has been entrusted to the web application of 2013: "What should we be worried about?", Pointing out that the answers must indicate the "scientific reasons" concerns and confirming our impression that the type and the tone of these questions would be discussed.

The website for years Edge.org meets many of the best scientists, artists, thinkers and technologists, all attentive to think the changes in knowledge and how to understand the world and life. As every year, the site invites them to answer a single question. The nearly 200 responses are an incredible display of wit, knowledge and sensitivity. And like every year, Radar read them and reproduced the 10 most remarkable and original to the question that opened in 2012: What's your favorite explanation deeper, beautiful or elegant?  ...

And the answers do not disappoint. In fact, reinforce, if proof were still needed the deep sense of cultural path Edge: breaking the walls that traditionally separate scientific specialties and interdisciplinary approach to research in this time of great change, not only preference intellectual or fashionable slogan, but real preconditions for an exploration of the very sources of innovative knowledge. 

Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question. ... The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Einstein's reinterpretation of the cosmos through general relativity and the idea that we live in one of an infinity of universes are some of the most elegant and beautiful human ideas, according to a group of the world's leading thinkers.

A sort of scientific-cultural online salon, Edge poses its annual big question to a select group of thinkers and publishes their responses. This year's essayists include biologist Richard Dawkins, geographer Jared Diamond and computer scientist David Gelernter. It all goes online at 12:01 a.m. Sunday morning. edge.org.

The Opinion Pages
More Tools for Thinking
David Brooks, March 29, 2011

In Tuesday’s column I describe a symposium over at Edge.org on what scientific concepts everyone’s cognitive toolbox should hold. There were many superb entries in that symposium, and I only had space to highlight a few, so I’d like to mention a few more here.

Before I do, let me just recommend that symposium for the following reasons. First, it will give you a good survey of what many leading scientists, especially those who study the mind and society, are thinking about right now. You’ll also be struck by the tone. There is an acute awareness, in entry after entry, of how little we know and how complicated things are. You’ll come away with a favorable impression of the epistemological climate in this subculture.

Here though, are a few more concepts worth using in everyday life:

Clay Shirky nominates the Pareto Principle. We have the idea in our heads that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle). But this is not how the world is organized in sphere after sphere. The top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent of the wealth. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers in any company will produce a disproportionate share of the value. Shirkey points out that these distributions are regarded as anomalies. They are not.

Jonathan Haidt writes that “humans are the giraffes of altruism.” We think of evolution as a contest for survival among the fittest. Too often, “any human or animal act that appears altruistic has been explained away as selfishness in disguise.” But evolution operates on multiple levels. We survive because we struggle to be the fittest and also because we are really good at cooperation.

A few of the physicists mention the concept of duality, the idea that it is possible to describe the same phenomenon truthfully from two different perspectives. The most famous duality in physics is the wave-particle duality. This one states that matter has both wave-like and particle-like properties. Stephon Alexander of Haverford says that these sorts of dualities are more common than you think, beyond, say the world of quantum physics.

Douglas T. Kenrick nominates “subselves.” This is the idea that we are not just one personality, but we have many subselves that get aroused by different cues. We use very different mental processes to learn different things and, I’d add, we have many different learning styles that change minute by minute.

Helen Fisher, the great researcher into love and romance, has a provocative entry on “temperament dimensions.” She writes that we have four broad temperament constellations. One, built around the dopamine system, regulates enthusiasm for risk. A second, structured around the serotonin system, regulates sociability. A third, organized around the prenatal testosterone system, regulates attention to detail and aggressiveness. A fourth, organized around the estrogen and oxytocin systems, regulates empathy and verbal fluency.

This is an interesting schema to explain temperament. It would be interesting to see others in the field evaluate whether this is the best way to organize our thinking about our permanent natures.

Finally, Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation nominates “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” This one hit home for me because I was just at a McDonald’s and guiltily ordered a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. I remember when these sandwiches were first introduced and they looked huge at the time. A quarter pound of meat on one sandwich seemed gargantuan. But when my burger arrived and I opened the box, the thing looked puny. That’s because all the other sandwiches on the menu were things like double quarter pounders. My baseline of a normal burger had shifted.  Kedrosky shows how these shifts distort our perceptions in all sorts of spheres.

There are interesting stray sentences throughout the Edge symposium. For example, one writer notes, “Who would be crazy enough to forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones than latrines?”

[Originally published March 29, 2011 in The New York Times.]

[Google translation:] As every year since 1998, the online magazine Edge (www.edge.org) has once again raised a great question to the best minds on the planet. And once again, this virtual forum of debate offers us all a wonderful opportunity to savor the thoughts of many top scientists and thinkers of the world.

This year, the question posed by Edge was: "What scientific concept improve our cognitive tools?". I ask readers of Eureka to take away everything they can from the 164 replies received. They will find many pearls of wisdom in this ocean of knowledge.

Among the illustrious figures who have participated in this high caliber survey, which has increased in prestige every year, the highlight is the biggest superstar of modern science, Craig Venter. ...

... Your response, like almost everything the father of the human genome and artificial life, says and does, not leave anyone indifferent: "We are not alone in the Universe." Venter believes that any discovery would have greater impact on mankind than the discovery of life outside our Solar System: "If we find that there are many, perhaps millions of origins of life, and therefore that life is present throughout the universe This will profoundly affect all humans." ...

...Edge has again shown that there is nothing like a asking a good question to the best brains.

We all know the world of Professional Wrestling is low brow and can appeal to the lowest common denominator. Each time Wrasslin' gets brought up in discussing MMA I can almost hear Luke Thomas doing his best mocking yokel impression while chastising people for making continual connections between the two before feeling the need to inform us of his penchant for The Classics as his preferred means of recreational entertainment. Something like that.

So it may come as some surprise that a clear cut example of Pro Wrestling terminology finds itself the centre of a recently published scientific essay. In this instance I'm referring to the term 'Kayfabe' which coincidentally enough I used in the headline of a recent article. ....

...With that out of the way, here's the Science part. Edge Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit virtual think tank and claims its informal membership to include "some of the most interesting minds of the world" and has been featured and referenced by the likes of American Scientist, New Scientist, The BBC, The Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Wired. Each year Edge poses a question in an attempt to get various thinkers from various backgrounds around the world to chime in with their own answers and interpretations. Questions have varied from philosophical ("What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" 2005), technological ("What is the most important invention in the last two thousand years ... and why?" - 1999) and cultural ("How is the Internet changing the way you think?" - 2010).

This year's question is psychological with "What Scientific Concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"....

...And as I alluded to, 'Kayfabe' formed the basis of one of the responses.

Eric Weinstein - Mathematician and Economist (PhD Mathematics at Harvard) and Principal of the Natron Group in Manhattan - writes:

The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling. ...

[Continue]

[Google translation]..."Truth is only a model", writes Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist. He finds that you should write down all the behind the ears, and lay people. In everyday life are shaped too much controversy about politics or lifestyle of the conviction to be right. Since one wishes for the humility of the researcher who knows he does not produce truth, but only models of reality that can quickly be back passé. "What scientific concept is in everyone's mental tool box?", had asked the thinker Club Edge.org. As suggested before Gershenfeld skepticism about truth.

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

This year, Brockman asked: "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" He took as his starting point James Flynn's notion of "shorthand abstractions" -- "concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ('market', 'placebo', 'random sample', 'naturalistic fallacy', are a few of his examples)". If we have a shorthand linguistic means of expressing the notion, Flynn suggested, we can use it as an element in thinking and debate. "This is the most challenging question we've put forth to date," Brockman said. Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural economics, said: "It is my favourite question ever. You will get great responses and actually move the culture forward."

On Saturday Brockman published this year's submissions, more than 150 answers from the likes of Craig Venter, Brian Eno and Steven Pinker (mostly men, it has to be said, with contributors such as Alison Gopnik and Lisa Randall making up a small female minority). A number of Wired contributors have sent in answers this year, writers such as Jonah Lehrer, David Eagleman and Matt Ridley. Some journalists and editors were also invited to add their thoughts, which is how I submitted a proposal for "personal data mining" as part of the symposium.

So what concepts did the contributors suggest that we need? The answers included:

“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” That may have been fine advice for the 20th century, but to survive in 2011 and beyond we need to step it up—a lot. We need to, say, embrace the concepts that many mental illnesses are just extremes of personality traits, that humans tend to accept credit for their successes but not blame for their failures, and that “wholes have properties not present in the parts,” as sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University writes on the online salon Edge (edge.org).

Christakis is one of scores of contributors to an annual exercise in which Edge, run by literary agent and author John Brockman, poses a question to scientists, technology gurus, philosophers, and other thinkers. Last year’s query was about how the Internet is changing the way we think, while 2008’s asked what the scholars had changed their mind about and why. This year’s: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Technology scholar Douglas Rushkoff nominates the concept that technologies have an “embedded bias” rather than being blank slates from which any outcome can arise. Cars have an embedded bias toward suburban sprawl; guns, an embedded bias toward killing people. By adding this concept to our cognitive toolkit, Rushkoff argues, we will have a better chance of using technologies “consciously and purposefully” and of resisting that bias. The embedded bias of the keyboardless iPad, for example, is toward passive consumption rather than active creation. To resist, get the add-on keyboard. ...

In the meantime, there’s a rich discussion of aspects of this question on Edge.org, a forum for all manner of minds, curated by the agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman. Once or twice a year since 1998, Edge has tossed provocative questions to variegated batches of scientists, writers, artists and innovators.

Some examples: How is the Internet changing the way you think? What have you changed your mind about? Why? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

This year’s question, proposed by Steven Pinker and shaped with input from Daniel Kahneman, has been addressed by more than 150 people so far:

What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? (The phrase "scientific concept" has a very broad meaning, explained at the link.)

You can read my Edge contribution, centering on a concept I call anthropophilia, below, with links to relevant context added (the Edge format is straight text).

I’m in the early stages of reading the other contributions. There’s much to chew on and enjoy. Here are a few highlights: ...

Planet's biggest brains answer this year's Edge question: 'What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?'

Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.

The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

The magazine called for "shorthand abstractions" – a way of encapsulating an idea or scientific concept into a short description that could be used as a component of bigger questions. The responses were published online today.

Many responses pointed out that the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety. ...

There's a fascinating list of scientific ideas that endured for a long time, but were wrong, over at Edge.org, the Web site created by the agent and intellectual impresario John Brockman.

The cautionary tale of the fight over the cause of stomach ulcers, listed by quite a few contributors there, is the kind of saga that gives science journalists (appropriately) sleepless nights. One of my favorites in the list is the offering of Carl Zimmer, the author and science journalist, who discusses some durable misconceptions about the stuff inside our skulls:

"This laxe pithe or marrow in man's head shows no more capacity for thought than a Cake of Sewet or a Bowl of Curds."

This wonderful statement was made in 1652 by Henry More, a prominent seventeenth-century British philosopher. More could not believe that the brain was the source of thought. These were not the ravings of a medieval quack, but the argument of a brilliant scholar who was living through the scientific revolution. At the time, the state of science made it was very easy for many people to doubt the capacity of the brain. And if you've ever seen a freshly dissected brain, you can see why. It's just a sack of custard. Yet now, in our brain-centered age, we can't imagine how anyone could think that way.?The list grew out of a query fromRichard Thaler, the director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of " Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness." (He also writes a column for The Times.)

Here's his question:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

Earlier this week Richard H. Thaler posted a question to selected Edge contributors, asking them for their favorite examples of wrong scientific theories that were held for long periods of time. You know, little ideas like "the earth is flat."

The contributor's responses came from all different fields and thought processes, but there were a few recurring themes. One of the biggest hits was the theory that ulcers were caused by stress–this was discredited by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who proved that the bacteria H. pylori bring on the ulcers. Gregory Cochran explains:

One favorite is helicobacter pylori as the main cause of stomach ulcers. This was repeatedly discovered and then ignored and forgotten: doctors preferred 'stress' as the the cause, not least because it was undefinable. Medicine is particularly prone to such shared mistakes. I would say this is the case because human biology is complex, experiments are not always permitted, and MDs are not trained to be puzzle-solvers–instead, to follow authority.

Another frequent topic of disbelief among Edge responders was theism and its anti-science offshoots–in particular the belief in intelligent design, and the belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Going by current political discussions in America it may seem that these issues are still under contention and shouldn't be included on the list, but I'm going to have to say differently, and agree with Milford Wolpoff:

Creationism's step sister, intelligent design, and allied beliefs have been held true for some time, even as the mountain of evidence supporting an evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life continues to grow. Why has this belief persisted? There are political and religious reasons, of course, but history shows than neither politics nor religion require a creationist belief in intelligent design. ...
 

THE FEIULLETON
NEW WORLD VIEWS: THE MAPS OF THE 21 CENTURY [pp18-19]

THE WORLD IS IN THE MIND
No map depicts reality - but we believe unwaveringly in the objectivity of cartography
TANJA MICHALSKY

THE GOAL IS THE GOAL 
Why we love paper maps, but no longer use
JENS-CHRISTIAN RABE

THE RAYS OF THE WHITE SPOTS 
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist is celebrating the new era of cartography with a festival of artists, scientists and designers
LAURA WEISSMUELLER

WE HAVE NOTHING MORE TO EXPECT 
Progress is the present management: Why cards have replaced the watch and GPS, the Big Ben of the present is
BERND GRAFF

WITH THE EYES OF THE EAGLE WHO MAKES MAPS AND USES, IS THE SOVEREIGN
BURKHARD MÜLLER

 

Whats the connection between Kevin Kellys habits on the internet, Louise Bourgeoiss contented view of France, and Craig Venters genome?

They can all be represented as maps. And this weekend, they all were -- along with hundreds of maps of experimental art, of the worlds oldest-known words, and of the steampunk-and-superheroes content of BoingBoing.

Oh, and not forgetting dozens more maps celebrating this magazines fascination with data visualisations as a way of turning data into stunningly beautiful visualisations.

Let me explain. Over the weekend I took part in an epic project organised by our friends at the Serpentine Gallery in London -- the Map Marathon, a live two-day event at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington. It was the fifth in the annual series of Serpentine Gallery Marathons, conceived by super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the gallerys extraordinarily energetic co-director of exhibitions, with gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones.

The Swiss-born Obrist, featured in Wired in February, was once called by Art Review "the art worlds most powerful figure". After seeing the impressive cast list for the two-day event, youll understand why -- with contributions from the likes of Anish Kapoor, David Adjaye and Gilbert & George.

In previous years, the Serpentines marathons have been curated around themes such as interviews and poetry. But this years theme was just up Wireds street (well, perhaps a short walk away up the A315): maps, in all their forms and beauty, from literal representations of physical landscapes, to abstract conceptualisations by scientists. The overall aim was "to challenge notions of art, culture, science, technology, and methods of public discourse and debate" -- and in that it more than succeeded.

From noon until 10pm on both Saturday and Sunday, there were non-stop live presentations by more than 50 artists, scientists, poets, writers, philosophers, musicians, architects and designers. There were also special collaborations with the Edge community and with the DLD conference community run by Steffie Czerny and Marcel Reichart, whose excellent events Ive written about here before.

On Sunday lunchtime, I shared the stage with Hal Bertram of ITO, the smart visualisers who worked with us on our "Data into Information" feature in Septembers issue of Wired. Our conversation was titled: When Data Meets Maps: How Datavisualisation is Changing the World. Hal showed some of our favourite visualisations, including examples of how OpenStreetMap was used to save lives after the Haiti earthquake in January, plus examples of how open data streams can be used effectively to visualise traffic flow.

Also up on stage were Wired friends such as Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen, whose work we featured a few months ago; and Aaron Koblin, who presented on "Re-Embodied Data: Mapping the Unseeable". But data visualisers were just one thread running through this constantly surprising event. There was Marina Abramovi? presenting on Body Maps; the writer Russell Hoban; and Marcus du Sautoy talking about Mathematical Maps.

One of my favourite panels was run by John Brockman, the literary super-agent who runs the EDGE community of "some of the most interesting minds in the world". Together with Lewis Wolpert and Armand Leroi, he presented maps submitted by members of the EDGE community. So we got to see Kevin Kellys internet; plus philosopher Eduardo Salcedo-Albaráns map of interconnections between Mexican drugs cartels.

That was followed by two strikingly contrasting but equally compelling sessions - C. E. B. Reas, the co-inventor (with Ben Fry) of the Processing software language, who explored the beautiful patterns it creates out of data; and architect David Adjaye, who showed some of the 35,000 photos he took in Africa.

Well done to the @WiredUK Twitter followers who got to go free of charge - the rest of you really will need to follow us on Twitter so you get early warning next time. And contragulations to all at the Serpentine for a rich and brain-expanding weekend.

Caught up in Moscow because of the volcanic ash cloud last week, my biggest regret was missing the annual Edge dinner in London on 19 April. Well, just look at the sort of people that Edge Foundation president, literary agent and superconnector John Brockman manages to bring together.

Guests at last year's London dinner ranged from Alfonso Cuarón and Terry Gilliam to Brian Eno and Richard Dawkins. So you can see why it was painful for me to be 3,000km away while all the big ideas were being nurtured over the entrees at Zilli Fish.

But Brockman -- whose latest book This Will Change Everything (Harper Perennial) lies well thumbed on my desk -- is not a man to waste an intellectual opportunity. In town from New York for the "eerily deserted" London International Book Fair, Brockman became caught up in talk of stranded travelers and 20-hour road trips. "Something is going on here that requires serious thinking," he reflected. "We've had earthquakes before, and we've had plane stoppages, but nothing like the continuing effects of the ash cloud. Why?"

So he invited the Edge community of smart and original thinkers -- from behavioural economists to psychologists, physicists to software engineers -- to think about the ash cloud and the reaction to it, and tell him (in 250 words) something "that I don't already know and that I'm not going to read in the newspapers".

The thinkers came through. Edge received contributions from the likes of 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 and Alexandra Zukerman. You can now read their conclusions -- an exercise that's worth your while. ...

Evgeny Morozov holds that Twitter is a control tool of authoritarian regimes. By invoking Søren Kierkegaard and Twitter Morozov explains why Jurgen Habermas always a bit too euphoric.

Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky had a short exchange of views in January in Prospect and a short exchange of blows on the importance of Twitter to the early Iranian protest movements. Morozov pointed out that encouraging social networks like Twitter and Facebook, created points of control by the regime. Clay Shirky said then: "Even taking into account the increased availability of surveillance, the net value of social media has shifted the balance of power in the direction of Iran's citizens."

FAZ today crossposted today a meeting between Morozov Shirky for Edge.org titled "Digital Power and It's Discontents". Significantly, among others, Morozov takes on Søren Kierkegaard, Jürgen Habermas and Twitter:

If there's something that fascinates me about the digital age, it's the evolution of the human psyche as it adjusts to the rapid expansion of informational reach and acceleration of informational flow.

The Edge Foundation, Inc. poses one question a year to be batted around by deep thinkers, this year: How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? One contribution that's bound to infuriate those of us of an older persuasion (I'll raise my hand) came from Marissa Mayer, the V.P. for Search Products & User Experience at Google.

The Internet, she posits, has vanquished the once seemingly interminable search for knowledge.

"The Internet has put at the forefront resourcefulness and critical-thinking," writes Mayer, "and relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment." She says that we now understand things in an instant, concepts that pre-Web would have taken us months to figure out.

So, basically, you don't have to memorize the The Gettysburg Address anymore, you just have to Google it or link to it. But here's my question: If you can Google it, does that mean you really understand it?

A favorite writer of mine, Nicholas Carr, who deals with all matters digital, cultural and technological has a good answer to that question. In his reply to Marissa Mayer, Carr offers a potent analysis of the difference between knowing and meaning.

He uses (brace yourself) a critical exploration of Robert Frost's poetry by Richard Poirier —Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing— to challenge what I might call the Google mentality.

"It's not what you can find out," he wrote. "Frost and (William) James and Poirier told us, it's what you know."

Gathering facts is not the same as gathering knowledge.

Il Sole 24 Ore - Nova

La Stampa

Today’s idea: Filtering, not remembering, is the most important mental skill in the digital age, an essay says.

But this discipline will prove no mean feat, since mental focus must take place amid the unlimited 

distractions of the Internet.

Internet | Edge, the high-minded ideas and tech site, has posed its annual question for 2010 — "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" — and gotten some interesting responses from a slew of smart people. They range from the technology analyst Nicholas Carr, who wonders if the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing; to Clay Shirky, social software guru, who sees the Web poised uncertainly between immature "Invisible High School" and more laudable "Invisible College." David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

O Estado De Sao Paulo (Brazil)

How is the internet changing the way you think?

THE HUFFINGTON POST

The online magazine Edge asked scientists, writers and artists, such as the Internet has changed their thinking. The answers are remarkable. ...

Two billion people worldwide use the Internet. The debates about the new technology, however, are not the same everywhere. In Germany, for example, the discourse is limited on the subject of the net, as it is especially focused on media and copyright debates.

The publication of the book "Payback", co-editor Frank Schirrmacher, co-editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung presents the German debate, giving the topic the the depth it deserves.

Prior to the publication Schirrmacher 's book, the American literary agent John Brockman, interviewed him for Edge.org, the online science and culture magazine.

Schirrmacher, in his book, also asked the question — Has the Internet changed thinking? Brockman has now taken up this issue, and formulated it as his fundamental question, which he asks at the end of each year of the scientists and authors who discuss and publish on Edge.

The answers have now been published on Edge.org. The authors are 131 influential scientists, authors and artists.

BRAIN TRUST

IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK?

Do you think the Internet has altered you mind at the neuronal, cognitive, processing, emotional levels? Yes, no, maybe, reply philosophers, scientists, writers, journalists to the Edge annual question 2010, in dozens of texts that are published online today Ana Gerschenfeld

Click here for PDF of Portuguese Original

In the summer of 2008, American writer Nicholas Carr published in the Atlantic Monthly an article under the titleIs Google making us stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains, in which highly criticized the Internet’s effects on our intellectual capabilities. The article had a high impact, both in the media and the blogosphere.

Edge.org – the intellectual online salon – has now expanded and deepened the debate through its traditional annual challenge to dozens of the world’s leading thinkers of science, technology, thought, arts, journalism. The 2010 question is: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?"

They reply that the Internet has made them (us) smarter, shallower, faster, less attentive, more accelerated, less creative, more tactile, less visual, more altruistic, less arrogant. That it has dramatically expanded our memory but at the same time made us the hostages of the present tense. The global web is compared to an ecosystem, a collective brain, a universal memory, a global conscience, a total map of geography and history.

One thing is certain: be they fans or critics, they all use it and they all admit that the Internet leaves no one untouched. No one can remain impervious to things such a Wikipedia or Google, no one can resist the attraction of instant, global, communication and knowledge.

More than 120 scientists, physicians, engineers, authors, artists, journalists met the challenge. Here, we present the gist some of their answers, including Nicholas Carr’s, who is also part of this online think tank founded by New-York literary agent John Brockman. If you have more time and think your attention span is up to it, we recommend you enjoy the whole scope of their length and diversity by visiting edge.org 

Who decides?

Daniel Hillis

Physicist, Computer Scientist

The real impact of the Internet is that it has changed the way we make decisions. More and more, it is not individual humans who decide, but an entangled, adaptive network of humans and machines. Although we created it, we did not exactly design it. It evolved. Our relationship to it is similar to our relationship to our biological ecosystem. We are co-dependent, and not entirely in control.

Speed of thinking

Andrian Kreye

Editor, Sueddeutsche Zeitung

If speeding up thinking continually constitutes changing the way I think, the Internet has done a marvelous job. All this might not constitute a change in thinking though. I haven't changed my mind or my convictions because of the Internet. I haven't had any epiphanies while sitting in front of a screen. The Internet so far has not given me no memorable experiences, although it might have helped to usher some along. It has always been people, places and experiences that have changed the way I think.

Facsimile of experience

Eric Fischl and April Gornik

Visual Artists

For the visual artist, seeing is essential to thought. So how has the Internet changed us visually? The changes are subtle yet profound. One loss is a sense of scale. Another is a loss of differentiation between materials. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.

Work and play

Kevin Kelly

Editor-At-Large, Wired

I am "smarter" in factuality, but my knowledge is now more fragile. Anything I learn is subject to erosion. My certainty about anything has decreased. That means that in general I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. The Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts. I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.

Digital sugar 

Esther Dyson

Former Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

I love the Internet. But sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty calories. It's sugar – short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts, Twitter posts, pop-ups and visualizations… Over a long period, many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. Could that be true of information sugar as well? Will we become allergic to it even as we crave it? And what will serve as information insulin?

Mind control

Larry Sanger

Co-founder of Wikipedia

Some observers speak of how our minds are being changed by information overload, apparently despite ourselves. Former free agents are mere subjects of powerful new forces. I don't share the assumption. Do we have any choice about ceding control of the self to an increasingly compelling "Hive Mind"? Yes. And should we cede such control, or instead strive, temperately, to develop our own minds very well and direct our own attention carefully? The answer, I think, is obvious.

Outsourcing the mind

Gerd Gigerenzer

Psychologist, Max Planck Institute

We are in the process of outsourcing information storage and retrieval from mind to computer, just as many of us have already outsourced the ability of doing mental arithmetic to the pocket calculator. We may loose some skills in this process, but the Internet is also teaching us new skills for accessing information. The Internet is a kind of collective memory, to which our minds will adapt until a new technology eventually replaces it. Then we will begin outsourcing other cognitive abilities, and hopefully, learn new ones. 

Thinking better

Stephen Kosslyn

Psychologist, Harvard University 

The Internet has extended my memory, perception, and judgment. These effects have become even more striking since I've used a smart phone. I now regularly pull out my phone to check a fact, to watch a video, and to read blogs. The downside is that when I used to have dead periods, I often would let my thoughts drift, and sometimes would have an unexpected insight or idea. Those opportunities are now fewer and farther between. But I think it's a small price to pay. I am a better thinker now than I was before I integrated the Internet into my mental and emotional processing.

Dramatic changes

Kai Kraus

Software Pioneer|

The Internet dramatically changed my own thinking. Not at the neuron level, but more abstractly: it completely redefined how we perceive the world and ourselves in it. But it is a double-edged sword, a yin-yang yoyo of the good, the bad and the ugly. The Net will not reach its true potential in my little lifetime. But it surely has influenced the thinking in my lifetime like nothing else ever has.

Tactile cyberworld

James O'Donnell

Classicist, Georgetown University

My fingers have become part of my brain. Just for myself, just for now, it's my fingers I notice. Ask me a good question today, and if I am away from my desk, I pull out my Blackberry – it's a physical reaction, a gut feeling that I need to start manipulating the information at my fingertips. At my desktop, it's the same pattern: the sign of thinking is that I reach for the mouse and start "shaking it loose". My eyes and hands have already learned to work together in new ways with my brain in a process that really is a new way of thinking for me. The information world is more tactile than ever before.

Promiscuity

Seth Lloyd

Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT

I think less. When I do think, I am lazier. For hundreds of millions of years, sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. The world-wide Web has usurped that role. A single illegal download can propagate more parasitic bits of information than a host of mating Tse Tse flies. For the moment, however, the ability of the Internet to propagate information promiscuously is largely a blessing. What will happen later? Don't ask me. By then, I hope not to be thinking at all.

Same old brain

Nicholas Christakis

Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University

The Internet is no different than previous (equally monumental) brain-enhancing technologies such as books or telephony, and I doubt whether books and telephony have changed the way I think, in the sense of actually changing the way my brain works. In fact, I would say that it is much more correct to say that our thinking gave rise to the Internet than that the Internet gave rise to our thinking. There is no new self. There are no new others. And so there is no new brain, and no new way of thinking. We are the same species after the Internet as before.

The map

Neri Oxman

Architect, Researcher, MIT

The Internet has become a map of the world, both literally and symbolically, as it traces in an almost 1:1 ratio every event that has ever taken place. As we are fed with information, thus withers the very power of perception, and the ability to engage in abstract and critical thought atrophies. Where are we heading in the age of the Internet? Are we being victimized by our own inventions?

Hunter-gatherers

Lee Smolin

Physicist, Perimeter Institute

The Internet hasn't, so far, changed how we think. But it has radically altered the contexts in which we think and work. We used to cultivate thought, now we have become hunter-gatherers of images and information. Perhaps when the Internet has been soldered into our glasses or teeth, with the screen replaced by a laser making images directly on our retinas, there will be deeper changes. 

The Matrix

John Markoff

Journalist, The New York Times

Not only have I been transformed into an Internet pessimist, but recently the Net has begun to feel downright spooky. Doesn't the Net seem to have a mind of its own? Will we all be assimilated, or have we been already? Wait! Stop me! That was The Matrix wasn't it?

The upload has begun

Sam Harris

Neuroscientist, The Reason Project

It is now a staple of scientific fantasy, or nightmare, to envision that human minds will one day be uploaded onto a vast computer network like the Internet. I notice that the prophesied upload is slowly occurring in my own case. This migration to the Internet now includes my emotional life. Increasingly, I develop relationships with other scientists and writers that exist entirely online. Almost every sentence we have ever exchanged exists in my Sent Folder. Our entire relationship is, therefore, searchable. I have many other friends and mentors who exist for me in this way, primarily as email correspondents.

Parallel Lives 

Linda Stone

Former Executive at Apple and Microsoft

Before the Internet, I made more trips to the library and more phone calls. I read more books and my point of view was narrower and less informed. I walked more, biked more, hiked more, and played more. I made love more often. The more I've loved and known it, the clearer the contrast, the more intense the tension between a physical life and a virtual life. The sense of contrast between my online and offline lives has turned me back toward prizing the pleasures of the physical world. I now move with more resolve between each of these worlds, choosing one, then the other – surrendering neither.

The Dumb Butler 

Joshua Greene

Cognitive Neuroscientist and Philosopher, Harvard University

The Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads. This is because the Internet doesn't (yet) know how to think. We still have to do it for ourselves, and we do it the old-fashioned way. Until then, the Internet will continue to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

The end of experience

Scott Sampson 

Dinosaur paleontologist

What I want to know how the Internet changes the way the children of the Internet age think. It seems likely that a lifetime of daily conditioning dictated by the rapid flow of information across glowing screens will generate substantial changes in brains, and thus thinking. But I have a larger fear, one rarely mentioned – the extinction of experience, the loss of intimate experience with the natural world. Any positive outcome will involve us turning off the screens and spending significant time outside interacting with the real world, in particular the nonhuman world.

Rewired

Haim Harari

Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science

There are three clear changes that are palpable. The first is the increasing brevity of messages. The second is the diminishing role of factual knowledge, in the thinking process. The third is in the entire process of teaching and learning: it may take another decade or two, but education will never be the same. An interesting follow-up issue, to this last comment, is the question whether the minds and brains of children will be physically "wired" differently than those of earlier generations. I tend to speculate in the affirmative.

The Price of omniscience

Terrence Sejnowski

Computational Neuroscientist, Salk Institute

Experiences have long-term effects on the brain's structure and function. Are the changes occurring in your brain as you interact with the Internet good or bad for you? Gaining knowledge and skills should benefit survival, but not if you spend all of your time immersed in the Internet. The intermittent rewards can become addictive. The Internet, however, has not been around long enough, and is changing too rapidly, to know what the long-term effects will be on brain function. What is the ultimate price for omniscience?

Thinking like the Internet 

Nigel Goldenfeld

Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I don't believe my way of thinking was changed by the Internet until around 2000. Why not? The answer, I suspect, is the fantastic benefit that comes from massive connectivity and the resulting emergent phenomena. Back in those days, the Internet was linear, predictable, and boring. It never talked back. But I'm starting to think like the Internet. My thinking is better, faster, cheaper and more evolvable because of the Internet. And so is yours. You just don't know it yet.

Greatest Detractor 

Leo Chalupa

Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis

The Internet is the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention of television. Moreover, while the Internet provides a means for rapidly communicating with colleagues globally, the sophisticated user will rarely reveal true thoughts and feelings in such messages. Serious thinking requires honest and open communication and that is simply untenable on the Internet by those that value their professional reputation. 

The Collective Brain

Matt Ridley

Science Writer 

Cultural and intellectual evolution depends on sex just as much as biological evolution does. Sex allows creatures to draw upon mutations that happen anywhere in their species. The Internet allows people to draw upon ideas that occur to anybody in the world. This has changed the way I think about human intelligence. The Internet is the latest and best expression of the collective nature of human intelligence.

Memory sharpener

Tom Standage 

Editor, The Economist

The Internet has not changed the way I think. What the Internet has done, however, is sharpen my memory. A quick search with a few well chosen keywords is usually enough to turn a decaying memory of a half-forgotten item into perfect recall of the information in question. This is useful now, but I expect it to become much more useful as I get older and my memory starts to become less reliable. Perhaps the same will be true of the way the Internet enhances our mental faculties in the years to come.

People in my head

Eva Wisten

Journalist, SEED Media Group

The Internet might not be changing how I think, but it does some of my thinking for me. And above all, the Internet is changing how I see myself. As real world activity and connections continue to be what matters most to me, the Internet, with its ability to record my behavior, is making it clearer that I am, in thought and in action, the sum of the thoughts and actions of other people to a greater extent than I have realized. 

Internet natives

Alison Gopnik

Psychologist, UC, Berkeley

The Internet has made my experience more fragmented, splintered and discontinuous. But I'd argue that's because I have mastered the Internet as an adult. So children who grow up with the Web will master it in a way that will feel as whole and natural as reading feels to us. But that doesn't mean that their experience and attention won't be changed by the Internet.

Repetition versus truth

Daniel Haun

Cognitive Anthropologist, Max Planck Institute

There is a human tendency to mistake repetition for truth. How do you find the truth on the Internet? You use a search engine, which determines a page's relevance by how many other relevant pages link to it. Repetition, not truth. Hence, the Internet does just what you would do. It isn't changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it.

Exaggeration

Steven Pinker

Cognitive Psychologist, Harvard University

I'm skeptical of the claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. To be sure, many aspects of the life of the mind have been affected by the Internet. Our physical folders, mailboxes, bookshelves, spreadsheets, documents, media players, and so on have been replaced by software equivalents, which has altered our time budgets in countless ways. But to call it an alternation of "how we think" is, I think, an exaggeration.

Mental Clock

Stanislas Dehaene

Neuroscientist, Collège de France

Few people pay attention to a fundamental aspect of the Internet revolution: the shift in our notion of time. Human life used to be a quiet routine that has become radically disrupted, for better or for worse. Do we aim for ever faster intellectual collaboration? Or for ever faster exploitation that will allow us to get good night's sleep while others do the dirty work? Our basic political options remain essentially unchanged.

Connecting is disconnecting 

Marc Hauser

Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University

Our capacity to connect through the Internet may be breeding a generation of social degenerates. I do not have Webophobia, greatly profit from the Internet as a consummate informavore, and am a passionate one-click Amazonian. But our capacity to connect is causing a disconnect. Perhaps Web 3.0 will enable a function to virtually hold hands with our Twitter friends.

Diminished attention

Nicholas Carr

Author

My own reading and thinking habits have shifted dramatically since I first logged onto the Web fifteen or so years ago. I now do the bulk of my reading and researching online. And my brain has changed as a result. Even as I've become more adept at navigating the rapids of the Net, I have experienced a steady decay in my ability to sustain my attention. My own experience leads me to believe that what we stand to lose will be at least as great as what we stand to gain.

Diet-Internet

Rodney Brooks

Computer Scientist, MIT

The Internet is stealing our attention. Unfortunately, a lot of what it offers is merely good sugar-filled carbonated sodas for our mind. We, or at least I, need tools that will provide us with the Diet-Internet, the version that gives us the intellectual caffeine that lets us achieve what we aspire, but which doesn't turn us into hyper-active intellectual junkies.

People Can Be Nice

Paul Bloom

Psychologist, Yale University

The proffering of information on the Internet is the extension of this everyday altruism. It illustrates the extent of human generosity in our everyday lives and also shows how technology can enhance and expand this positive human trait, with real beneficial results. People have long said that the Web makes us smarter; it might make us nicer as well.

A miracle and a curse

Ed Regis 

Science writer 

The Internet is not changing the way I think (nor the way anyone else thinks, either). I continue to think the same way I always thought: by using my brain, my senses, and by considering the relevant information. I mean, how else can you think? What it has changed for me is my use of time. The Internet is simultaneously the world's greatest time-saver and the greatest time-waster in history.

Ana Gerschenfeld

Every year, ideas impresario John Brockman asks one hundred super-bright minds one big question, and shares their answers with the world.

This time out, the question was about science and what big development in our lifetimes will change the world. What will change everything?

The answers — from Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Lisa Randall, Irene Pepperberg, and many more — range from mind-reading to space elevators to cross-species breeding. Yikes.

This hour, On Point: “This will change everything…”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, onTwitter, and on Facebook.

Guests:

John Brockman joins us from New York. He’s the founder of the Edge Foundation, which runs the science and technology websiteEdge.org. Every year, Edge asks scientists and thinkers a “big question,” and publishes the answers in a book, which Brockman edits. The latest, just out, is “This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future.” It’s based on the 2009 question: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” The 2010 question, “How is the internet changing the way you think?,” has just been posted.

From Cambridge, Mass., we’re joined by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and professor of physics at MIT. His response to the 2009 Edge question discusses coming technological advances resulting from deeper understanding of quantum physics. He’s the author of several books on physics for the lay reader, most recently “The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.”

And from Berkeley, Calif., we’re joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC-Berkeley and an expert on cognitive and language development. Herresponse to the 2009 Edge question discusses the extension of human childhood.  Her latest book is “The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.”

As each new year approaches, John Brockman, founder of Edge, an online publication, consults with three of the original members of Edge—Stewart Brand, founder and editor of Whole Earth Catalog; Kevin Kelly, who helped to launch Wired in 1993 and wrote “What Technology Wants,” a book to be published in October (Viking Penguin); and George Dyson, a science historian who is the author of several books including “Darwin Among the Machines.” Together they create the Edge Annual Question—which Brockman then sends out to the Edge list to invite responses. He receives these commentaries by e-mail, which are then edited. Edge is a read-only site. There is no direct posting nor is Edge open for comments.

Brockman has been asking an Edge Annual Question for the past 13 years. In this essay, he explains what makes a question a good one to ask and shares some responses to this year’s question: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” 

Read the responses in their entirety » 

It’s not easy coming up with a question. As the artist James Lee Byars used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” Edge is a conversation. We are looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. Surprise me with an answer I never could have guessed. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts that they normally might not have. 

The art of a good question is to find a balance between abstraction and the personal, to ask a question that has many answers, or at least one for which you don’t know the answer. It’s a question distant enough to encourage abstractions and not so specific that it’s about breakfast. A good question encourages answers that are grounded in experience but bigger than that experience alone. 

Before we arrived at the 2010 question, we went through several months of considering other questions. Eventually I came up with the idea of asking how the Internet is affecting the scientific work, lives, minds and reality of the contributors. Kevin Kelly responded:

And so we did.

Yet, we still had work to do in framing our question. When people respond to “we” questions, their words tend to resemble expert papers, public pronouncements, or talks delivered from a stage. “You” leads us to share specifics of our lived experience. The challenge then is to not let responses slip into life’s more banal details. 

For us, discussion revolved around whether we’d ask “Is the Internet changing the way we think?” or probe this topic with a “you” focused question. Steven Pinker, Harvard research psychologist, author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Blank Slate,” and one of several distinguished scientists I consult, advised heading in the direction of “us.”

Ultimately it’s my call so I decided to go with the “you” question in the hope that it would attract a wider range of individualistic responses. In my editorial marching orders to contributors, I asked them to think about the Internet—a much bigger subject than the Web, recalling that in 1996 computer scientist and visionary W. Daniel Hillis presciently observed the difference:

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.

Early Responders

Framing the question and setting a high bar for responses is critical. Before launching the question to the entire Edge list, I invited a dozen or so people who I believed would have something interesting to say; their responses would seed the site and encourage the wider group to think in surprising ways. Here are some of these early responses:

• 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, who wrote The Atlantic cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” asks whether the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing.

• Social software guru Clay Shirky says the answer is “ ‘too soon to tell.’ This isn’t because we can’t see some of the obvious effects already, but because the deep changes will be manifested only when new cultural norms shape what the technology makes possible. ... The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users.”

• 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?

• Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog, cannot function without the major players in his social extended mind—his guild. “How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think,” he writes. “Thanks to my guild’s Internet-mediated conversation, my neuronal thinking is enhanced immeasurably by our digital thinking.”

• 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?

The Conversation

The 2010 question elicited, in all, 172 essays that comprised a 132,000-word manuscript published online by Edge in January.  Kelly speaks about a new type of mind, amplified by the Internet, evolving, and able to start a new phase of evolution outside of the body. In “Net Gain,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins looks 40 years into the future when “retrieval from the communal exosomatic memory will become dramatically faster, and we shall rely less on the memory in our skulls.” Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” writes about “The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge” as he asks us to “consider the explosive situation: More information (particularly thanks to the Internet) causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge while degrading predictability.”  Nick Bilton, lead writer of The New York Times’s Bits blog, notes that “[the] Internet is not changing how we think. Instead, we are changing how the Internet thinks.” Actor Alan Alda worries about “[speed] plus mobs. A scary combination.” He wonders, “Is there an algorithm perking somewhere in someone’s head right now that can act as a check against this growing hastiness and mobbiness?” New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernanwrites that “we must keep on reading and not mistake new texts for new worlds, or new forms for new brains.” Numerous artists responded in enlightening ways, as their evocative headlines suggest:

• Marina Abromavic: “My Perception of Time”

• Stefano Boeri: “Internet Is Wind”

• Tony Conrad: “A Question With(out) an Answer”

• James Croak: “Art Making Going Rural”

• Olafur Eliasson: “The Internet as Reality Producer”

• Eric Fischl and April Gornik: “Replacing Experience With Facsimile”

• Terence Koh: “A Completely New Form of Sense”

• Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Edge A to Z (Pars Pro Toto)”

• Jonas Mekas: “I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person—I Am a Poet”

• Matthew Ritchie: “The Interface I Want Is the Real World.”

My Favorites

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of responses by psychologist Steven Pinker, “Not At All,” and Chinese artist and cultural activist Ai Weiwei, “I Only Think on the Internet.” The response I most admired is George Dyson’s “Kayaks vs. Canoes.” It is a gem:

What do you think?

The conversation was in English, Schirrmacher's second language. Rather than edit the piece for grammar, and risk losing the spontaneity of the conversation, I present it here -- for the most part -- verbatim. -- John Brockman]

The question I am asking myself arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, was how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life. So I've profited a lot from Edge.

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. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment onEdge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know -- this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus -- when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.

Here European thought is quite interesting, our whole history of thought, especially in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, starting from Kant to Nietzsche. Hegel for example, in the nineteenth century, where you said which thought, which thinking succeeds and which one doesn't. We have phases in the nineteenth century, where you could have chosen either way. You could have gone the way of Schelling, for example, the German philosopher, which was totally different to that of Hegel. And so this question of what survives, which idea survives, and which idea drowns, which idea starves to death, is something which, in our whole system of thought, is very, very known, and is quite an issue. And now we encounter this structure, this phenomenon, in everyday thinking.

It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn't important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it's in Facebook. And others say, well, it's on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it's very hard to say it's somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

Of course, everybody knows we have a revolution, but we are now really entering the cognitive revolution of it all. In Europe, and in America too -- and it's not by chance -- we have a crisis of all the systems that somehow are linked to either thinking or to knowledge. It's the publishing companies, it's the newspapers, it's the media, it's TV. But it's as well the university, and the whole school system, where it is not a normal crisis of too few teachers, too many pupils, or whatever; too small universities; too big universities.

Now, it's totally different. When you follow the discussions, there's the question of what to teach, what to learn, and how to learn. Even for universities and schools, suddenly they are confronted with the question how can we teach? What is the brain actually taking? Or the problems which we have with attention deficit and all that, which are reflections and, of course, results, in a way, of the technical revolution?

Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and who I find a fascinating thinker, put it in such a way that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.

The European point of view, with our history of thought, and all our idealistic tendencies, is that now you can see -- because they didn't know that the Internet would be coming, in the fifties or sixties or seventies -- that the whole idea of the Internet somehow was built in the brains, years and decades before it actually was there, in all the different sciences. And when you see how the computer -- Gigerenzer wrote a great essay about that -- how the computer at first was somehow isolated, it was in the military, in big laboratories, and so on. And then the moment the computer, in the seventies and then of course in the eighties, was spread around, and every doctor, every household had a computer, suddenly the metaphors that were built in the fifties, sixties, seventies, then had their triumph. And so people had to use the computer. As they say, the computer is the last metaphor for the human brain; we don't need any more. It succeeded because the tool shaped the thought when it was there, but all the thinking, like in brain sciences and all the others, had already happened, in the sixties, seventies, fifties even.

But the interesting question is, of course, the Internet -- I don't know if they really expected the Internet to evolve the way it did -- I read books from the nineties, where they still don't really know that it would be as huge as it is. And, of course, nobody predicted Google at that time. And nobody predicted the Web.

Now, what I find interesting is that if you see the computer and the Web, and all this, under the heading of "the new technologies," we have, in the late nineteenth century, this big discussion about the human motor. The new machines in the late nineteenth century required that the muscles of the human being should be adapted to the new machines. Especially in Austria and Germany, we have this new thinking, where people said, first of all, we have to change muscles. The term "calories" was invented in the late nineteenth century, in order to optimize the human work force.

Now, in the twenty-first century, you have all the same issues, but now with the brain, what was the adaptation of muscles to the machines, now under the heading of multitasking -- which is quite a problematic issue. The human muscle in the head, the brain, has to adapt. And, as we know from just very recent studies, it's very hard for the brain to adapt to multitasking, which is only one issue. And again with calories and all that. I think it's very interesting, the concept -- again, Daniel Dennett and others said it -- the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you.

The tool is not only a tool, it shapes the human who uses it. We always have the concept, first you have the theory, then you build the tool, and then you use the tool. But the tool itself is powerful enough to change the human being. God as the clockmaker, I think you said. Then in the Darwinian times, God was an engineer. And now He, of course, is the computer scientist and a programmer. What is interesting, of course, is that the moment neuroscientists and others used the computer, the tool of the computer, to analyze human thinking, something new started.

The idea that thinking itself can be conceived in technical terms is quite new. Even in the thirties, of course, you had all these metaphors for the human body, even for the brain; but, for thinking itself, this was very, very late. Even in the sixties, it was very hard to say that thinking is like a computer.

You had once in Edge, years ago, a very interesting talk with Patty Maes on "Intelligence Augmentation" when she was one of the first who invented these intelligent agents. And there, you and Jaron Lanier, and others, asked the question about the concept of free will. And she explained it and it wasn't that big an issue, of course, because it was just intelligent agents like the ones we know from Amazon and others. But now, entering real-time Internet and all the other possibilities in the near future, the question of predictive search and others, of determinism, becomes much more interesting. The question of free will, which always was a kind of theoretical question -- even very advanced people said, well, we declare there is no such thing as free will, but we admit that people, during their childhood, will have been culturally programmed so they believe in free will.

But now, when you have a generation -- in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today -- which are adapted to systems such as the iTunes "Genius," which not only know which book or which music file they like, and which goes farther and farther in predictive certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.

What will this mean for the question of free will? Because, in the bottom line, there are, of course, algorithms, who analyze or who calculate certain predictabilities. And I'm wondering if the comfort of free will or not free will would be a very, very tough issue of the future. At this very moment, we have a new government in Germany; they are just discussing the what kind of effect this will have on politics. And one of the issues, which of course at this very moment seems to be very isolated, is the question how to predict certain terroristic activities, which they could use, from blogs -- as you know, in America, you have the same thing. But this can go farther and farther.

The question of prediction will be the issue of the future and such questions will have impact on the concept of free will. We are now confronted with theories by psychologist John Bargh and others who claim there is no such thing as free will. This kind of claim is a very big issue here in Germany and it will be a much more important issue in the future than we think today. The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives. And, of course, this will play out in the work force -- the new German government seems to be very keen on this issue, to at least prevent the worst impact on people, on workplaces.

It's very important to stress that we are not talking about cultural pessimism. What we are talking about is that a new technology which is in fact a technology which is a brain technology, to put it this way, which is a technology which has to do with intelligence, which has to do with thinking, that this new technology now clashes in a very real way with the history of thought in the European way of thinking.

Unlike America, as you might know, in Germany we had a party for the first time in the last elections which totally comes out of the Internet. They are called The Pirates. In their beginning they were computer scientists concerned with questions of copyright and all that. But it's now much, much more. In the recent election, out of the blue, they received two percent of the votes, which is a lot for a new party which only exists on the Internet. And the voters were mainly 30, 40, 50 percent young males. Many, many young males. They're all very keen on new technologies. Of course, they are computer kids and all that. But this party, now, for the first time, reflects the way which we know, theoretically, in a very pragmatic and political way. For example, one of the main issues, as I just described, the question of the adaptation of muscles to modern systems, either in the brain or in the body, is a question of the digital Taylorism.

As far as we can see, I would say, we have three important concepts of the nineteenth century, which somehow come back in a very personalized way, just like you have a personalized newspaper. This is Darwinism, the whole question. And, in a very real sense, look at the problem with Google and the newspapers. Darwinism, but as well the whole question of who survives in the net, in the thinking; who gets more traffic; who gets less traffic, and so. And then you have the concept of communism, which comes back to the question of free, the question that people work for free. And not only those people who sit at home and write blogs, but also many people in publishing companies, newspapers, do a lot of things for free or offer them for free. And then, third, of course, Taylorism, which is a non-issue, but we now have the digital Taylorism, but with an interesting switch. At least in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, you could still make others responsible for your own deficits in that you could say, well, this is just really terrible, it's exhausting, and it's not human, and so on.

Now, look at the concept, for example, of multitasking, which is a real problem for the brain. You don't think that others are responsible for it, but you meet many people who say, well, I am not really good at it, and it's my problem, and I forget, and I am just overloaded by information. What I find interesting that three huge political concepts of the nineteenth century come back in a totally personalized way, and that we now, for the first time, have a political party -- a small political party, but it will in fact influence the other parties -- who address this issue, again, in this personalized way.

It's a kind of catharsis, this Twittering, and so on. But now, of course, this kind of information conflicts with many other kinds of information. And, in a way, one could argue -- I know that was the case with Iran -- that maybe the future will be that the Twitter information about an uproar in Iran competes with the Twitter information of Ashton Kutcher, or Paris Hilton, and so on. The question is to understand which is important. What is important, what is not important is something very linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad.

Because suddenly it's gone again. And the next piece of information, and the next piece of information -- and if now -- and this is something which, again, has very much to do with the concept of the European self, to take oneself seriously, and so on -- now, as Google puts it, they say, if I understand it rightly, in all these webcams and cell phones -- are full of information. There are photos, there are videos, whatever. And they all should be, if people want it, shared. And all the thoughts expressed in any university, at this very moment, there could be thoughts we really should know. I mean, in the nineteenth century, it was not possible. But maybe there is one student who is much better than any of the thinkers we know. So we will have an overload of all these information, and we will be dependent on systems that calculate, that make the selection of this information.

And, as far as I can see, political information somehow isn't distinct from it. It's the same issue. It's a question of whether I have information from my family on the iPhone, or whether I have information about our new government. And so this incredible amount of information somehow becomes equal, and very, very personalized. And you have personalized newspapers. This will be a huge problem for politicians. From what I hear, they are now very interested in, for example, Google's page rank; in the question how, with mathematical systems, you can, for example, create information cascades as a kind of artificial information overload. And, as you know, you can do this. And we are just not prepared for that. It's not too early. In the last elections we, for the first time, had blogs, where you could see they started to create information cascades, not only with human beings, but as well with BOTs and other stuff. And this is, as I say, only the beginning.

Germany still has a very strong anti-technology movement, which is quite interesting insofar as you can't really say it's left-wing or right-wing. As you know, very right-wing people, in German history especially, were very anti-technology. But it changed a lot. And why it took so long, I would say, has demographic reasons. As we are in an aging society, and the generation which is now 40 or 50, in Germany, had their children very late. The whole evolutionary change, through the new generation -- first, they are fewer, and then they came later. It's not like in the sixties, seventies, with Warhol. And the fifties. These were young societies. It happened very fast. We took over all these interesting influences from America, very, very fast, because we were a young society. Now, somehow it really took a longer time, but now that is for sure we are entering, for demographic reasons, the situation where a new generation which is -- as you see with The Pirates as a party -- they're a new generation, which grew up with modern systems, with modern technology. They are now taking the stage and changing society.

One must say, all the big companies are American companies, except SAP. But Google and all these others, they are American companies. I would say we weren't very good at inventing. We are not very good at getting people to study computer science and other things. And I must say -- and this is not meant as flattery of America, or Edge, or you, or whosoever -- what I really miss is that we don't have this type of computationally-minded intellectual -- though it started in Germany once, decades ago -- such as Danny Hillis and other people who participate in a kind of intellectual discussion, even if only a happy few read and react to it. Not many German thinkers have adopted this kind of computational perspective.

The ones who do exist have their own platform and actually created a new party. This is something we are missing, because there has always been a kind of an attitude of arrogance towards technology. For example, I am responsible for the entire cultural sections and science sections of FAZ. And we published reviews about all these wonderful books on science and technology, and that's fascinating and that's good. But, in a way, the really important texts, which somehow write our life today and which are, in a way, the stories of our life -- are, of course, the software -- and these texts weren't reviewed. We should have found ways of transcribing what happens on the software level much earlier -- like Patty Maes or others, just to write it, to rewrite it in a way that people understand what it actually means. I think this is a big lack.

What did Shakespeare, and Kafka, and all these great writers -- what actually did they do? They translated society into literature. And of course, at that stage, society was something very real, something which you could see. And they translated modernization into literature. And now we have to find people who translate what happens on the level of software. At least for newspapers, we should have sections reviewing software in a different way; at least the structures of software.

We are just beginning to look at this in Germany. And we are looking for people -- it's not very many people -- who have the ability to translate that. It needs to be done because that's what makes us who we are. You will never really understand in detail how Google works because you don't have access to the code. They don't give you the information. But just think of George Dyson's essay, which I love, "Turing's Cathedral." This is a very good beginning. He absolutely has the point. It is today's version of the kind of cathedral we would be entering if we lived in the eleventh century. It's incredible that people are building this cathedral of the digital age. And as he points out, when he visited Google, he saw all the books they were scanning, and noted that they said they are not scanning these books for humans to read, but for the artificial intelligence to read.

Who are the big thinkers here? In Germany, for me at least, for my work, there are a couple of key figures. One of them is Gerd Gigerenzer, who is somebody who is absolutely -- I would say he is actually avant-garde, at this very moment, because what he does is he teaches heuristics. And from what we see, we have an amputation of heuristics, through the technologies, as well. People forget certain heuristics. It starts with a calculation, because you have the calculator, but it goes much further. And you will lose many more rules of thumb in the future because the systems are doing that, Google and all the others. So Gigerenzer, in his thinking -- and he has a big Institute now -- on risk assessment, as well, is very, very important. You could link him, in a way, actually to Nassim Taleb, because again here you have the whole question of not risk assessment, the question of looking back, looking into the future, and all that.

Very important in literature, still, though he is 70 years old, 80 years old, is of course Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Peter Sloterdijk is a very important philosopher; a kind of literary figure, but he is important. But then you have, not unlike in the nineteenth or twentieth century, there are many leading figures. But I must say, as well as Gigerenzer, he writes all his books in English, we have quite interesting people, at this very moment, in law, which is very important for discussions of copyright and all that. But regarding the conversations of new technologies and human thought, they, at this very moment, don't really take place in Germany.

There are European thinkers who have cult followings -- Slajov Zizek, for example. Ask any intellectual in Germany, and they will tell you Zizek is just the greatest. He's a kind of communist, but he considers himself Stalinistic, even. But this is, of course, all labels. Wild thinkers. Europeans, at this very moment, love wild thinkers.

Der New Yorker Literaturagent John Brockman und seine Edge Foundation hatten kürzlich zu einer außergewöhnlichen Zukunftskonferenz nach Los Angeles geladen. Zwei prominente Wissenschaftler, George Church, Molekulargenetiker in Harvard, und Craig Venter, Pionier bei der Entschlüsselung des Humangenoms, sprachen über die synthetische Genomik. Zu der Tagung, zu der nur ein ausgewählter Kreis eingeladen worden war, erschienen rund zwanzig Vertreter der Technologieelite Amerikas, darunter Larry Page, Mitbegründer von Google, Nathan Myhrvold, vormals Chief Technology Officer von Microsoft, und Elon Musk, Gründer von PayPal und Direktor von SpaceX, einem privaten Raketenbau- und Raumforschungsunternehmen, das in einem riesigen Gebäude unweit des Flughafens von Los Angeles untergebracht ist.

Der erste Tag des Treffens fand auf dem Areal von SpaceX statt, wo übrigens auch das Elektroauto Tesla produziert wird. Die synthetische Genomik, Thema der Konferenz, ist im Grunde Gentechnik in großem Stil. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der teilweisen oder vollständigen Ersetzung des natürlichen Genmaterials eines Organismus durch synthetisches Genmaterial.

Das Schreckgespenst der „Biohacker“

Von ihr erwartet man eine Vielzahl von biotechnischen Umbrüchen - beispielsweise Bakterien, die so programmiert werden, dass sie Kohle in Biogas umwandeln, oder Mikroben, die Kerosin produzieren. Mit wieder anderen Verfahren wollen Wissenschaftler ausgestorbene Lebewesen wieder zum Leben erwecken, etwa das Wollhaarmammut, vielleicht sogar den Neandertaler.

Natürlich kam auch das Schreckgespenst der „Biohacker“ zur Sprache, die neue Krankheitserreger produzieren. Aber Genomforscher sind ja fast zwangsläufig Optimisten. George Church, der über sein Spezialgebiet „Humangenetik 2.0“ sprach, erklärte seinen Zuhörern, wie sich das Genmaterial - die DNS - programmieren lässt. So wie Sequenzierungsautomaten die natürliche Ordnung eines DNS-Moleküls entziffern können, so können Automaten Komponenten einer gezielt manipulierten DNS schaffen, die, in eine Zelle eingebaut, deren normales Verhalten verändern. Bösartige Tumoren ziehen beispielsweise viele Bakterienzellen an. Durch präzise Manipulation des Bakteriengenoms kann man krebsbekämpfende Mikroben schaffen, also Organismen, die den Tumor angreifen, indem sie in die Geschwulst eindringen und dort synthetisch erzeugte Toxine freisetzen.

„Personalisierte“ Mäuse

Church und sein Harvard-Team haben inzwischen Bakterien programmiert, die jede dieser Funktionen separat ausüben, aber es ist ihnen noch nicht gelungen, sie zu einem komplett organisierten System zusammenzubauen. Trotzdem: „Wir sind nicht mehr weit von dem Punkt entfernt, wo wir diese Zellen quasi wie Computer programmieren können“, sagte Church.

Tumorkiller-Mikroben sind aber nur eine der vielen wundersamen Entwicklungen in Churchs Laboren. Ein anderes Projekt ist die Aussicht auf „personalisierte“ Mäuse. Es handelt sich um Säugetiere, denen Ausschnitte menschlicher DNS injiziert werden, damit sie Antikörper bilden, die vom jeweiligen Menschen nicht abgestoßen werden. Eine personalisierte, mit individuellem Genmaterial gespickte Maus würde dann Antikörper produzieren, die der entsprechende kranke Mensch nicht mehr abstoßen würde.

Resistent gegenüber konventionellen Enzymen, Parasiten und Erreger

Und was wäre wohl von synthetischen Organismen zu halten, die gegenüber einer ganzen Klasse natürlicher Viren resistent wären? Zwei Verfahren gibt es. Eines besteht darin, eine DNS zu konstruieren, die das Spiegelbild einer natürlichen DNS ist. Wie viele biologische und chemische Substanzen zeichnet sich die DNS durch Chiralität (Händigkeit) aus, das heißt, sie existiert in links- oder rechtshändiger Helixstruktur. In natürlichem Zustand sind die meisten biologischen Moleküle linkshändig. Durch künstliche Schaffung rechtshändiger DNS könnte man aber synthetische Organismen erzeugen, deren DNS das Spiegelbild des Originals ist. Diese wären resistent gegenüber konventionellen Enzymen, Parasiten und Erregern, weil ihre DNS von der Spiegelbildversion nicht erkannt würde. Solche synthetischen Organismen wären Teil einer ganz neuen „Spiegelwelt“.

Church ist außerdem Gründer und Direktor des „Personal Genome Project“. Dessen Ziel ist es, die Genome von hunderttausend Freiwilligen zu sequenzieren und ein Zeitalter der personalisierten Medizin einzuläuten. Anders als die lange übliche Standardkombination aus Pillen und Therapien wird die Medizin künftig passgenau wie ein Maßanzug auf das Individuum zugeschnitten.

„Leben auf anderen Planeten etablieren“

Gegen Ende des ersten Tages stellte Elon Musk, Charismatiker sondergleichen, eine Genomveränderung anderer Art vor. Während im Hintergrund ein Video vom Start seiner „Falcon 1“-Rakete auf dem südpazifischen Kwajalein-Atoll lief, sprach er über die Verpflanzung der Spezies Mensch auf andere Planeten. Dieses Ziel hätte man als unrealistisch abtun können, wäre nicht am 13. Juli, kurz vor der Konferenz, eine „Falcon 1“ gestartet, die den malaysischen Satelliten RazakSat auf eine Erdumlaufbahn brachte. Schon zuvor hatte SpaceX einen Auftrag der Nasa für Versorgungstransporte zur Internationalen Raumstation erhalten.

Wie ein Herrscher seine Untertanen führte Musk dann die Konferenzteilnehmer durch die Fertigungsanlagen seines Raumfahrtunternehmens. Wir sahen den Bereich, in dem das Triebwerk gebaut wird, wir sahen Komponenten der Trägerrakete, das Kontrollzentrum und ein Exemplar des „Dragon“-Raumschiffs, einer Kapsel für den Transport von Fracht oder Menschen zur Raumstation. „All das dient dem Ziel, Leben auf anderen Planeten zu etablieren“, sagte Musk.

Organismen auf ein Minimum an Genen reduzieren

Am zweiten Tag trat J. Craig Venter auf, Pionier des privaten Humangenomprojekts und Gründer von Synthetic Genomics Inc. Das ist eine Organisation, die sich der Vermarktung von Gentechniken verschrieben hat. Eine der Herausforderungen der synthetischen Genomik ist es, Organismen auf ein Minimum an Genen zu reduzieren, die zum Leben notwendig sind. „Reduktionistische Biologie“ nennt Venter das. Die Grundfrage sei, ob sich durch Kombination der geringsten Zahl an lebenswichtigen Genkomponenten neues Leben kreieren lasse.

Venter nutzt Bierhefe, die imstande ist, DNS-Fragmente zu funktionalen Chromosomen zusammenzubauen. Er schilderte ein Experiment, bei dem fünfundzwanzig synthetische DNS-Komponenten erzeugt und in eine Hefezelle eingebracht wurden, die von dieser zu einem Chromosom zusammengefügt wurden. Dabei kam es darauf an, die DNS-Teilchen so zu konstruieren, dass der Organismus sie korrekt zusammensetzen konnte. Venter stellte fest, dass Gene sich in Hefe leicht manipulieren ließen. Er konnte Gene einbringen, entfernen und eine Hefe mit neuen Eigenschaften erzeugen. Im August 2007 veränderte er die Individuen einer Spezies radikal: Er entnahm den Zellen je ein Chromosom, verpflanzte diese und schuf etwas völlig Neues. „Durch Veränderung der Software wurde der alte Organismus völlig eliminiert und ein neuer geschaffen“, so Venter.

„Die Software baut sich ihre eigene Hardware“

Venter und sein Forschungsteam schufen auch eine synthetische DNS-Kopie des PhiX-Bakteriophagen, eines kleinen, für Menschen ungefährlichen Bakterienparasiten. Eingesetzt in ein Kolibakterium, produzierte die Zelle die erforderlichen Proteine und setzte sie zu einem neuen Bakterienvirus zusammen, das seinerseits die Zelle vernichtete, aus der es hervorgegangen war. Und all das, so Venter, sei automatisch in der Zelle passiert: „Die Software baut sich ihre eigene Hardware.“

Diese und andere genomische Kreationen, Transformationen und Zerstörungen führten zu Fragen, wie sicher wir vor dem Albtraum gentechnisch produzierter Bakterien sind, die aus dem Labor entweichen und Unheil in die Welt bringen. Um das zu verhindern, könne man, so Venter, den Organismus mit „Suizidgenen“ versehen - das heißt ihn mit einer chemischen Abhängigkeit ausstatten, so dass er außerhalb des Labors nicht überlebensfähig ist. Außerhalb des Labors würden diese künstlichen Zellen absterben.

„Es ist nicht schwer, Algen dazu zu bringen, Öl zu produzieren“

Wenn dem so ist, wäre das eine gute Nachricht, denn Venter und sein Team sind gegenwärtig dabei, mit Forschungsgeldern von Exxon-Mobil eine fünf bis sieben Quadratkilometer große Algenfarm einzurichten, in der umprogrammierte Algen Biokraftstoff produzieren werden. „Es ist nicht schwer, Algen dazu zu bringen, Öl zu produzieren“, sagte Venter. „Die Menge ist das Problem.“ Um als praktikable Energielieferanten dienen zu können, müssen Algenfarmen groß sein, und das macht sie teuer. Algen haben jedoch den Vorteil, dass sie Kohlendioxid verbrauchen und Sonnenlicht als Energiequelle verwenden. Potentiell haben wir also lebende Solarzellen, die Kohlendioxid fressen und dabei neue Kohlenwasserstoffe - den Treibstoff - produzieren.

Das letzte Wort hatte Church mit seinem Projekt „Engineering Humans 2.0“. Der Mensch, meinte er, sei in vielerlei Hinsicht beschränkt: in seiner Konzentrations- und Erinnerungsfähigkeit, durch die Kürze des Lebens und so weiter. Mit Hilfe der Gentechnik könnten all diese Unzulänglichkeiten und Einschränkungen korrigiert werden. Die gemeine Labormaus habe eine Lebensdauer von zweieinhalb Jahren, der Nacktmull dagegen erreicht das hohe Alter von fünfundzwanzig Jahren. Es sei möglich, diejenigen Gene zu finden, die zur Langlebigkeit des Nacktmulls beitragen, und wenn man diese Gene in die Labormaus einsetze, könne man deren Lebensdauer allmählich steigern.

„Warum sollte man Neandertaler wiederbeleben wollen?“

Analog könne man bei Menschen verfahren, also die Lebensdauer verlängern und das Gedächtnis verbessern, aber es frage sich, ob das klug wäre. Es gebe immer Nachteile, sagte Church. Man kann es einrichten, dass die Menschen größere und kräftigere Knochen haben, aber nur um den Preis, dass sie massiger und plumper werden. Auf einer Konferenz, in der über grenzenlose Machbarkeit gesprochen wurde, waren diese Worte eine willkommene Mahnung.

Doch dann erklärte er, dass es vermutlich möglich sei, durch gezielte Manipulation des Elefantengenoms dem Wollhaarmammut zu neuer Existenz zu verhelfen. Und durch ähnliche Manipulation des Schimpansengenoms könne man möglicherweise den Neandertaler wieder zum Leben bringen.

„Warum sollte man Neandertaler wiederbeleben wollen?“, fragte ein Gast.

„Um einen Verwandten zu schaffen, der uns einen neuen Blick auf uns ermöglicht“, antwortete Church. Der Mensch sei eine Monokultur, und Monokulturen seien eben biologisch gefährdet. Seine Antwort überzeugte nicht alle Anwesenden. „Wir haben schon genug Neandertaler in Washington“, rief Craig Venter, und mit dieser Bemerkung ging die Konferenz zu Ende.

Aus dem Englischen von Matthias Fienbork.

Von Ed Regis erschien zuletzt „What is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology“ bei Oxford University Press.

...Genetic engineering is now at a point where computer science was around the mid-eighties. The early PCs were limited as to purpose and network. In two and a half decades, the computer has led us into a digial world in which every aspect of lives has been affected. According to Moore's Law, the performance of computers doubles every 18 months. Genetic engineering is following a similar growth. On the last weekend in July, Craig Venter and George Church met in Los Angeles to lead a seminar on synthetic genetic engineering for John Brockman's science forum Edge.org.

Genetic engineering under Church has been following the grwoth of computer science growing by a factor of tenfold per year. After all, the cost of sequencing a genome dropped from three billion dollars in 2000 to around $50 000 dollars as Stanford University's Dr. Steven Quake genomics engineer announced this week. 17 commercial companies already offer similar services. In June, a "Consumer Genetics" exhibition was held in Boston for the first time. The Vice President of Knome, Ari Kiirikki, assumes that the cost of sequencing a genome in the next ten years will fall to less than $1,000. In support for this development, the X-Prize Foundation has put up a prize of ten million dollars for the sequencing of 100 full genomes within ten days for the cost of less than $10,000 dollars per genome sequenced. 

It is now up to the companies themselves to provide an ethical and legal standing to commercial genetic engineering. The States of New York and California have already made the sale of genetic tests subject to a prescription. This is however only a first step is to adjust a new a new commercialized science which is about to cause enormous changes similar to those brought about be computer science. Medical benefits are likely to be enormous. Who knows about dangers in its genetic make-up, can preventive measures meet. The potential for abuse is however likewise given. Health insurances and employers could discriminate against with the DNS information humans. Above all however our self-understanding will change. Which could change, if synthetic genetic engineering becomes a mass market, is not yet foreseeable. For example, Craig Venter is working on synthetic biofuels. If successful, such a development would re-align technology, economics and politics in a fundamental way. Of one thing we can already be certain. The question of whether genetic engineering will becomes available for all is no longer on the table. It has already happened.

An essay on how language influences thought from the pop-science anthology "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science" has been posted on The Edge. Author Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford, writes:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

She brings up experiments and other examples involving use of language and direction, time, color and gender, all of which seem to demonstrate that yes, language shapes how we think.

But my favorite is this example above. Only a linguist -- or perhaps a social scientist -- would put Chomsky in a hypothetical. 

The artist and composer responds to this year's Edge.org question: What will change everything?
 

[PHOTO: BRIAN ENO/EAMONN MCCABE]

What would change everything is not even a thought. It's more of a feeling.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it all. The great migrations of human history grew from the feeling that there was a better place, and the institutions of civilisation grew out of the feeling that checks on pure individual selfishness would produce a better world for everyone involved in the long term.

Leading thinkers - includingCraig Venter and Ian McEwan - have marked New Year 2009 by predicting what will be the next big thing to shape the future.

[PHOTO: IAN MCKEWAN/PHILIP HOLLIS]

[Caption: Ian McEwan: predicts the full flourishing of solar technology as one of the next 'big things']

A 150-strong group of scientists, authors, musicians, philosophers and other respected experts were posed the question "What will change everything?"

Their task was set by Edge, an online intellectual discussion group, which claims its membership comprises "the most interesting minds in the world".

The responses spanned new methods of energy production, the dawn of telepathy, freely available artificial intelligence and the colonisation of the Milky Way."

I've been traveling in Central America for the past few weeks, so I'm late on blogging a number of things -- including this. Each year, EDGE.org's John Brockman asks a new question, and a bunch of tech/sci/internet folks reply. This year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

I was one of the 165 participants, and wrote about what I learned from Boing Boing's community experiments, under the guidance of our community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Link to "Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands."

"Flip-Flops" werden im Englischen verächtlich Menschen genannt, die plötzlich ihre Meinung ändern. Was bei Politikern oft als ein Zeichen von Opportunismus interpretiert wird, gehört in der Wissenschaft zum Wesen. Dennoch ist es auch unter Forschern und Forscherinnen nicht üblich, sich öffentlich zu einem Sinneswandel zu bekennen. Genau das haben sie aber nun gemacht. Bereits zum elften Mal hat der New Yorker Literaturagent John Brockman namhaften Wissenschaftlern zum Jahreswechsel knifflige Fragen gestellt. Diesmal lauten sie "Wobei haben Sie Ihre Meinung geändert? Und warum?"

Die Antworten von insgesamt 165 Forschern und Expertinnen sind unterschiedlich und oft amüsant: Der Biologe Richard Dawkins erklärt, warum Meinungswandel kein evolutionärer Nachteil sind; die Philosophin Helena Cronin zeigt, dass es unter Männer zwar mehr Nobelpreisträger gibt, aber auch mehr Trottel; und Anton Zeilinger erzählt von seinem Irrtum, die Quantenphysik einst für "nutzlos" gehalten zu haben. ...

Eines der anregendsten intellektuellen Spiele findet sich jedes Jahr im Januar auf der Website Edge.org, wenn Wissenschaftler und Künstler im "World Question Center" auf die Frage des Jahres antworten. 2007 prügelte man mit Vehemenz auf die Religionen ein, und so klingt schon die Frage für 2008 wie ein erneuter Generalangriff auf die Seligen: "Welche Ihrer Meinungen haben Sie einmal geändert?" Ist die Religion doch der Ort der göttlichen Wahrheit, die sich nicht begründen muss und nicht bezweifelt werden kann. Wenn er einer Partei angehöre, hatte der Agnostiker Camus auch gesagt, dann der des Zweifels. Keine Konfrontation sollte mehr gescheut werden. Die letzte Heimat der Unverzweifelten bleibt dagegen der Glaube. Was Edge angeht, wird diese Erwartung jedoch enttäuscht. ...

... As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to Web site editor John Brockman's impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity.

In explaining why they have cast aside old assumptions, the respondents' short essays tackle an array of subjects, including the nature of consciousness, the existence of the soul, the course of evolution and whether reason will ultimately triumph over superstition.

Two of the most interesting answers may signal a cease-fire in the gender wars.

In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence *. Summers was assailed for suggesting that innate differences might explain why there are few top women scientists. Now Diane F. Halpern, a psychology professor at Claremont Mc-Kenna College and a self-described "feminist," says Summers was onto something.

"There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to cognitive abilities," she writes.

Her views are echoed by Helena Cronin, a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

"Females," she writes, "are much of a muchness, clustering around the mean." With men, "the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast." Translation: There may be fewer female geniuses in certain fields, but there are also fewer female morons...

John and George’s New Year resolutions; John softens his pessimism about neuroscience ; The soccer club theory of terrorism; The trouble with relying on experts; How George got hooked on garage-band science; Happiness is a burning bridge.

CULTURE
Change of Mind Could Spur A Hardening of the Heart
• EDGE -- JAN. 4

When scientists and other prominent intellectuals change their mind about important things, their new outlook often is gloomier.

That, at least, is the theme of responses to a survey conducted by online science-and-culture publication the Edge, which asked some influential thinkers: "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" ... d

...Fittingly, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert says he has changed his mind about the benefits of changing one's mind. In 2002, a study showed him that people are more satisfied with irrevocable decisions than with ones they can reverse. Acting on the data, he proposed to his now-wife. "It turned out that the data were right: I love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend."

RFQ: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (Plus: Last Chance on the Coin Contest)

...University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt says he used to consider sports and fraternities to be the height of American celebration of stupidity. "Primitive tribalism, I thought. Initiation rites, alcohol, sports, sexism, and baseball caps turn decent boys into knuckleheads. I'd have gladly voted to ban fraternities, ROTC, and most sports teams from my university." But Haidt has changed his mind: "I had too individualistic a view of human nature. I began to see us not just as chimpanzees with symbolic lives but also as bees without hives. When we made the transition over the last 200 years from tight communities (Gemeinschaft) to free and mobile societies (Gesellschaft), we escaped from bonds that were sometimes oppressive, yes, but into a world so free that it left many of us gasping for connection, purpose, and meaning. I began to think about the many ways that people, particularly young people, have found to combat this isolation. Rave parties and the Burning Man festival are spectacular examples of new ways to satisfy the ancient longing for communitas. But suddenly sports teams, fraternities, and even the military made a lot more sense." ...

At the beginning of each year is a great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture, or rather, in the social life of that culture...The event is called the Edge Annual Question, bringing together much of the most interesting 

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has introduced a subtle shift in the explanation of the evolutionary history of man: he once believed it to be caused by eating meat, now he believes that the decisive factor is the kitchen, ie, changing from raw to cooked. The response from the musician Brian Eno explains how he went from revolution to evolution, and how he left Maoism for Darwin. ...

UN'ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE HA CHIESTO A LUMINARI E 

FILOSOFI DI RACCONTARE I PROPRI ERRORI

Quando lo scienza confessa: ho sbagliato
Dalle teorie sull'evoluzione alle differenze tra razze, 
in rete i mea culpa degli studiosi

LONDRA — «Quando pensare modifica la tua opinione è filosofia, quando Dio ti fa cambiare idea è fede. Quando i fatti ti fanno vedere le cose in modo diverso è scienza». Questa l'introduzione al quesito per l'anno posto da un'associazione culturale cui aderiscono i principali pensatori del momento, da Richard Dawkins, lo zoologo britannico autore del libro culto Il gene egoista e più recentemente L'illusione di Dio, allo psicologo Steven Pinker passando per il musicista produttoreBrian Eno.

Se nel 2006 aveva domandato ai suoi iscritti quale fosse l'idea più pericolosa e nel 2007 su che cosa si sentissero ottimisti, per il 2008Edge (il sito è www.edge.org) ha lanciato una provocazione: su cosa avete cambiato idea? E perché? L'obiettivo era spingere gli scienziati, gli scrittori e i ricercatori che utilizzano regolarmente il sito ad ammettere, in un certo senso, i propri errori.

Centinaia di loro hanno raccolto l'invito (a tanta solerzia ha forse contribuito il fatto che le ultime edizioni delle risposte sono state pubblicate sotto forma di libro), rivelando una gamma di dietro front tra il clamoroso e il simpatico.

This year's Big Question at Edge from John Brockman, et al., is this, What have you changed your mind about? This is, at least, an interesting question, so I'll start by saying that what I've changed my mind about is whether, in general, the Edge's annual question is worth reading. Okay, sometimes it is.

That said, are any specific answers to this year's Big Question worth reading? Somewhat surprisingly, yes. Granted, some of the answers are just wankery, scientists and others saying that they used to think we wouldn't solve Problem X, and now they think we will, someday, etc. Or, worse yet, there is a passel of up-with-the-environment puffery, where the previously unconverted become carbon holy-rollers. ...

Here are a couple worth reading. Feel free to add more.

Economist Dan Kahneman on the aspiration treadmill
Clay Shirky on science and religion
Nassim Taleb on .... nothing (okay, incomplete, but I still like the semiotic pun)...

chrisd writes