Fisch Can't Swim

I wanted to touch on two uses of the internet in our elections that didn’t explicitly come up in conversation today.

Howard Dean, in his 2004 presidential campaign, was the first candidate for president to really utilize the internet, most notably as a fundraising tool. Just twelve years later in our 2016 cycle, almost all campaign fundraising plays out over the internet, but the Dean campaign was the first to utilize this tactic back in ’04. I love this anecdote from Dean about using the internet both to mobilize donors and also to fundraise by allowing grassroots supporters to easily contribute small dollar amounts:

“Dick Cheney was holding a $2,000-a-plate fundraising lunch, so we asked Americans all over the country to join me the same day for a lunch in front of their computers. It sparked a huge response, and, amazingly, the online contributions from that day matched what Cheney made from his fundraiser. It showed that our campaign, and that of other Democrats, could remain competitive thanks to a growing base of people donating small amounts. A lot of people talked about how our campaign revolutionized the use of the Internet to raise money. But the Internet isn’t magic, it’s just a tool that can be used to do things differently. We treated it as a community, and we grew the community into something that has lasted long after the campaign ended. The Internet let us build that community in real time, on a massive scale, and that lunch helped us do that. The turkey sandwich wasn’t bad either.” (source: https://www.wired.com/2005/08/2003/)

His campaign set up a video feed of Dean eating a sandwich and broadcast it over the internet, allowing his supporters to tune in and give money to this “fundraising lunch” using online donation tools – a clever, low-budget, internet-based response to Cheney’s fundraiser. I also like Dean’s comment on how the internet is a community. The internet can be used to connect voters from all across the country and to enhance a feeling of togetherness amongst supporters, and today our candidates’ Facebook pages act to bring together many supporters from all over.

Also, switching gears to think about paid vs. earned media and how the internet affects these forms of media. Paid media is when a campaign buys ads (TV/Print/Online etc.) to reach potential voters whereas earned media is when a candidate does something or says something that gets reported on (by the press or otherwise) and reaches potential voters. An interesting form of earned media from this election cycle in particular is the “political selfie,” featuring you posing with a candidate. If a person goes to a rally and takes a selfie with a candidate after the event, that selfie will probably get posted to social media – and will be seen by hundreds of that person’s friends/followers and may even be shared, further expanding its reach. If a candidate makes an unexpected stop at your local restaurant or in a retail store in your town, selfies are often a primary form of documentation. The internet helps to spread political-selfies to hundreds of possible supporters (and seeing a friend posing with a candidate may make people even more likely to consider voting for him/her.) Thinking also about more traditional earned media (a candidate makes a surprise stop at a nationally known fast-food chain, for example) – Twitter and the immediacy of other internet sites allow for not only the sharing of such media but also for interacting with this news. Hearing about this same surprise stop-by on a news show on TV may have a more passive effect, and paid media appears to perhaps be even more passive than watching earned media on TV or hearing about it on the radio.

This week we discussed the Singularity, the tipping point in our future where machines will overtake humans as the most intelligent species on the planet.

Paul Allen argued that the Singularity will not happen in the year 2045 (or, for that matter, any other time in the near future) – and he provides us with a counter-argument to the idea that the computer is a living entity similar to the human brain. We’ve looked at Licklider’s man-machine symbiosis hypothesis and also explored the Internet of Things’ ability to create a “living network” amongst multiple devices. However, this seems to be one of the first times in our readings that we’ve encountered a view that attempts to identify why the brain and the computer are not quite comparable:

“The complexity of the brain is simply awesome. Every structure has been precisely shaped by millions of years of evolution to do a particular thing, whatever it might be. It is not like a computer, with billions of identical transistors in regular memory arrays that are controlled by a CPU with a few different elements. In the brain every individual structure and neural circuit has been individually refined by evolution and environmental factors. The closer we look at the brain, the greater the degree of neural variation we find. Understanding the neural structure of the human brain is getting harder as we learn more.”

He does go on to say that the complexity will eventually end, as the brain is made up of finite amount of neurons and a set number of neural connections – but for the foreseeable future, the deep interworkings of our brains will continue to mystify us. I found Allen’s comparison – of computers as somewhat rigid and repetitive in their composition vs. our brain as a distinctly refined organ that is unique to each individual – to be an interesting divergence from some of the thoughts we’ve read in previous weeks.

Assuming the Singularity does happen, when will we know that it has hit us? Will it be a hard-and-fast day in the year 2045 or a slow decline over a prolonged period? I would argue for the slow decline method. Humans have evolved gradually over millions of years. If we view computers as the successor to humans, then we will slowly be phased out as the computers take over the role of superior “species” (if we can even call computers a species.) If we take the Law of Accelerating Returns to be true, then the rate of evolution amongst machines is much greater than the human rate of evolution.

We’ll still be chugging along at our gradual evolutionary pace, but machines will create more and more rapid and noticeable change with each successive generation. Until, perhaps, the machines will be able to evolve not only from generation to generation, but within a generation itself (i.e., a machine that evolves during its own lifespan, if that would even be possible.) It’s fascinating to think about whether the human model of evolution and change would even be applicable to machines and computers, or if they will evolve in some way we can’t even predict (or comprehend).

Today we had a great discussion about connectivity amongst devices – a concept known as “The Internet of Things.”

A quote of interest from the “Embedded, Everywhere” reading: “An EmNet that requires extensive user training will have failed in its fundamental promise—computing systems must adapt to users, not the other way around.” (emphasis added)

Is this (or has this always been) a hard and fast rule? I may be wrong, but there seems to be some irony here. As the ARPANET was being built just 50+ years ago, the onus was placed on scientists (the users) to create software that would adapt their own local machines to IMPs which would then connect to the overall network – in order to connect, they had to adapt. Now, according to this article, we expect our computerized consumer electronics (which house EmNets) to be easy to use and, ideally, intuitively adaptable to us.

Waski’s Wired article suggests that interconnected sensors are practically living, working together as a single “organism.” I found this comment related to Licklider’s original idea of the computer as an almost human entity.  Licklider died in 1990; it makes you wonder what he’d think if only he were around to see the changes over the past 26 years.

Finally, to take Burrus’ thought (about the Internet of Things being far larger than we realize) a step further: Smart Cities connect to other Smart Cities, States connect to States, and all of America is then connected and then…? How big could this possibly get? A central command hub in the White House that monitors all 50 states? The implications are pretty neat; for example, sensors could assess natural disaster damage across multiple states and decide where first to send responders based on which areas were most harmed. How would national responses to Hurricane Sandy or Katrina have differed had we had this type of technology in place? (At the same time, the national security implications of a central command hub are also pretty alarming.)