On Horse_ebooks and augmentation

I’m hereby finally pulling this blog off the bookshelf and whacking it on my leg a couple of times to get the dust off of it.  Having moved to a new and highly cool job at a new and highly cool institution a few months ago, I’m now taking part in the Gardner Campbell-led New Media Faculty-Staff development seminar.

Part of our contribution to the cause entails weekly blogging, and this I now return to doing with great pleasure.  Not only because it helps me organize my thoughts on the fascinating reading we’re doing for the seminar, but because blogging is a habit to which I want to return, now that I’m bearing responsibility for a new library unit doing some really engaging stuff.

In any case, this week is only a couple of quick hitters:

The first is inspired by some conversation we had in the first couple of seminar sessions in which we engaged with themes emerging from such seminal new media texts as Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945), Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About” (1954), and J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960).

We talked about the extent to which the machine is simply an faster automator of processes that humans are already undertaking or whether it will eventually be sophisticated enough to create art (leaving aside the question of whether that would be “true” art or simply the resemblance of art) or emote.

So I was entertained to run across a story at Huffington Post about the disappointment among the twitter faithful upon learning that the handle @Horse_ebooks was NOT a bot, when it was thought to be one:

For years, @Horse_ebook’s over 200,000 avid followers had been convinced its sometimes poetic, often nonsensical, frequently hilarious tweets had been the musings of a spambot created to elude Twitter’s spam detectors and peddle books about horses. There was something captivating about an algorithm that seemed so gifted at capturing the conundrums of our age. (“Everything happens so much” read one post, retweeted 8,500 times.)

On Tuesday, that fantasy came crashing down. The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean revealed that two living, breathing homo sapiens had been composing the tweets as an art piece.

Such sad news!  We wanted it to be more.  But why?

Our dismay at finding that the bot was human actually reveals a great deal about we want from our devices: We’re rooting for the compassionate computer.

“If people are upset that [@Horse_ebooks] is a person, it’s because they were hoping for the future. They were hoping that in the future, computers would be not just responsive or smart, but poetic,” says Blade Kotelly, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert in user-interface design. “[The computers] wouldn’t just be executing. They’d be thoughtful, taking care of us.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but is this evident yearning somehow proof that we won’t rest until creative, poetic–dare I say feeling–machines are among us?

The other thing that I wanted to touch on (and only have time to do so briefly because I have to run to the next session) is a niggling problem I’ve had with some of the technologies described with such amazing prescience by Bush in his essay and, this week, in Doug Englebart’s 1962 report “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”  It has to do with Bush’s concept of the “associative trail:”

The human mind . . . operates by association.  With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

While they both rightly point out the utility of associative trails, the very verb in question is a challenge. These trails have “been associated” by the user rather than, in essence, associating themselves. In other words, the emphasis is on speeding up connections that are noted by the user to exist, not in finding connections that weren’t previously discovered.

Such approaches are very useful for supporting structured thinking, but not for discovering previously-undiscovered patterns or connections.  I can’t help but think THAT is where computers can and should take us.