Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

Cognitive Daily posted an interesting article today about the potential for human-robot marriage and how our relationships with robots seem to be growing.

From the article:

My first instinct upon reading this is to believe that people won’t get as much satisfaction from such relationships as from “normal” human relationships, but I’m not sure this will be the real problem with human-robot marriage. People need much less feedback in a relationship than you might think. They assign emotions to their pets (and robots) that these creatures simply don’t possess.

Emotional attachment to non-sentient items is a pretty scary thought, but entirely real. When we are in heightened emotional states, many of us seem to attach ourselves to whatever nearby is responsive, especially if that item performs a specific function or interacts with us and our environment. How these interactions will play out as technology advances is anyone’s guess, but they will without a doubt play out.

I recently joined Kiva, a non-profit organization which “… lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world.” After joining the site, you can look at a list of owners of small businesses in developing countries and choose to loan them money for a length of time. The loan lengths are generally about a year and currently you can only loan $25 at a time.

Once the loans are made, the money is distributed to a lending agency in the country the business owners originate from. The money is then distributed from these lending agencies. There are reviews of the different lending agencies, including a trust value, and how often the loans have been paid back. You are able to cross reference the trust level of the lending agency with each business owner.

Occasionally the individuals that have accepted the loans will post journals of the progress they’ve been making since receiving the loans and what they are doing with the money. Though some businesses post more often than others, it is an interesting way to stay connected with the people you’ve loaned too.

It was started by a group of people who have worked at a wide variety of different companies like Google, PayPal, and TiVo and has been operating as a non-profit since 2004. I’ve created an account at http://www.kiva.org/lender/ezkl and have made 3 $25 loans to a few different businesses in Azerbaijan, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

I hope to see more and more of these kinds of organizations springing up. I believe that if we begin to focus more on the intangible human interest accrued when people are able to support themselves and not so much on the interests in our own bank accounts, we can end a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Nature has posted a series of videos and articles on the evolution of language over time. It begins by explaining the story of Babel, the biblical explanation of the different languages of the world.

From the Nature summary of the videos and article:

As a language evolves, grammatical rules emerge and exceptions die out. Lieberman et al. have calculated the rate at which a language grows more regular, based on 1,200 years of English usage. Of 177 irregular verbs, 79 became regular in the last millennium. And the trend follows a simple rule: a verb’s half-life scales as the square root of its frequency. Irregular verbs that are 100 times as rare regularize 10 times faster. The emergence of a rule (such as adding –ed for the past tense) spells death for exceptional forms.

via: Mind Hacks

RU Sirius over at 10ZenMonkeys.com has asked 10 writers what effect they believe that the Internet has had on writers and the writing community. Very interesting answers from some very interesting authors. I especially liked Douglas Rushkoff’s response, an excerpt of which follows:

Douglas Rushkoff: I’d say that it’s great for writing as a cultural behavior, but maybe not for people who made their livings creating text. There’s a whole lot more text out there, and only so much time to read all this stuff. People spend a lot of their time reading text on screens, and don’t necessarily want to come home and read text on a page after that. Reading a hundred emails is really enough daily reading for anyone.

The book industry isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t blame that on the internet. It’s really the fault of media conglomeration. Authors are no longer respected in the same way, books are treated more like magazines with firm expiration dates, and writers who simply write really well don’t get deals as quickly as disgraced celebrities or get-rich-quick gurus.

I think that Rushkoff’s thoughts apply to many different industries and that because of the democratizing effect of the Internet there are many more options than ever before. Whether or not this will hurt the conventional publishing industry severely depends entirely upon their response to and ability to adapt with the changing times. I believe that this is true of all preexisting entertainment and information industries.

Well, we didn’t end up making it into the lectures on time. After a horrible set of directions from Google Maps and an ill-fated trip to Trenton, we got there far too late to get in. I would, however, like to thank the extremely drunk, middle aged Princeton alumni who directed us towards McCosh Hall with eloquence and speed. Never in my life have I heard such an inebriated group of people give such perfect directions without even a hint of drunken slur.

Bravo!