Liberation of Tools

Without the existence of parody, I would have far less hope for our society. Robert Brockway’s recent article on the Cracked website, “If The Internet Wins The Nobel: A Proposed Acceptance Speech,” makes fun of the effort to give the internet the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unfortunately the Nobel Prize agency hides the nominees list for 50 years in a secret volcano lair, so I’m not sure if the intertubes is actually a nominee right now.

Brockway points out the strangeness of recent awards/nominations to abstract concepts, such as “You” for Time’s Person of the Year. Why don’t we nominate abstract concepts for President?  Brockway bemoans the internet’s qualifications, concluding that this would really be a peace prize for pornography.

Despite his brilliance, Brockway misses one aspect of the internet that makes it somewhat different than other abstract concepts, which is that it’s also a tool. Even if you disagree with the usage, the acceptance of a tool for a major award may be a predecessor to a future culture in which intelligence, personhood and rights apply to a myriad forms, not just humans.   And not just in object-oriented forms.

“In the future, your clothes will be smarter than you.”
—Scott Adams

The interfaces of the web allow us to interact with agents who may not be human. Would you care if other players in multiplayer games were bots, as long as they acted like humans? Would you follow software agents on Twitter? I certainly would.  Would you have sex with a sufficiently humanlike robot (or web agent + peripheral)?  I certainly…um…

“Smart” gadgets now are still relatively idiotic. But we’ll have more and better mobile assistants and home appliances in the future. Also, if we can work out the interfaces, automatic systems and software agents will become better at doing online chores and information aggregation for us.

In the real world, augmented pets and socially adept robots may be among your friends. Telepresence robots will let you interact in the same physical space with remote humans, software agents, pets, corporations, etc.

This could be the era in which humans finally start accepting machines, distributed systems, and other non-humans as people. Or if not as people, than as new classes of rights-bearing entities.

Bonus points to anybody who makes an “I for one welcome…” comment.

Syndicated 2010-02-26 02:32:20 from SynapticNulship