Artifical Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that captures my interest and over the next few postings I hope to explore some of the ethical thoughts and issues around this. 

In particular what inspires these postings are Sebastian Thrun's keynote speech at TED last year in which he spoke about Google's driverless car. Thrun's conjecture is that driverless cars can be programmed to scan the entire environment around them and react accordingly, thus making them safer than human-driven cars.

Master/Machine

I like the idea of developing technologies to make the world safer, though in the next posting we will explore a little more about what it means to be 'safe', bearing in mind that 'pilotless' drones do not inspire ideas of safety for those living in the Pak-Afghan border regions. Admittedly, some of these drones are operated remotely and thus there is still a human-control element to them, but there is a pattern of military needs shaping advances in technology. For now, Sebastian Thrun makes a plausible case for going driverless:

Find out more on Sebastian Thrun's speech at TED last year.

Android

Android developed by Android Inc., the Linux-based operating system that has had people excited since its emergence in 2005. The collaboration with Google and the Open Handset Alliance has seen Android become the world's best selling smartphone platform*. 

Google Inc. released the Android software under a free, open-source license and so the whole Android experience takes on the aspect of a wider, shared collaboration through developers who have written over 200,000 apps for the operating system so far. The great thing is its free.There's an entire open source community out there and if we're ever going to bridge the digital divide, surely open source will play a key factor. Go, Android, Go! 

*Android is also the operating system on my Samsung Galaxy S.

One Laptop Per Child - Why?

Continued from previous posting ... Why give a laptop to a child who may have no electricity or even running water?

In Part 2 of the video produced by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, this is a fundamental question is explored. Provides some very valuable food for thought.

One Laptop Per Child - Mission

There are many arguments and counter arguments in regards to the effectiveness of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, but put like this, there is a sense of purpose for project itself. This is the first of a two parter - the second video which will follow in the next posting defines the "laptop" project as a "education" project.

Digital Technology: Diffusion and Revolution

continued from previous posting

Technology: Diffusion and Revolution

In 1996, 80 percent of the population in 50 Muslim countries did not have regular access to a telephone. By 2006, this proportion had dropped to 20 percent. The diffusion rates for other information and communication technologies are also high, generally higher than those in non-Muslim developing countries: between 2000 and 2010, the compound annual growth rate of internet users was 32 percent, compared with 24 percent for the rest of the developing world. See here.

Consider “doubling time,” a figure used by demographers to refer to the amount of time it takes for a country’s population to double. Applied to technology diffusion, this reveals rapid trends: on average, since 2000, the number of internet users in Muslim countries has doubled every 8 months.

Understanding technology diffusion in Muslim countries offers some insight into why current political leaderships are being challenged. Mounir Khelifa, a Tunisian literature professor, speaking to Reuters, explains that the uprisings were made possible by the emergence of a generation raised during this information technology age. Both the Internet and Satellite Television undercut the propaganda of state media, creating  the opportunity for people to develop their own consensus on their rights. 

The recent uprisings in the Arab world began with the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, a protesting Tunisian shopkeeper who self-immolated, which activated a cross boundary network of people exhausted by authoritarian rule. Within weeks, digitally-enabled protesters in Tunisia had deposed their dictator after a series of strikes, protests and a mass civil disobedience movement called the Jasmine Revolution. Satellite television and the social media allowed the trend to spread across the Middle East.  Even President Obama has identified technology as one of the key variables that enabled average Egyptians to protest. True, digital media alone didn’t oust Mubarak, but it did provide the medium by which calls for freedom have cascaded across the region.

Technology: Politics of Change

And what of the sands? Where will they settle? It is difficult to know but what is already being called the Arab Spring, it is likely to lead to more political casualties. I remain cautious about what happens next - the western media is rather formulaic in its response and seems to feel that tomorrow the Arabs of the middle east will wake up as free citizens in fully established democracies or that militant theocracies will manoeuvre quick take-overs and send forth an army of radicals.

Nothing is quite certain and in no way am I ambivalent towards what is happening. I live here; I see it through a different lens and in particular, I think solutions need to be local.

There is much to be learned from this. Right now, I feel like I know two things. Firstly, in the modern world that we live in, we should not underestimate the will of people and the power that they have in tapping into the technologies available to them. Secondly, long term, brutal regimes and autocracies cannot survive; change will occur. The sands will continue to shift.

For further reading on Information Technology and Political Islam follow this link.

Morpheus Speaks

MORPHEUS Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

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MORPHEUS The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO What truth?

MORPHEUS That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.

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MORPHEUS The Matrix is a system Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save ... You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. 

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Shouting from the Mountaintop

As an educational advisor working in school improvement, I quote a contributor to Dr. Alec Couros's blog on Open Thinking. This is one of the most challenging aspects of our work here in the UAE.

Convincing teachers to stop teaching from the mountaintop and lead the students up the mountain is an on going challenge ... Our teachers need to constantly remind themselves to try new teaching methods and avail themselves of the tools.

Dave Hill, February 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm

The Art of Penmanship

Serendipity ...

... I happened to be having a conversation about this issue only yesterday...

The same old fonts, the same styles of presentation; with so much of the text that we read being in print form, isn't there a threat that somewhere we are being de-skilled both as readers and writers? Of course, this may lead to a different understanding of what it is to be literate, but what about those very important calligraphic forms of writing such as Nastaʿlīq and Kanji?

I do join up when I write, but don't get to write so much because of the emphasis on electronic communication. Anyway, I'll make a point of uploading an example sometime soon Inshallah.

full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm

... Is the ancient art form of handwriting dying out?

A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.

For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

"When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them," says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.

She argues that children - if not this generation then one soon to come - may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.

Wicked-Pedia: Volume I

Wicked-Pedia

I like Wikipedia, and use it as a point of reference, even here in this blog. Often I'll follow the articles in full, but mostly I pick up points of interest through scanning. For me, Wikipedia fits the need to fill my curiosity that my Hutchinson Encyclopaedia once served - similar to the times that I would spend in the school library looking at Britannica. Later, when we had Encarta, with it's stylised indexing, media files and hyperlinks, I thought that I had the world of knowledge all in one place. It was a good start, but of course slightly inaccurate - there's simply too much information to store and collate on a single CD-ROM. Besides, the fundamental disadvantage with Hutchinson, Britannica and Encarta was that they were pretty much out of date as soon as they went to press. Besides, what about the hidden pockets of information, that never quite made it to a volume of Britannica, or into the final edit of Encarta?

Step forward Wikipedia. I can spend a good deal of time, reading about the Jurassic and find myself clicking on the hyperlinks that carry me off somewhere else, where I'll follow another entry with interest; dinosaurs, air composition, flowering plants, modern farming, economy, gold, the periodic table, alchemy, the Renaissance, modernism, geo-politics and so on. All, advert free, without stepping outside of the Wiki-world.

The People's Encyclopaedia

But is Wikipedia, the fountain of all knowledge? It is, I guess, without boundaries, but there-in is the Achilles' Heel. We live in an Information Age, where the cyber-world is littered with junk, incomplete works, debris, misinformation and malice. This does, quite often, creep into Wikipedia, and therefore the whole process of navigating through Wikipedia, like much of the WWW, is about being able to spot obvious bias, avoiding the vandalism, recognising the variation in quality and taking care to check and validate what is presented as a 'truth'. Wikipedia may be good, but like anything good, it has to be supported to keep it good and we still need to take care where we step when exploring.  

(...to be continued ...)

The Encyclopaedia of the Brethren of Purity

Of course, no discussion on encyclopaedias would be complete without mentioning the Brethren of Purity, whose 52 volume compendium was completed in Basra, Iraq circa 1000 CE, later to influence post-Renaissance encyclopaedias in the West.