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Post by judithodili on Mar 22, 2016 3:48:52 GMT
Focusing on Bush's idea of the Memex - I completely agree with his line of thought. Machines are better suited for storing, indexing, and "remembering" the vast amounts of information that we need to do our work as scientists. I do not think that is a bad thing at all, humans are great at some things, while machines are great at others, and I think the two can complement each other very nicely.
+1 on Qian's thoughts - we are still struggling with the generation of insights and new knowledge even with all the technology of today. I'm quite uncertain as to what contributes to our ability to generate new knowledge or invent new things. Is this process of manually storing, and remembering information, as well as contextualizing them the driver behind our innovation, or can we somehow remain or bolster our innvovation if information is more readily available?
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Post by fannie on Mar 22, 2016 3:53:14 GMT
I think technological development has moved more towards the efficient access of knowledge rather than the understanding of knowledge. I agree with what a lot of people are saying about our lack of ability to synthesize all the information that we now have access to. Something like the trails that Bush mentioned are starting to come about in different information map visualizations, but even the number of trails that we produce (e.g. how many links you click on before you find what you want) can be difficult to manage. We might collaborate with other people to build up knowledge that the different parties are experts in, but even then there are tons of other experts in the world. I think this is hard especially in interdisciplinary fields, where we have to adjust to the variations in the different fields.
What Amy mentioned about modern “warfare” as a result of knowledge access makes me wonder about moderating knowledge versus making sense of the knowledge accessed. If people could make even more sense of knowledge accessed, perhaps the “warfare” would expand with new ways of exploiting what is knowledge is now understood. We might want to be wary of this as we start to advance on understanding knowledge rather than accessing knowledge.
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Post by mrivera on Mar 22, 2016 4:13:39 GMT
To Amy's point- in making knowledge more accessible, we inherently open the door to making more dangerous knowledge readily available. We see this sort of thing happen on places like the dark web where you can easily find tons of nefarious information- guns, bombs, drugs, hacking, etc. A more open and connected world is also one that is more exposed to these things. Revisiting Joselyn's question- "Do you think our modern technologies are functioning as the 'pacific instruments' Bush was anticipating?" I'd argue that there the idea of a "pacific instrument" is pointless. Anything can be turned into a non-peaceful tool under the right circumstances and in the hands of the wrong people. Cole asked an interesting question: "Is scientific advancement moving at the correct pace? Is it too fast or too slow?" I'd argue that it is moving too slow. While the internet is a driving force behind scientific advancement, the research domain still relies heavily on yearly conferences/journal articles in order make headway in a given community. The breadth (and depth) of the internet provides a wealth of information but it isn't deemed as reputable as older forms of scientific communication. PS. If none of this makes sense, that's probably because it doesn't thesciencedog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/golden-retriever-and-science1.jpg
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Post by Brandon on Mar 22, 2016 4:38:44 GMT
1. Do you think the focus of technological development has moved towards understanding of knowledge, as Vannevar Bush was arguing it should?
I'm sort of amazed at how, despite all the technological advances we've made, we still present findings in basically the same format that we have for 100+ years. Journal articles look basically the same. We still write huge dissertations (has anyone actually read a phd dissertation?). There certainly are some changes (videos that accompany submissions, you CAN post code/data sometimes), but the norms are basically the same. Many of the technological ideas that Bush presented have come to pass (in some form), but I think the hoped for results have not necessarily occurred.
Posing information access as a technological problem, I think, overlooks many of the cultural issues at play. Open source software movements and the sharing of libraries/code/etc. seem to really follow the spirit of what Bush was getting at, but I think the institutions that pay scientists/researchers are not primarily interested in information accessibility anyway. So, yeah, we're making progress towards better technologies for sharing/accessing info (especially now that search algorithms are commercially successful), but I think we, as a society, have moved more into a view of knowledge as a valuable, patentable commodity rather than a public good.
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Post by Felicia Ng on Mar 22, 2016 4:54:49 GMT
First off, I find it pretty amazing that after the war, the first thing that this super prominent scientific R&D director person decided to rally all scientists to throw their efforts into is creating a massive and accessible repository of collective human knowledge. It makes a really strong and extraordinary statement about how obsessed people were and still are with augmenting the human mind and cognitive capabilities. I feel like it speaks to some fundamental and collective human need to know more, do more, create more, think more, want more, have more, than we already can. What is up with this voraciousness? It's laudable from one perspective, but it's also disconcerting from another.
Relatedly, Cole asked: "Is scientific advancement moving at the correct pace? Is it too fast or too slow?" There is no "correct" pace. Michael Rivera argues that it's too slow, but I think it depends on what the ultimate societal goal is. If change, revolution, disruption, and innovation are the goal, then sure, it could be moving faster (especially in medical research- I heard somewhere that, contrary to some popular belief and despite our advances so far, the current state of medical research is actually still abysmal). But if stability is a goal, then I would say that we could use some slowing down.
The most interesting questions to me in this discussion are also the philosophical/moral ones revolving around the implications of such a massive and accessible repository of collective human knowledge. Alexandra mentioned that Bush should have evaluated what the knowledge would be used for before urging scientists to develop the memex. But I wonder if all the consequences of massive and accessible information could ever have been fully predicted. I think Erik Stolterman would say no. And at the end of the day, I would argue that creating the internet and Wikipedia and everything that Bush speculated have, in many ways, improved human lives and the state of our society. Of course there will always be negative consequences to ANYTHING that is developed or invented. You will never find a single thing in the world that does not carry potentially dangerous consequences to its existence. But someone once told me that if you keep questioning and speculating on potential negative consequences, then you will be forever paralyzed and never create anything. You have to just create things, and then if negative consequences come up, you find ways to address them as you move forward with improving the creation. Design thinking is important at the outset of projects, I agree, but I think there is such thing as too much of it- there comes a point where you need to just stop thinking and create things to make any kind of progress in the world.
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Post by Anna on Mar 22, 2016 5:16:41 GMT
To Joselyn's question about Memex's potential impact on human memory/retrieval/ability: I'm skeptical that even in its ideal form Memex would pose a threat to human ability. People said that about Google, but there hasn't actually been evidence that human cognition is deteriorating as a result (I don't think?). Though I do think that eventually we might find that certain important parts/functions of the brain might atrophy under modern technological conditions. Brains might go the way of bodies in popular culture-- eg whereas in the past, no one thought about how to get a beach bod, or felt compelled to run in place in order to retain a healthy human heart, (etc), in the future, people will need to force themselves to meet their daily recommended brain activity. Of course, we already have this to an extent-- eg Lumosity brain games, etc. etc.
Also to Cole's point about sci fi inspiring science-- yes, definitely true, but also a 2-way street. Eg that Johnnie Depp movie based on The Singularity, Donnie Darko and references to wormholes, etc (just the 2 that came to mind).
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Post by rushil on Mar 22, 2016 8:03:00 GMT
To answer the topic questions -- Yes, I do believe there is immense value in speculating about progress of future developments. Let me illustrate my point via an example. Mark Weiser is one of the most highly regarded visionaries in the field of technology. Technologists have tried to achieve / move closer to his vision for the last two decades, but even with the progress we have made, we are nowhere near close to achieving that vision. However, the attempts or the technological advances being made in an effort to achieve that vision have several unintended consequences. They are improving the quality of human life (aided by technology, an improvement nonetheless). Therefore, speculating progress has value, as has been seen from past examples.
I also agree with Qian that Bush's claim was not that accessible knowledge leads to "designing peaceful technology", rather providing scientists and technologists with a holistic view of the world, to enable them to make better choices while building future products that can / may / will impact the society as a whole.
Another question posted by the leaders indicates that Bush calls for indexing as a method to create Memex. I disagree. I think that Bush's contribution was not in the system itself, but in illustrating a point about the importance of the end goal for a Memex-like system.
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Post by julian on Mar 22, 2016 21:07:25 GMT
Bush's article is incredibly accurate about our present in so many ways that I honestly didn't realize I was reading a 1945 article until he starts talking about telephones. This however is only confirmation that many of the problems we see now were already foreseen 60+ years ago. I believe, like Bush's put it in his article, that the explosion of information in science although good has created its own challenges and we are always at the verge of inadvertently inventing the wheel over and over again. It is still the case for example that people in Physics create methods that are strikingly similar to say Mathematical methods invented long time ago. Bush's attributes all of this problems to not having a proper indexing system. I think however the problem is not all in part to that but it is also caused by differences in vocabulary across fields and even domains in the same field. So not only we have a terrible indexing system but we have an indexing system that depends on the vocabulary of each field which is inconsistent when navigating across fields.
It is quite interesting that Bush was already thinking about Internet of Things in his own way, and by that I mean on how he describes this very specific computing machines that are everywhere. Throughout the article it's interesting to notice that Bush misses completely the internet, nonetheless by the way he solves the information retrieval problem he kinds of describes the way PageRank works.
This reading puts into question the novelty and direction of our research: Is it really that novel or are we just following someone else's idea. And if it is not novel, then what does it say about the space in which this research is done and the way HCI has changed (or not) since its conception. Maybe Bush's article is so prophetic because things although have changed, have done so in a very predictable way or .... have we been building around Bush's ideas without notice (like apparently Engelbart did) to make his vision of the future true?.
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Post by sciutoalex on Mar 24, 2016 1:08:32 GMT
Vannevar Bush argued that a key limitation to the advance of science was the storage and retrieval of information. Here we are seventy-odd years, where we can store an infinite amount of information and retrieve it actually pretty efficiently, and science has certainly improved and become more efficient, but it has not been the panacea Bush envisioned. I think it's worth exploring why the success of Bush's vision hasn't translated into such strong success.
One reason we haven't seen the translation is that the core challenge of doing research isn't the storage and retrieval of information. For those of us who took P&T last semester, doing a good literature review is more than gathering the correct papers together. In addition to the retrieval of papers, the papers must be combined to find themes (synthesis), new ideas must be inserted into pre-existing arguments (interdisciplinarity), and an argument must be made as to why the literature matters (rhetoric and contextualization). These challenges are unrelated to information retrieval, and I think one could argue that easier retrieval exacerbates these issues. HCI has largely solved information storage and retrieval, but these more complex tasks HCI is only beginning to look at. I think advances in artificial intelligence will slowly begin to imperfectly solve synthesis and interdisciplinarity. I can't see any science ever solving rhetoric and contextualization because that requires the researcher to bring their personal experiences and knowledge of the social-dimension of research to bear. But let's just do a thought experiment, if we can develop machines that can synthesize literature as good as an experienced researcher, what would that leave to the researcher to do? And what would be the point of other researchers reading the output of an algorithm?
The science-fiction author William Gibson is often quoted as saying, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." I think Bush's paper is a great example of this. Doug Engelbart read the paper, and turned he turned Bush's ideas into one of the most important research programmes of HCI. It's a great example of the value of research and the value of speculation. Bush's insights would be forgotten had others not taken them, implemented them, and begun to understand the possibilities and limits of Bush's ideas. All HCI researchers today should look just as much at the practices of people, especially niche groups with surprising practices, for inspiration for their work as much as the list of papers coming out of conferences.
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