A Quote by Dan Simmons
We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.
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Our weavings in the cosmic web are not self-contained. Rather, they are part of the design of our collective humanity.
Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming."
If you look back over the history of computing, it started as mainframes or terminals. As PCs or work stations became prevalent, computing moved to the edge, and we had applications that took advantage of edge computing and the CPU and processing power at the edge. Cloud computing brought things back to the center.
Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.
Computers and computing are all around us. Some computing is highly visible, like your laptop. But this is only part of a computing iceberg. A lot more lies hidden below the surface. We don't see and usually don't think about the computers inside appliances, cars, airplanes, cameras, smartphones, GPS navigators and games.
The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing ... Only when our feet learn once again how to walk in a sacred manner, and our hearts hear the real music of creation, can we bring the world back into balance.
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.
Internally, we're focused on building our own technology, leveraging all the momentum that's out there around wearable computing and mobile computing and PC computing. But at the end of the day, all the code we've written and all the invention we've created has been focused on our own tech and our own products.
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
We've lived through a time in which people have felt they could forge their own future and make a better world. We may not have achieved our dreams in the time frame that we once believed was realistic, but the magnitude of what is yet to be achieved only confirms the importance of our commitment. Knowing this, we can't stop now.
[The] dynamics of computational artifacts extend beyond the interface narrowly defined, to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities. System design, it follows, must include not only the design of innovative technologies, but their artful integration with the rest of the social and material world.
I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'
It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing.
The 21st century has more potential than perhaps any other in our brief evolutionary history. We stand on the cusp of computing, genetic and energy generation breakthroughs that were only recently in the realm of science-fiction. A golden age of humanity is tantalisingly within our grasp.
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
Our contribution purely depends on our consciousness and our willingness to support those in need, to show vulnerability and accept the support of others, to share without expecting the credit, to give it our all and allow our hard work to decide the outcome, to understand that control can only be achieved with a shared responsibility.
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