Yet Asimov’s reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their “sexiness” on a scale of one to three. Today’s social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, “So-and-so is indeed my friend,” and “I trust so-and-so to see all my other ‘friends.'” These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that’s easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: “If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy.” The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm (“allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself”) is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net’s underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.
This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock’s autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It’s likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as “lack of accord” and “certainty,” to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.
[From Cory Doctorow’s Rise of the Machines in the current Wired magazine.]
With iRobot about to hit the theatres, Cory’s article addresses how Asimov “turned androids into pop culture icons – and invented the science of robotics in the process.” His account is pretty critical and insightful, reminding me that the science fiction literature that i love should not be considered a complete prescriptive tool because the stories written often fail to address the complexities that exist in everyday life.
Synchronicity! I just finished blogging about this. Albeit disagreeing with you.
http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/archives/000256.html
the mind is not an algorithm, it is a mind. that it can metacognate about itself, this is a given: infinity cannot fit into a finite machine, nor can the infinite of emotions ever be quantified with numbers. This is probably why Asimov could not find a feminine voice: the infinity of emotion is intuitive to the female of our species. it is nessesary for the upbringing of future adults: it is the reason of the heart that builds empires and shatters dreams.
Allah is great;
you better get an edit thing for the blog:
i was kidding with about allah is great…
to read your words each day moves me like everyday life never could.
to read your words each day moves me like everyday life never could.
check this out. interesting? very Asimovian
I think that the language here is essential. I think that the better question is…do people actually rely on the word “friend” as having the same definition in social software terms ?
For example, if I post a bulletin board about needing a roomate, and someone replies to it who is say 2 degrees from me, then obviously I would follow up with the people in that chain that connects me to them before signing them up to live with me.
Are you supposing that anyone would just blindly accept, explicitly, that “well…I see that my friend is “friends” with them, so no need to really check into it, I’ll just trust Friendster’s definition of “friend” as what it means to me, in real life ?
I think that there seems to be too much insisting that Social Networking (or, rather, social software, anyway) is even trying to impose those algorithms on their users.
I would argue that instead, that connections are being made that might not have been *easily* made in real life without such technology, and as it should be, the definitions of those connections not only will be up to the users to define, but of course even those definitions will change over time. I just don’t see an insistence on any of the socialsoftware sites suggesting that you do things with these connections in *their* way, and that is a good thing.
Flickr doesn’t *force* me to share photos with people I have chosen to have a connection with, nor does it force that I have to look at the ones that my peeps have shared.