{"id":1234,"date":"2004-06-23T14:19:52","date_gmt":"2004-06-23T14:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2004\/06\/23\/asimov_reductionist_approach_to_human_interaction_and_yasns.html"},"modified":"2004-06-23T14:19:52","modified_gmt":"2004-06-23T14:19:52","slug":"asimov_reductionist_approach_to_human_interaction_and_yasns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2004\/06\/23\/asimov_reductionist_approach_to_human_interaction_and_yasns.html","title":{"rendered":"Asimov, reductionist approach to human interaction and YASNS"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[From Cory Doctorow’s Rise of the Machines<\/a> in the current Wired magazine.]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}