Prediction of an emergent trend: integration of cheap overseas labour into ‘intelligent’ systems, to fill the gaps where ‘hard AI’ still fails.

The press is making a lot of ‘offshoring’ — the movement of call centres, support departments and the like to countries where educational standards are high, and labour is cheap. Ignoring the politics for a bit, this is interesting in other ways: once the infrastructure for such services is in place, the supply side of this market will naturally be looking for higher-margin ways to exploit any surpluses.

Imagine similar businesses offering the ‘clever, value-added bit’ to intelligent web search, or to collaborative filtering — much more cheaply and quickly than an otherwise huge investment in Research and Development. We’ve usually imagined the fleshy part to be the interface of the half-human, half-machine, but it feels to me that it’s much more likely, imminent and cost-efficient, to do it the other way around.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, but a recent email from Tim has brought it up again, with reference to the small person hidden in the base of the chess-playing automaton…

Speaking of 100 Suns, what could be more then than a Viewmaster reel of 3D images of atomic tests? Coming soon at Atom Central. I only stumbled over this because I’m still hunting for the image that I hoped would be in 100 Suns — a Rapatronic photograph of a desert test that I hope I can find and post later, with some thoughts. Actually, I’m off to search the amazingly comprehensive The Bomb Project for it. This might take some time…

That thing that happens sometimes, when you are lost in thought and you kick your foot against something in the world, fiercely hard, by accident, and suddenly you are aware that you have feet, and of the world, and it’s very funny, in a Zen kind of oh-here, the world kind of way. Today I took my headphones off in the Number 38 bus at Victoria, and the bus conductor was ringing the bell steadily, slowly, like a call to prayer, every note dying before the next.

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of us.

But there’s a moment with all of these tools when you first pick the thing up — before it melds itself into your extended being, before it disappears into the task of being-in-the-world once and forever, there must be a first time, when you test the heft of the thing as a thing with capabilities, when it is briefly possible to feel the interface betwen self and thing (I remember the first whole texts I read as a child, and that could feel the world through the words. But soon there was only the world — language since then has become such a part of me, it is no longer a tool I feel the use of).

We don’t seem to have words for that moment — feeling the new newness of something becoming part of us (we don’t really have a word for that incorporation itself, either, other than love, and this is not love) — when we are, briefly and uniquely, aware of the particular interface it effects between us and our task, surely a moment when we can learn something, when we last see clearly our chosen tool and feel its heft, become aware of how it rubs against our hand in a particular way, has a certain weight, and more importantly, how it could be different — that there might have been other choices, other ways to light our way through the forest, other ways to scar the world with our memories and desires that the future might know us… when we heft the tool-as-a-thing for the first (and last) time (think ‘early man’ lifting the thighbone in the prelude to 2001) and it becomes part of us, and reshapes us and our (the only) world forever.

I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon:

When a whole crowd turns to see us, we are rooted in place. (Imagine a painting of heaven with everyone, from Jesus to the smallest soul, staring right at you).

I’m trying hard to imagine that, and it terrifies me. There’s a long middle section dealing with Bataille’s assertions about things which ‘can’t be seen, even though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death’, which I’ll come back to later…