Babel-17

I recently picked up Babel-17 at the recommendation of my A.I. professor and found it short, weird, but all-together interesting. Babel-17 is a Nebula Award winning novel by Samuel R. Delany, and its plot is driven by a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that speakers of different languages think and behave differently. Essentially, in this book, language controls not only your thoughts and your behavior, but also your physical and mental abilities.

The book started off rather normally, but in the second chapter you are thrust into a bizarre world of cosmetic surgery and the discorporate. After the initial shock I warmed up to the characters and enjoyed the story. There are several interesting portions of the book (I'll quote a few favorites below) where the author either examines language in the minds of the characters or shows the perception of characters through their language. While the interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis used in this book is no longer scientifically valid, it is a fun, small novel that takes a known scientific concept and uses it to an extreme to create a small, thought-provoking novel for those willing to suspend disbelief and truly dive into the strange future that Delany envisioned.

Rating: 8/10

Cool Quotes (BEWARE SPOILERS - highlight to read):

"Words are names for things. In Plato's time things were names for ideas--what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object..."

"But the Greeks were poets three thousand years ago and you are a poet now. You snatch words together over such distance and their wakes blind me. Your thoughts are all fire, over shapes I cannot catch. They sound like music too deep, that shakes me...The 'I' in me is not strong enough to hold them..."

Creative Computers

In his book, On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins presents an interesting future where computers have become truly creative. They can combine ideas and concepts into new ideas and understand the context and perspective of the objects they see/sense.
This futuristic world blurs the barrier between what we now see as a lifeless computing machine, and a living organism. In a world where computers can attain the creativity, intelligence, memory, and computation power far greater than humanity, what is humanity's place?

Multi-touch in the Home

Multi-touch technology is the hottest thing in mobile electronics today, and products like Microsoft's Surface hold the potential for bringing this technology into the home. There is a lot of potential for this technology to revolutionize computing, but there are also many barriers for its entry. Multi-touch devices need to become cheaper, and interaction principles need to be solidified in the minds of everyday users.
The mouse and keyboard are very limiting in terms of number and fluidity of interactions with a computer, and multi-touch devices hold the promise of changing the way we think about the human-computer environment.

Your Internet Footprint

The role of the internet in people's everyday life is already huge, and it is expanding every day. Facebook currently has about 400 million users, Amazon and other internet retailers generate billions of dollars, and the world of web 2.0 applications continues to grow. I know I have dozens of accounts tied to several email addresses and usernames at various websites; many of which I have forgotten about. Without any record or physical location for these sites to exist, this can be anywhere from a nuisance, to a security and identity problem. How will this be remedied in the near future?

Arguments for Universality

Universal identification and password systems provide an internet enable population security and the ability to control all of their important data as one system. Something as simple as a universal identification protocol that many sites can adhere to at least allows a person to keep their email, banking, and purchasing accounts all tied under a single secure entity. For official records like these, the multitudes of accounts and password systems doesn't make much sense, and password recovery practices just make these less secure. As a professor of mine once said, "When you are given a security question from a website, it is best to just pound your fist on the keyboard."

Arguments for Anonymity

We leave little traces of our identities all over the internet. Some cookies here, logged data here, sessions, passwords, all add up to a pretty scary world. If your entire identity could be tied to a single identification, the motivation for people to crack that system is huge. While there are many situations for official internet identification, perhaps that level of identification is not something that should be passed around to every website you want to have an account with. The more you put information that could tie your real world assets in the virtual world, the more risk you are taking. So for sites like social networks, language learning communities, forums, and free blogging websites, perhaps it is best that you are only tied to a username, secondary email account that can be tossed if it was stolen.

Also with a system where your entire identity is centralized and controlled, privacy becomes endangered. People tend not to like having governments or seemingly benevolent companies tracking their every move, even though this kind of activity is already occurring and on the rise.

I believe there is some room in the internet for an open, high security identification protocol if measures are taken to prevent any organization from becoming a big brother.