Telecommuting has its advantages and it has its limits. I think we need to find that sweet spot in between where it helps the environment, it helps people, but it doesn't alienate us and it doesn't cause our organizations to fall apart by centrifugal force.
I think that most people really do need the sort of community you find in an office. Most people are always going to go into an office. If you are a member of a working group and you are not there physically, decisions are made without you.
We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.
Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.
The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.
Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.
I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.
There are always a few people who are hyper-normal.
Maybe there is no objective experience, but there is a certain way of interacting with all the subjective experiences.
We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.
One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.
There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.
We've got a planet in which we don't want to have everybody having sex, and most people are lonely anyway.
What is it about sex? Is it the sensations, or is it the meanings and the communication game that's tied into that.
My mission is to try to get a lot more global view.
Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."
There is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.
You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it's just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn't happen anymore. I don't know why.
If 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000?
The neural network is this kind of technology that is not an algorithm, it is a network that has weights on it, and you can adjust the weights so that it learns. You teach it through trials.
We can design things that learn, so you can grow an intelligence by creating an environment and creating things that just do it a million time faster than we do.
I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.
In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.
Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words - and this is the problem that they have with Americans - just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.
What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.
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