Go Online? What about my privacy?

Virtual Reality or Split Personality?

"Have you ever been to Hawaii?"
"Yes ... in my Second Life ™"

A funny thought that occured to me after waking up while still in bed thinking about what I read last night about virtual reality. I was thinking, what if people's constructed mental split between their real-life actions and virtual actions start to blur? What are the legal & eniviromental implications, not to mention business and economics? After all, what scientist are discovering in the field of Quantum Physics is pointing very boldly to the fact that what we experience with our senses represents a very tiny portion of reality. The unseen is much much greater than the "seen", according to them.

"Get a Second Life", more than one online article were titled. "What?!" was my reaction. "What about my first life? I'm having difficulties managing stuff in my first life; I'm not sure I want to add a second life now."

"Choose from our list of wide variety of last names", the Second Life registeration page instructed. "What?!" was my reaction again. "Changing my name? .. Now that's worth my meditation time" ;-)

Personally, I love my name, but I think I'm going to leave this post open to the readers' stands on this without me taking a solid position. I'm curious to know what other people think and feel towards a VR vs. SP (the title?) hypothesis and how they perceive it.

The Internet is Killing Our Culture ?!

I must say it's a scary thought with regard to the internet. I always thought of the explosion of the web as a powerful culture-enriching tool to exchange knowledge and expertise. Many metaphysics gurus saw the internet as an inevitable physical expression of the oneness and connectedness of mankind, and so did I. But the issue that this weeks' reading raised in my mind is whether this connectedness is only enriching our repertoire of intellectual resources or is going too far beyond that to the extent at which indviduality and cultural uniquness are melting down.

Personally, I don't think there can be creativity and constructive change without diversity. I'm a strong believer in the saying, "It takes a world of differences to make a difference in our world" Again, the title is a scary thought. Imagine waking up someday only to find that your roommate is a clone of you wearing and looking totally the same. Not only that, but when you go outside, everyone; on the streets, in classes, in the metro, everywhere look the same. How boring & how daunting that is!

My conclusion is that there should be some limits set to the democratization of social media. I was shocked by Wikipedia's founder's disbelief in the intellectual authority of experts. It is those experts who are keeping your encyclopedia sane and nonsense-free. Without respect to their authority, knowledge just becomes sourceless. Let's believe in anything from wherever it comes. It's all connected, you know!

My Blog Circle; A Circle of Cool Bloggers

Hi. I want every one in the world who is reading my blog to know about the other awesome cool bloggers that belong to my blog circle. They are (in order of how I met them):

Stephanie
Evan
Brian
Jessica

Enjoy their creative ideas and thoughts. Have Fun!

What is artificial & what is not?

I know the title could be somewhat unrelated to the business implications of crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence, but I'm a person who likes to have those little ponderings from time to time as a form of mental, internal kind of joy. "Can a machine think?" It's an interesting question that is often quickly answered in negation without proper thiinking and analysis. Regardless of the answer, I think, a more critical point to the issue is: How can we tell? What if the machine CAN think, but we have no way of examining its own kind of thinking? A good answer I came across while looking up AI is the Loebner prize for Turing Test. Turing postulated that if machines can think, then the output of their thoughts should be indistinguishable from those of humans. And so, he suggested that examiners sit on different computers in a lab that are -unkowingly to them- either connected to AI "chat bots" or to human respondants. If an examiner "chats" with a machine and can't tell it's a machine, then Bingo .. that's intelligence; it's not artificial any more.

"What do you think? Can a machine think what a human can think? The answer, I think, if someone thinks what he saw is what a human would think, a machine can think, I think.
If what a machine thinks is not what a human would think, a machine can't think, I think."
I just invented an awkward AI tongue twister! Excuse my internal MOPs (Moments of Pondering) :-)