Missing Shades of Grue

Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry -- atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Information infrastructure is a network of cultural artifacts and practices. A database is not merely a technical construct; it represents a set of values and it also shapes what we see and how we see it. Every time we name something and itemize its attributes, we make some things visible and others invisible. We sometimes think of infrastructure, like computer networks, as outside of culture. But pathways, whether made of stone, optical fiber or radio waves, are built because of cultural connections. How they are built reflects the traditions and values as well as the technical skills of their creators. Infrastructure in turn shapes culture. Making some information hard to obtain creates a need for an expert class. Counting or not counting something changes the way it can be used. Increasingly it is the digital infrastructure that shapes our access to information and we are just beginning to understand how the pathways and containers and practices we build in cyberspace shape knowledge itself.

The advent of the computer has made possible an event that has happened only a few times in human history: the creation of a new medium of representation. The name "computer" fails to adequately convey the power of this medium, since a machine that executes procedures and processes vast quantities of symbolic representation is not merely a bigger calculator. It is a symbol processor, a transmitter of meaningful cultural codes. The advent of the machinery of computing is similar to that of the movie camera or the TV broadcast. The technical substrate is necessary but not sufficient for the process of meaning-making, which also depends on the related cultural process of inventing the medium. Cyberinfrastructure is an evolving creation. It is both technical and cultural, constrained and empowered by human skills and traditions, and possessing the same power to shape and expand the knowledge base that the print infrastructure has maintained for the past 500 years, and that the broadcast and moving image infrastructures have for the past 100 years.

Pistorius wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics. But despite his ascendance, he is facing resistance from track and field's world governing body, which is seeking to bar him on the grounds that the technology of his prosthetics may give him an unfair advantage over sprinters using their natural legs.

Isaac Asimov was already thinking about these problems back in the 1940s, when he developed his famous "three laws of robotics".

He argued that intelligent robots should all be programmed to obey the following three laws:

* A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

* A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

* A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

These three laws might seem like a good way to keep robots from harming people. But to a roboticist they pose more problems than they solve. In fact, programming a real robot to follow the three laws would itself be very difficult.

...the robot would need to be able to tell humans apart from similar-looking things such as chimpanzees, statues and humanoid robots.

This may be easy for us humans, but it is a very hard problem for robots, as anyone working in machine vision will tell you.

And as I look at the trends that are now starting to converge, I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present.