Fwd: W. Daniel Hillis: Addendum to "Aristotle: The Knowledge Web"

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From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 14 Mar 2007 16:03
Subject: W. Daniel Hillis: Addendum to "Aristotle: The Knowledge Web"
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

March 14, 2006

Edge 205
http://www.edge.org

[5,715 words]

[This EDGE edition is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html]

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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ED. NOTE: In May, 2004, Edge published Danny Hillis's essay in which he proposed Aristotle: The Knowledge Web. "With the knowledge web," he wrote, "humanity's accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come."

Last week, Hillis announced a new company call Metaweb, and the free database, Freebase.com. The launch was covered by John Markoff in his New York Times article "Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching" [ 3.9.07].

Below is an addendum to his essay  he has written for Edge, a link to Markoff's article, as well as links to the original essay, the subsequent Edge Reality Club discussion.

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ADDENDUM TO "ARISTOTLE: THE KNOWLEDGE WEB"
By W. Daniel Hillis

...In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 9, 2007

Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching
By John Markoff

SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 - A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#markoff
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THIRD CULTURE NEWS
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
SCIENCE TIMES
FINDINGS

What's So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing
By John Tierney

When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago, he naïvely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of "Saturday Night Live" and a George Carlin routine. They didn't laugh much. It was what a stand-up comic would call a bad room. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Tierney3.13
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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 11, 2007
[COVER STORY]

The Brain on the Stand
By Jeffrey Rosen

How neuroscience is transforming the legal system.

...Two of the most ardent supporters of the claim that neuroscience requires the redefinition of guilt and punishment are Joshua D. Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard, and Jonathan D. Cohen, a professor of psychology who directs the neuroscience program at Princeton. ...

...Michael Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of "The Ethical Brain," notes that within 10 years, neuroscientists may be able to show that there are neurological differences when people testify about their own previous acts and when they testify to something they saw.  ...

...Libet argued that this leaves 100 milliseconds for the conscious self to veto the brain's unconscious decision, or to give way to it - suggesting, in the words of the neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, that we have not free will but "free won't.". ...

...The legal implications of the new experiments involving bias and neuroscience are hotly disputed. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard who helped to pioneer the I.A.T., has argued that there may be a big gap between the concept of intentional bias embedded in law and the reality of unconscious racism revealed by science. . ...

... "You can have a horrendously damaged brain where someone knows the difference between right and wrong but nonetheless can't control their behavior," says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. "At that point, you're dealing with a broken machine, and concepts like punishment and evil and sin become utterly irrelevant. Does that mean the person should be dumped back on the street? Absolutely not. You have a car with the brakes not working, and it shouldn't be allowed to be near anyone it can hurt.". ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Rosen
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THE NEW WORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 11, 2007

Out There
By Richard Panek

Only 4 percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter that makes up you and me and all the planets and stars and galaxies. The rest - 96 percent - is ... who knows?

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming, eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent, leaned forward in his. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Panek
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PROSPECT
March 2007

LEFT VERSUS RIGHT
defined the 20th century
WHAT'S NEXT?

100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question on the left in no more than 250 words. An edited selection of their responses is printed here - the rest are on our website. (Thanks to John Brockman for allowing us to borrow his Edge website idea). The pessimsm of the responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many predict it will get much worse.

Ed. Note: Among the 100 responses to the question posed by Prospect Editor David Goodhart, are a number of Edge contributors:


Brian Eno, musician
Interventionists vs laissez-faireists
One of the big divisions of the future will be between those who believe in intervention as a moral duty and those who don't. ...

Anthony Giddens, sociologist

"The future isn't what it used to be," George Burns once said. And he was right....

Nicholas Humphrey, scientist

How can anyone doubt that the faultline is going to be religion? On one side there will be those who continue to appeal for their political and moral values to what they understand to be God's will. ...

Marek Kohn, science writer

The right, of course, is still with us; robust structures remain to uphold individualism and the pursuit of wealth. There is also plenty of room in the current orthodoxy for liberalism and conservatism of all kind of stripes. ...

Mark Pagel, scientist

Modern humans evolved to live in small co-operative groups with extensive divisions of labour among unrelated people linked only by their common culture. Co-operation is fragile, being the contented face of trust, reciprocity and the perception of a shared fate-when they go, the mask can quickly fall. ...

Lisa Randall, scientist

Debates today have descended into those between the lazy and the slightly less lazy....

Steven Rose, biologist

Last century's alternatives were socialism or barbarism. This century's prospects are starker: social justice or the end of human civilisation-if not our species....

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Prospect
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PROSPECT
March 2007

Speculations

Why have we not encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life? We used to assume that the aliens had blown themselves up. But perhaps they just got addicted to computer games

By Geoffrey Miller

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Miller
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 11, 2007

Reflections on Life as a Shaker-Upper
By Erik Piepenburg

SINCE the 1960s the playwright, director and designer Richard Foreman has been the emperor of New York experimental theater, with some constants in those experiments: nonlinear tableaus about the unconscious mind, deliriously decorated sets, actors dressed like commandos from Dr. Seuss's special forces. Voices (often Mr. Foreman's own) and, lately, projected films add to the sensory overload.

In his current production, "Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!," running through April 1 at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church, he imagines a topsy-turvy world where doll heads and catatonic humans question the concept of sentience. Ben Brantley of The Times called it a "dazzling exercise in reality-shifting." ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Piepenburg
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 11, 2007
ICONS

Tie Space Contimuum
By Herbert Muschamp

Shoppers for men's wear should not be discouraged, either. Even if we cannot solve the problem, we can at least live the problem, and live it well, provided we know where to shop. "The Elegant Universe" is the title Brian Greene gave his popular book about string theory.

Let us ponder a possible sequel on the subject of thread theory. We will call it Universal Elegance. Battistoni will be the laboratory for our cosmic research.

[...more]
Muschamp
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TIME
March 7, 2007

Early Christianity's Martyrdom Debate
By David Van Biema

Princeton University's Elaine Pagels is about the nearest thing there is to a superstar in the realm of Christian history scholarship. It is largely through her work that many understand the early non-Orthodox Christianity that she at one point dubbed (and later un-dubbed, finding the term imprecise) the Gnostic Gospels. She breaks new ground with the debut of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, her collaboration with Harvard Divinity scholar Karen King about the second-century "Gospel of Judas" that was made public last year.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Pagels
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HUFFINGTON POST
March 7, 2007

Damascus, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, March 4, 2007

Give Palestine's Unity Government a Chance
Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod and Richard Davis

Most Israeli leaders we talked to agree that Abbas is sincere in wanting to steer the unity government and all Palestinian factions to recognize Israel.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Atran

[ED NOTE: See New York Times Magazine cover story "Darwin's God" ( 3.4.07) on Scott Atran's theories on the evolution of religion.]

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SEED
March 6, 2007
THE SEED SALON

Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin
The novelist and the cosmologist meet up to talk about reality.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Levin

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This EDGE edition is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html
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EDGE

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Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

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