30 September 2007
On 23 September 2007, The New York Times published George Johnson's article, "An Oracle Part Man, Part Machine". In his article, Johnson describes the advent of a "human-machine symbiosis" in which the "idea of automating...judgement has gone from radical to commonplace". He goes further to posit Musa al-Khwarizmi's algorithm with the (Second Life) avatar and the realization of the human as materially "absorbed into the operating system".
Great, man as machine, ingested and entrapped within. Or, perhaps not entirely so...
Taking the idea of the human-machine symbiosis a step further, we have semantic web technologies (SWT), as described by Peter Wayner in his article, "Helping Computers to Search with Nuances, Like Us" (The New York Times, 12 September 2007). With SWT, a computer language is created in a database, just as any regular ontology, however, for the purpose of encoding human language. In this manner, the computer obviates the possibility of misanalysis, or incongruous codes. Through this semi-ontological database then, the data in the distributed web can be connected up and analyzed in a more refined and precise manner - hence nuance. Thus fueled by the needs of corporations, scientists are trying to program the computer to think with human cognitive modalities when analyzing the massive data within databases. However, this is less an exercise of database analysis and programming and more an exercise of a functional cognitive simulacrum.
Why not take pause to re-think this direction? Perhaps there is no space and time for pause:
Indeed, with Advanced Micro Devices announcement that it will soon be releasing its quad-core chip in a race against Intel's Xeon server processors (Laurie J. Flynn, The New York Times, "A New Entry From A.M.D. in Chip Wars," 10 September 2007), a true pantheon of the technological phantasmagoria has been erected - postmodernists rejoice, your arguments have been validated.
The spectre of the machine or the imminence of knowledge simulation - a synthetic intelligence simulacrum?
There is a demarcation at which we must pause in true reflection or else we will be forced to do so at a time of frightening 'inconvenience'. There should be a temperance between ideology and praxis, each mediating the other. Unfortunately, we are too busy 'racing' in praxis to allow ideology its natural fruition. Here too, hyphenation serves a reminder as a hermeneutic device of re-evaluating dualities and searching for the creative potentiality of slight nuance within that trace element on that connecting line.
And this, this is the material hyphen: a nuance against the spectre of e-phantasmagoria.
