After interviewing Julia Parra about what she sees happening with learning today, I took some time to follow up on some suggestions from Julia regarding the technology evolution. Thanks to Julia for leading us at PSA to some quality links in our pursuit of the latest in learning today.
Here is a Ted Talk suggested by Julia Parra, “We are all Cyborgs Now”. The video helps explain how technology is evolving us as humans. The talk is a good visual for better understanding the “Medium is the Massage” by Marshall Mcluhan. John has often posted about understanding media and the technology extensions of our senses and brain.
Another suggestion from Julia, was checking out “Network Analysis” as an approach to better understand knowledge in the world today. I found the this Ted Talk blog as an example of how networks can visually help us understand human knowledge.
As designer Manuel Lima points out in his TED Talk, A visual history of human knowledge, the network has become a powerful way to visualize much of what is going on in the world around us. “Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence,” says Lima. “This way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain to understanding the vast universe out there.” Here, Lima shares a few of his favorite network graphics.
I’ve been hungry for visuals to “show” us aspects of our “network” realities. Seems to me we need these images to help us understand our brave new world, much as one needs a map to “get a lay of the land”. An image is “understood” differently than a word, at least in western languages, and sometimes a diagram is worth 1000 words in helping us understand complex relationships.
Some good images to work with here by Maneul Lima.
We are all Cyborgs TED talk by Amber makes an important point about technology and us. Our cloud tools enable human connectivity, and this, despite it being an “artificial” reality, is nonetheless a human reality. She emphasizes that our tools increase our human interactions, and thus are a part of us, and not alien.
What still manages to scare us, and perhaps for good reasons, is the increasing portion of our “thinking” that we are allowing AI to do, and the thought that eventually AI will start to “think for itself” in non human ways.
So there’s two sides, one a very human face to our being connected via cloud tools, and then the other unknown and scary side of those tools becoming autonomous, or even just presenting us with curation and choices that we don’t understand.
We may accept a google search response with little knowledge of how it was derived, for example.
Or accept directions for driving with the same mysterious background process. Or accept an AI driving our car. Or an AI diagnosing our health profiles and prescribing our care.