|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
There is a really interesting rant by Jaron Lanier at Edge.org about Wikipedia. He warns of a dangerous groundswell towards "hive mind" type social models, wary of the disastrous political precendents for rampant collectivism, which he distinguishes from "representative democracy" and "meritocracy." Lanier connects the popularity of Wikipedia with the economic push for meta-level sorting of the internet where information becomes farther and farther removed from its original context and the levels of useful subjective information associated with authorship. And he relates all this to artificial intelligence and points out an uncomfortable phenomenon of people degrading their expectations of human intelligence in order to claim success for artificial intelligence. He also notes that the internet is good because of all the people, but there is a trend to depersonalise the content. (As with Wikipedia, which he says "is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure.") The essay has some analysis (quoted) below of collective versus individual systems, and also talks about the valuable checks and balances we developed pre-internet that helped us generate good shared knowledge, like independent media and ethical journalism!
"Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it's possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.
There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals."