Social Networking
Clay Shirky on why you cannot program a machine to replicate a relationship here via Tim Oren.
Some of the comments make the assumption that the brain is a computational machine and therefore should be replicable in code on another computational machine.
This morning whilst waiting for the guys from Mosenergo (Moscow energy utility company) to come to finally authorize the meter in my new apartment (I have only been living there 3 months) I was reading the story of the Spassky / Fisher chess match. The book moved away from history and politics briefly to talk about the mathematical permutations of a chess game, as close to infinite as I will ever get. The authors stated that the number of permutations available in any move were far too great for the brain to compute them. Some were clearly excluded immediately from experience and knowledge with a few options taking the most time. The conclusion was that great chess players used their computational ability as a base but that they were actually artists. It was their ability to "see" or visualize the chess board that made them brilliant, not their computational ability. In one section they described how players "felt" that a piece was in the right place rather than computing its ability to be there.
What's the relevance to Shirky's piece? The brain is computational, but it is also multi-layered in a way that computers just aren't (yet?). Social networking software is a tool which is fairly useless just now and will improve, but it will still have to be employed using human intelligence. Some will be better at creating relationships than others and it will have nothing to do with software and everything to do with emotional intelligence.
26 March 2004
Social Networking
Clay Shirky on why you cannot program a machine to replicate a relationship here via Tim Oren.
Some of the comments make the assumption that the brain is a computational machine and therefore should be replicable in code on another computational machine.
This morning whilst waiting for the guys from Mosenergo (Moscow energy utility company) to come to finally authorize the meter in my new apartment (I have only been living there 3 months) I was reading the story of the Spassky / Fisher chess match. The book moved away from history and politics briefly to talk about the mathematical permutations of a chess game, as close to infinite as I will ever get. The authors stated that the number of permutations available in any move were far too great for the brain to compute them. Some were clearly excluded immediately from experience and knowledge with a few options taking the most time. The conclusion was that great chess players used their computational ability as a base but that they were actually artists. It was their ability to "see" or visualize the chess board that made them brilliant, not their computational ability. In one section they described how players "felt" that a piece was in the right place rather than computing its ability to be there.
What's the relevance to Shirky's piece? The brain is computational, but it is also multi-layered in a way that computers just aren't (yet?). Social networking software is a tool which is fairly useless just now and will improve, but it will still have to be employed using human intelligence. Some will be better at creating relationships than others and it will have nothing to do with software and everything to do with emotional intelligence.
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