With technology increasing as rapidly as ever and people like Ray Kurzweil making predictions for us to be finished with reverse engineering the brain around 2030, the question arises, will we be able to recreate digital copies of our brain? if so, what does that mean for all of us? Will we see the start of human's uploading and downloading information directly to/from our brains via a central hub? Will we be able to send mental messages to our friends and transmit raw thoughts and feelings to one another?
Imagine this: say you live in a society where this technology exists. you also like a girl, but can't really bring up a way of telling her how you feel. wouldn't it be awesome if you could transmit to her the sensation of the butterflies in your stomach that you feel when you're around her? after all, this feeling is merely just your brain's interpretation of information received from your nervous system. Imagine your reaction to a beautiful painting for the first time and the emotional response it evoked out of you. Imagine being to tag that picture with this first time feeling, so that you can experience it anytime you want after that. Let's be honest, sometimes words just don't suffice for whatever you're trying to express. Maybe in the future, that will never be a problem because we'd be able to communicate our raw thoughts/emotions to whoever we wish. But what else can we do with these new digital brains of ours?
What if we could "live forever" by just re-downloading another full copy of our brain into a mechanical body once your current one starts to fail? I find this whole concept one of extreme interest because our society would be forever changed by this. Think about what would have to happen if we had the ability to never die. Well, for one thing, Earth would get crowded pretty quickly because people would stop dying but new babies would keep being born. This would definitely force us to begin settling on the other planets/moons in our solar system. Let's think of something else: when you trade your organic brain for the digital representation, is it really you? will your friends see any difference in the way you act? is there more to us than our brains? can we really accurately construct a mind? I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Maybe when we switch from our organic brain to our digital representation, it's really lights out for us, and the birth of an artificial intelligence which already has your memories and acts and learns just like you do, or maybe we actually will wake up on the other side. The answer if any of this will come to pass still remains to be seen, and I won't be holding my breath for it, but I'll be keeping a watchful eye on the development of technologies which might lead up to this.
Thank you all for reading,
-Carlos
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Thoughts On Education
About a year ago, I was looking for a good Ted Talk to watch, and I stumbled upon Ken Robinson's 2006 talk, called "Schools Kill Creativity". My view on education was forever changed. If you're reading this and you've never seen that talk, please do so! (and for that matter, watch his 2010 follow-up talk too) It helped me realize something that I notice every day now, that is, in the words of Sir Robinson, "we're educating people out of their creativity". His talk also tells a story of a little girl in a drawing class, who usually doesn't way attention, was hard at work at what she was drawing. the teacher came to investigate and asked what she was drawing. the girl responded, "I'm drawing a picture of god", the surprised teacher says ,"well no body knows what god looks like" to which the girl responded, "well, they will in a minute". now, I don't know about you, but I can't even remember the last time I attempted to picture what god looks like, let alone draw him out on a piece of paper. Why is that?
One thing I've also noticed during my progression through the education system, and something that I still notice in college, is that as people progress through their educational career, they become increasingly afraid of being wrong. In Elementary, everybody raised their hand to answer the teacher's question, when middle school came around, about half of the people were willing to answer the question, and when I was in high school, it pretty much boiled down to 5-10 people per class answering the question. In some of my college classes, it's lucky if someone even gives the question a go. Now, much like in Robinson's talk, I'm not saying to be wrong is to be creative, but if one is unwilling to be wrong, he or she will never be able to give themselves to a creative idea. In my opinion this stigma associated with being wrong is largely the fault of our education system. Fail once or twice in your educational career now a days, and it's like the world is over. It's almost like the world has forgotten that the best lessons learned come right after a failure.
Another thing our education system does, is make amazingly talented people who are passionate and brilliant in their own right think they're inadequate. This goes back to Einstein's quote saying "everyone's a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will believe its whole live believing that it is stupid" This is because the thing these people were good at wasn't valued by our education system. This is something that I've been guilty of for so long and I still have to struggle to not fall into this. I used to tell my friends who wanted to study something in college they were passionate about things like "Don't do that, you'll never find a job doing something like that". But now I believe that people would be most efficient, doing work for things they feel passionate most about. I also think people would be happier doing the thing they feel most passionate about for a living no matter what amount of money they're making.
I think in every class, no matter what the subject is, should be taught in a matter that evokes the most creativity out of the student as possible. I think we should move more towards this because in the age of the internet, knowledge of cold facts are practically useless, we are moving towards a society that values creativity nearly above all. I believe math should be taught in a way where the computation takes a back seat and the actual development of a problem is focused on. How do we take a real world problem, convert it into a mathematical expression, solve it, and convert it back into a real world solution? the computation is only a single step in the process and it is soon becoming the least important for humans to do. I believe that if we shift our attention towards evoking creativity, our whole world would profit so much more. At the end of Ken Robinson's second talk in 2010 he says, "every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet, and we should tread softly".
One thing I've also noticed during my progression through the education system, and something that I still notice in college, is that as people progress through their educational career, they become increasingly afraid of being wrong. In Elementary, everybody raised their hand to answer the teacher's question, when middle school came around, about half of the people were willing to answer the question, and when I was in high school, it pretty much boiled down to 5-10 people per class answering the question. In some of my college classes, it's lucky if someone even gives the question a go. Now, much like in Robinson's talk, I'm not saying to be wrong is to be creative, but if one is unwilling to be wrong, he or she will never be able to give themselves to a creative idea. In my opinion this stigma associated with being wrong is largely the fault of our education system. Fail once or twice in your educational career now a days, and it's like the world is over. It's almost like the world has forgotten that the best lessons learned come right after a failure.
Another thing our education system does, is make amazingly talented people who are passionate and brilliant in their own right think they're inadequate. This goes back to Einstein's quote saying "everyone's a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will believe its whole live believing that it is stupid" This is because the thing these people were good at wasn't valued by our education system. This is something that I've been guilty of for so long and I still have to struggle to not fall into this. I used to tell my friends who wanted to study something in college they were passionate about things like "Don't do that, you'll never find a job doing something like that". But now I believe that people would be most efficient, doing work for things they feel passionate most about. I also think people would be happier doing the thing they feel most passionate about for a living no matter what amount of money they're making.
I think in every class, no matter what the subject is, should be taught in a matter that evokes the most creativity out of the student as possible. I think we should move more towards this because in the age of the internet, knowledge of cold facts are practically useless, we are moving towards a society that values creativity nearly above all. I believe math should be taught in a way where the computation takes a back seat and the actual development of a problem is focused on. How do we take a real world problem, convert it into a mathematical expression, solve it, and convert it back into a real world solution? the computation is only a single step in the process and it is soon becoming the least important for humans to do. I believe that if we shift our attention towards evoking creativity, our whole world would profit so much more. At the end of Ken Robinson's second talk in 2010 he says, "every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet, and we should tread softly".
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