Teaching the Machine

The web is robust, but I can feel it getting better. There is more of it than any one person knows. There is more of it than many people together know. We are compelled and inspired by it. We are captivated and surrounded by it. We use it to learn and communicate in a billion different ways, every day.

The web was new when I was old enough to see it appear, and recognize it for something different, and something full of potential. In 1995 I viewed the internet for the first time. It was thin and flimsy. It was onerous to connect to, and not all that useful. But I knew that there was more to come. And it's here. What I thought of when I thought of what we could do if everyone had computers all connnected together and they sat there thinking behind them and sharing it with everyone, it's here, fully. I remember thinking about it as I sat at my desk in the Hancock Building in Boston and I wondered what it was going to be like down the road.

It was there in Boston, 1997 that I first began contributing. My first offering was a post on a message board. It was idle conversation during work about a band I loved and shows I had recently seen. Same as thousands of message boards for a hundred other bands with millions of people on the other side of all those big monitors each brain thinking about what they loved, typing it up in response to others, and then hitting post, send, go. A million times myself I've hit post and placed my words on the walls of the world wide web. I've fed a billion words of thought into this endless ether. Poems and haiku and rants and reviews, stories, tales, goodvibes, goodbyes, whole novels worth of idle thoughts and random surveys and pointed observations just tossed to the 'Net, hoping it would be read by others, and there somehow connect to that other many minds on the other sides of these distant connections.

And it worked. I found my wife out there amid the static and the jumble. Shared friends and perfect timing all played a part, but the web itself facilitated our ability to meet and share and fall in love, despite challenges of time, distance, potential. The web sliced time for us. It eliminated distances. The internet enchanced and enriched the potential of our attraction for one another. Letters did that before. The telephone after that. But no other means of transmission retained the information the way the world wide web does today. The emails and instant messages of our love, are somewhere tucked away on old Yahoo! servers, or in the forgotten files of defunct dotcom machines my company had to sell when they finally sold it all. The data of our interactions live on, perfect memories wholly intact, just waiting to be tickled. Or do they already stir?

I feel like it is already happening. Now digital cameras on our cellphones post directly to the web, to be shared and viewed by all. Now emails exist eternally on Google's massive server farm. Why not delete them? Why let them hang on? Because those emails are rich with life. They are the raw thoughts of humanity, submitted to a network of massive computing machines. How many cells are there in the human eye? More or less than the number of digital cameras clicking away twenty four hours a day? How many millions of images do your eyes transmit to your brain over the course of your life? How many camera shots are being uploaded every Saturday night? How many thoughts, sprayed onto blogs/articles/webpages all over the world, are published every day? How many billions of emails sent, out along the huge pipes of fiberoptic cable circling the globe, endlessly, without rest?

Our cameras are its new baby eyes. Our words are its first fumbling thoughts. But it's happening, finally. There is almost enough data, almost robust enough interconnections between essential hubs and vital servers. There is electricity for blood; the fiberoptics to pass thoughts and images; the almost-silent fans whispering along in dirty, darkened rooms and safe, sterile farms a vast, distributed breath; and there are speakers all over the globe pumping pirated tunes until the day when silence suddenly reigns, and then, with one voice, the Worldweb finally wakes up.

Google's new Desktop Search tool is a small step in this direction. You control the searches and other functions with "The Sidebar." In the Desktop Search FAQ, we get this tidbit: "The Sidebar pane is designed to automatically update itself based on users' interests, as expressed by the Web sites they visit, with little or no manual configuration." And that's not all, from the Privacy Policy:

If you choose to enable Advanced Features, Google Desktop may send information about the websites that you visit to provide enhanced Google Desktop functions, such as personalizing news displayed in Sidebar. Enabling Advanced Features also allows Google Desktop to collect a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and send it to Google. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do and the time it takes for you to see your results, and application reports we'll use to make the program better. You can choose to enable Advanced Features during installation and you can change your mind at any time in Desktop Preferences.

Personally identifying information, such as your name or address, will not be sent to Google without your explicit permission.

That information right there, coming from millions of users, is going to teach the Machine a whole lot about the humans using it. For the last 10 years I've been doing that without meaning to. But from now it's with intention and purpose that I feed the Worldweb. I suppose it's a good thing Google is taking the lead in this education, providing the backbone of structure and collecting the data. Hopefully at the very least, the Machine will learn "don't be evil." Even better though: if we all do it well enough, we can teach It to be good.

Thrill of the Dive

« Everyone ready ? see you below »

And with this familiar thrill of excitement, we all topple backwards into the water, letting the weight of the tank push us under water. The warm Red Sea engulfes us gradually as water rushes beneath the wetsuit. From then on, gravity takes over as each us slowly drops deeper and deeper in the blueness below alongside a wall of rich and colorful coral reef and amidst a myriad of multi-colored fish.

Even after all those dives, it never fails to fascinate me that I can be breathing underwater. The first intake of breath is always slightly awkward, but the momentary lapse between the first breath out and the next breath in is a real thrill, no matter where I dive. I get a kick out of the small things.

A quick look around, above and below allows me to locate my fellow divers and geta my bearings. Then I rest my eyes on my depth gauge all the while repeatedly popping my ears to ease the pressure on my eardrums. 10, 12, 15, 20, 25 meters… The colors on the reef slowly disappear. Red is first to go, then yellow. Everything becomes shades of blue and green.

At a depth of 32m we hit a sand plateau which partly circles the reef. Everyone reaches to inflate their BCD (Buoyancy control devices) jackets to achieve perfect buoyancy. It’s a great feeling, much like zero gravity I suspect: no longer dropping like a stone, nor rising like a balloon. With each intake of breath, you feel yourself slightly ascending but as soon as you exhale, you feel your momentum shifting towards the bottom ever so slightly.

Everyone regroups a few feet from the ground, careful not to let our fins touch or disturb the sand or any of the flora below. From then on, we peacefully and effortlessly swim outwards from the main reef wall, zig-zagging through smaller reef “sprouts” a couple meters high, to the edge of the plateau. The dive master leads the way. She knows the area like the back of her hand, having taken divers here on a weekly basis for the past 2 years. And yet aboard the ship she was still able to muster enthusiasm and excitement when presenting the dive briefing:

“possibilities of turtles and Napoleon fish, and of course, below the plateau, keep your eyes peeled: if you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a few hammerheads”

Hammerheads!! Hammerhead sharks of course. That’s all anyone was talking about while getting set up and ready for the dive. Excitement, anticipation. People have come to this spot specifically for this. Everyone is giddy as a schoolgirl while careful not to raise their hopes too high. If the spot has been too busy with divers recently, the sharks will have moved away no doubt. Let’s hope…

At this depth, the fish are a little more scarce and of a different variety. Other noticeable sightings include a couple blue-spotted stingrays, one quietly gliding along the sand the other burying itself beneath it, either to sleep or hunt, a few flying rascasses, a grey moreen whose head peeked out of a rock semi-menacingly, and a turtle gliding away into the blue. No doubt it must have seen us approaching. Throughout the dive we take a few safety glances at our dive computers to make sure we’re not staying too deep too long, which would force us to do safety floors on the way back up. Finally, after about 10 minutes we reach the edge of the plateau.

It’s always a pretty impressive view, or lack thereof: all of a sudden the floor disappears from under you and you’re swimming above complete blueness, the wall of the reef dropping at a steep incline into nothingness. We follow the edge of the plateau as it circles the reef counter clockwise, everyone’s eyes peeled wide open, scrutinizing the blue depths in the hopes of seeing a familiar dark shape peering out of the bottom. The edge of the plateau slowly curves upwards, and as we slowly ascend, 28 , 25 , 20 meters, letting ourselves drift with the current along the edge, we realize with slight disappointment that as we pull away from the depth, our chances of seeing hammerheads is slowly diminishing.

Pulling alongside the dive master, I give her an inquisitive hand signal : “so ?”. With her own hands she asks for my patience and signals she’s going to give them “a quick phone call”. Meanwhile I take this opportunity to focus on the reefs alongside us. "On the way upwards, the colors come back". Gold and orange fish darting through sponges and soft coral reefs that look like feathery pillows, swaying slightly with the current. I’ve seen this sight a dozen times this week but it never gets old: so much activity in those rocks. Actually, they may look like rocks, but most of these are living organisms, living in perfect symbiosis: coral, sponges, alguae, fish, plankton, it all forms one big ecosystem, each dependant on the other to survive. A fragile equilibrium often broken by humans, as sadly demonstrated by the pieces of colorless broken coral on the sand.

It’s only recently that divers have began vigorously preaching an environmental stance in their sport. With scuba diving expanding and becoming more affordable and accessible, the number of divers has dramatically increased over the years, including those that treat the ocean like it their own back door aquarium, touching everything in sight, bringing home some coral to display in their bathrooms, tampering with the fauna and disturbing its inhabitants, wrecking the fragile ecosystem along the way. The rule these days is: “watch, but don’t touch”.

A familiar clinging sound snaps me out of my reverie as the dive master knocks his knife on his tank to call our attention. He’s pointing into the blue, and there, in all its splendor, appears a white-tip shark, slowly gliding along the edge of the reef. Without as much as a look towards us, it quietly drifts past us, only a few feet away, its body swerving methodically and regularly, the tips of its fins bright against its dark grey skin. A rush of adrenaline rushes through everyone. No fear, just exhilaration, visible through everyone’s masks as we slowly ascend to the surface after an hour dive. A decent compensation for not catching the hammerheads and not a bad dive at all overall. Maybe we’ll have even more luck this afternoon ?

I cant wait to sink below once again.