An iPhone Is an Extension of the Mind
slate.com
slate.com
> With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
As a native Swedish speaker, I find the common identification of "anxiety" and "ångest" a little strange, because of the strong existential connotations of the latter word...
But it's interesting how McLuhan insinuates a connection between angst in the existential sense and this spatial displacement of the nervous system.
By the way, the quote is from his essay "The Agenbite of Outwit".
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...
No. These are phones, not implants. The FBI wants to crack encryption, not skulls. Anyone who equates access to phones with scifi mind scanning needs perspective. If you find your meat self indistinguishable from your "networked self" then you need to get out of the matrix once and a while. Some of us, I think most of us, still have internal and interpersonal lives that are not shared with our devices.
>> There is no reason to allow corporate access to our minds while vigorously denying state access.
Yes there is. A corporation doesn't have access to weaponized drones (at least not yet;). A corporation doesn't want to kill its customers. It wants them happy and spending. On the other hand, governments often want and do kill. A government does not necessarily want its people happy. Therefore, data in the hands of corporations is a very different scenario than data in the hand of government. They should not be equated.
I'm having difficulty thinking of a single part of my life that isn't shared with my devices.
My smartphone can be used to discover where I am at any given time, and where I probably was at any given time. Reasonable guesses about my state of mind and stream of thoughts could be constructed from my search history on the device. It can access any and all of my personal documents, photos, and financial information. It provides access to a matrix of nearly all of my social and professional contacts, and a fair bit of history regarding my current and historical interactions with them. It provides access to entry and exit logs for the doors and windows in my home, recordings of all persons approaching or entering its doors, and even logs about which lights I turn on and when.
Most noteworthy is that the information above is almost certainly of higher quality and breadth than anything law enforcement previously (in a pre-digital age) could have assembled on their own.
>I'm having difficulty thinking of a single part of my life that isn't shared with my devices.
Well, yes you have explained how you share just about everything with your smartphone but is that supposed to prove that there is no other way? You could just (maybe) use a little more discretion with a tool that you apparently know, understand and accept, can siphon any information in its vicinity.
I hate hearing the recurring point about "if I don't do everything on my phone I'll cease to function", why can't we collectively adapt our consumption to the tools available and stop expecting all tools to have our best interests in mind?
I don't see any need to. My smartphone is a valuable source of real-time and archived information, time-saving automation, and provides great social utility.
> why can't we collectively adapt our consumption to the tools available
I have, in a way that suits my needs and lifestyle.
>stop expecting all tools to have our best interests in mind
I never expected this, and still don't. I also don't expect my government to have my personal best interests in mind, which is why I'm quite interested in limiting its ability to seize and search my personal effects, including my smartphone.
Law enforcement still physically follow people. They can get a location, but a phone in a pocket cannot understand what a person is doing at a location, or even who they talk to. And phones are subject to massive disinformation. (ie plant phone on someone else/leave on bus). So it is impossible for a cop at any terminal to replicate the quality of information gained by a physical tail.
I don't care how old you happen to be, or how rose-tinted your memories are. My smartphone and associated personal devices and services allow me to meet business, personal, and social goals in an efficient and effective manner. I have access to better information and get things done more quickly with my phone than without. I don't find it to be a drain on my productivity or my lifestyle.
>a phone in a pocket cannot understand what a person is doing at a location, or even who they talk to. And phones are subject to massive disinformation. (ie plant phone on someone else/leave on bus). So it is impossible for a cop at any terminal to replicate the quality of information gained by a physical tail.
This is irrelevant. Law enforcement and prosecutors tend to weaponize whatever personal data can be gleaned from civilians they are targeting, regardless of quality. Aside from my own personal measures to ensure such data is reasonably difficult for an unauthorized party to obtain, there ought to be strong controls on the ability of the state and its agents to acquire such data.
On the flip side, corporations exist for one purpose: to make money. They're only expected to do as much "good" as they feel like doing without hurting the bottom line. They can't be impeached nor do we vote for their policies (except maybe indirectly by voting with wallets when that's even an option).
Power and influence, whether wielded by public or private organizations can be incredibly dangerous or incredibly beneficial. In some cases I'm more comfortable with certain powers in the hands of the private sector where they'll likely only use it to try to sell me stuff and don't have the power to imprison or kill me. At the same time, I don't believe the embodiment of self-interest (private business) is the ideal solution in a lot of situations where my well-being and future prosperity are on the line.
A public servant at his/her least effective fails to serve our interests. A business at its most effective only cares about its own.
They will be soon and I look forward to the day. Of course then the government will open your body and remove the implant to do what they are now doing with the phones.
>> A corporation doesn't want to kill its customers. It wants them happy and spending.
Happy is not a priority, just spending. Many actually aim for depressed and spending. Depressed is better because all that is left is hope and that's a big carrot.
If you already have everything you want, you're definitely not spending.
Depressed people lack desire. They often barely eat and prefer to sleep as much as possible, but that varies. In some cases they don't derive significant pleasure from anything.
Happy people get excited. They have appetite. If they can afford it, they'll buy a boat so they can bring their happy friends out and have a good time.
Except for monks and nuns, nobody really has everything they want. Well, you could see some depressed people as having everything they want—if they lost the ability to want.
Wrong. There are corporate weaponized drones already, and lobbying in favor of private (individual and corporate) armed drones in the US. [0][1]
> A corporation doesn't want to kill its customers.
Competitors, protestors, and disaffected workers, OTOH...
[0] http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a29182/the-skunk-d...
[1] http://executivelp.com/laws-regulations/why-tennessee-should...
He then posits the money question "How much of ourselves should we give over to the state?"
However, it's a huge leap to treat this like a new issue. Humans have been storing mental processes with 3rd parties since the literal beginning of history, and storing them with non-human parties since literally the first written word. This necessarily existed before the "state" in any sense (as a state requires laws, which have to be somehow commuincated.) This means that this debate has been ongoing since literally the beginning of governments.
How/why/when/where the state handles spoken conversations vs written records vs computer records are concepts that have been fairly well established in both US and international law. People certainly hold varying viewpoints, but to contextualize that debate as new because of recent technological advances or the latest news seems clickbaity.
On one hand the article proposes that writing something down on paper is an extension of the mind, yet does not even mention the obvious situation that must occur on a regular basis of confidential papers in a safe. These are admissible correct?
I still am searching for something new about smartphone vs older technology such as safes and paper, which must have hundreds of years of legal precedent to reference. Even the idea that the safe destroys it's contents if tampered with is not new (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptex).
This article brings up the concept of cognitive liberty. The more we rely on technology and AI the more this may become a concern.
"Cognitive liberty, or the "right to mental self-determination", is the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness. It has been argued to be both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought. Though a relatively recently defined concept, many theorists see cognitive liberty as being of increasing importance as technological advances in neuroscience allow for an ever-expanding ability to directly influence consciousness."
if this is a real thing, most of what passes for "education" these days tramples this right extensively.
Here we have the opportunity to do the opposite. It is inevitable, given the trends in technology, that we will someday be able to directly integrate computing devices into our minds in some way. Perhaps we would use them to store memories themselves, or offload the processing of difficult thoughts or problems. It's hard to say, but if you can imagine controlling a smartphone or computer with only your mind then it's not too hard to imagine all the other potential uses.
We have the opportunity to get it right, here and now. Let's not waste it.
It will become interesting once the "mind reading" technologies become more accurate though. What happens when you can read someone's mind in passing to, e.g., call their pin that has been established as protected under the Constitution. Look for wire mesh balaclava fashions in the future.
It is not the sole framing, nor is it correct. The order is not to weaken the encryption scheme, but to override the kill switch, on a specific phone, that will disable the device if too many incorrect login attempts are made.
There are at least 9 phones they want this on today, and other sources have "hundreds" more. So you can say they want to do this on "any specific" phone, but I hope we're well past debating this as if we're talking about a single phone ever.
I couldn't be happier with yesterday's ruling denying the government motion to compel using AWA in a similar case. I think we can see the forest for the trees in these case and should have an honest debate about how much police should be able to control the software on our devices, without trying to skirt the issue by tying it to a particularly haneous crime.
I'm convinced and I believe it's well understood and settled that if AWA works the way the Fed wants in a specific case, it works in every single investigation, regardless of the brand of device or type of software. Magistrate Judge Orenstein certainly saw it that way.
If you read the order, the software to deactivate the kill switch is only supposed to work with one particular iPhone and Apple is under no obligation to deliver that software to anyone; they are only required to provide access to the device without fear of the kill switch.
The cell phone, etc will be a much bigger extension. However, we still need better ways to input, organize and access the information. Handwritten notes, voice memos, pictures, drawings, unstructured and structured data, etc.
Cortana/Siri with hand tracking ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0 ) and a HoloLens will allow people to organize everything in creative ways.
Remember kids, this flower of your youth is precious precious precious. Do not waste it glued to a screen.
If they were zombies they wouldn't be bumping accidentally into you on the sidewalk. They'd be trying to eat your flesh or something.