2005 Honors Symposium

1
UMFK HONORS SYMPOSIUM
Spring 2005
2
Agenda

• Peeking into our Cybernetic Future
• Student Research Proposals
• Honors Essay Winners
• Fall 2005 Honors Seminar

3
What is Cybernetics??

• Classic definition
• The science of communication and control in
  animal and machine
• Norbert Wiener, Mathematician
• Other Definitions
• an experimental epistemology (the limits to how
  we know what we know) concerned with the
  communication within an observer and between the
  observer and his environment.
• Warren McCulloch, Philosopher
• the science of effective organization.
• Gregory Bateson, Anthropologist
• a science concerned with the study of systems of
  any nature which are capable of receiving,
  storing, and processing information so as to use
  it for control
• A.N. Kolmogorov, Mathematician

4
Cybernetics

• Cybernetics is the study of interactions between
  living (changing) things and how those
  interactions bring about order (stasis) through
  circular causality (feedback)
• Using observations about the interactions between
  man and machine to project future developments in
• Society
• Governments and the Body Politic
• Economics
• Technology
• Education??

5
Nicholas NegroPonte

• Founder of MIT Media Lab
• Being Digital 1995
• the next decade will see cases of intellectual
  property abuse and invasion of our privacy
• radical transformations of the nature of our job
  markets, as we work less with atoms and more with
  bits, will happen just at the same time the 2
  billion strong labor force of India and China
  come on-line
• As children appropriate a global information
  resource, and as they discover that only adults
  need learners permits, we are bound to find new
  hope and dignity in places where very little
  existed before

6
Stan Davis

• Management Consultant
• Retired Harvard Professor (Social Sciences)
• Lessons From the Future 2001
• when you connect a lot of dumb things together
  and let them interactcommunicate with each
  otherthen you get a smart system
• The key to the economy of the future lies in its
  deep structure. And, whether this structure is
  rooted in information technology or
  biotechnology, in optical, quantum, molecular, or
  DNA computing, in inorganic silicon
  microprocessors or organic biochips, they are all
  code based and they all work from the bottom up.

7
Lawrence Lessig

• Professor of Law Stanford Law School
• The Future of Ideas 2001
• All around us are the consequences of the most
  significant technological, and hence cultural,
  revolution in generations. This revolution has
  produced the most powerful and diverse spur to
  innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of
  ideas about a central aspect of this
  prosperitypropertyconfuses us. This confusion
  is leading us to change the environment in ways
  that will change the prosperity. Believing we
  know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the
  nature of the actual prosperity all around, we
  change the rules within which the Internet
  revolution lives. These changes will end the
  revolution.

8
Other thoughts

• Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into
  a system that compels him to increase his herd
  without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin
  is the destination toward which all men rush,
  each pursuing his own interest in a society that
  believes in the freedom of the commons. (Hardin,
  1968)
• In an Information Society, does the Internet
  represent the Global Information Commons of the
  future? If so, does an un-controlled Internet
  represent our ruin?

9
Other thoughts

• Whatever gulf separates the rich from the poor,
  an even greater chasm separates the armed from
  the unarmed and the ignorant from the educated.
  Today, in the fast-changing, affluent nations,
  despite all inequities of income and wealth, the
  coming struggle for power will increasingly turn
  into a struggle over the distribution and access
  to knowledge. - Alvin Toffler, Powershift, 1990
• Will global informations Sharing prevent the
  upcoming conflict?

10
Other Thoughts

• Technology now has its own culture, the third
  culture, the possibility culture, the culture of
  nerds--a culture that is starting to go global
  and mainstream simultaneously. The culture of
  science, so long in the shadow of the culture of
  art, now has another orientation to contend with,
  one grown from its own rib. It remains to be seen
  how the lofty, noble endeavor of science deals
  with the rogue vernacular of technology, but for
  the moment, the nerds of the third culture are
  rising.
• Kevin Kelly, Editor Wired Magazine

11
New computer technologies have brought many
changes into our lives and these changes have
been occurring with greater frequency and
commotion. The impact of these new digital
technologies resembles a revolution as economies,
businesses, social interactions governments,
health care and even warfare are being digitally
mutated into new cybernetic forms. Does the
future bring digital utopia or dystopia? Do we
get to chose or is the digital die already cast?

12
Peeking into our Cybernetic Future

• Research Proposals
• Stephen Dean
• Joshua Phillips
• Ray Soucy
• Cora Williams
• Sherwin Britton
• John Cole Torrey