Techumanity: No. 3 Concentration

Welcome to Tech Humanity, the weekly podcast. Examine the intersection between technology and humanity. Yeah. century, the so called digital age. Ones and zeros tend to determine much of what we call reality. Do you ever question? of your reality. Do you ever wonder how new technologies Social media, apps for humanistic ideas and so on shape your consciousness. Are we in charge of technology or is technology

in charge of us. Will singularity become a reality and AI become the new creator, competing directly with the metaphysical gods. These are some of the ideas and questions educator, author, cultural critic and philosopher of technology, Dr. Tony Keshani, will examine in this episode and many more in the future. Please join us in Tech Humanity! Hello friends, welcome to Tech Humanity. I'm your host, Tony Kashani. Today we will focus on, well, focus. The kinds of things we focus on in our lives.

On a daily basis. What is important to us? What do we see? What are we aware of? And so on. But first, a couple of stories.

The first story is called The Black Doc. I had first heard about this story from a colleague of mine who had actually experimented with his students based on this story. And to be honest with you, I have done the same. So here it goes. One day a professor enters his classroom and tells his students that there will be a quiz, a surprise test of sorts. And of course the students don't like this, but

They are the students, and the professor tells them there'll be a test, they have to get ready. So he tells them to pull out a piece of paper, put their names on it, and be ready to answer their questions. So what does he do? He turns on the projector and projects an image on the big screen. To the student's surprise. There is nothing on the screen except for a black dot in the center of the screen.

The professor, seeing the expression on everyone's faces, tells them, Look, what I want you to do is write about what you see on the screen. And that's all. So don't feel pressured with time. Take your time and write what you see on the screen on that piece of paper, then turn it in. So the students proceed. They're a little confused, but they get going. They start writing.

At the end of the class, the professor takes all the exams, collects them, and tells the students to wait because he's going to read every single piece of paper that he has. All of them, with no exception, define the black dot. They explain its position in the center of the sheet, or rather the big screen. In to uh not the surprise of the professor, but uh the surprise of the student.

Almost all of the exams are identical. People talking about where the dot is and focusing on the black dot. Some are more eloquent than others discussing the dot. So the professor uh pauses for a second and tells them, look, I'm not going to grade this. I just wanted to give you something to think about. As you can see, no one, not a single person wrote about the white part of the screen. Everybody focused on the black dot.

And is this the same thing that happens in our lives? And that was the final question after the story.

We'll get to the implications of the story later, but let me move ahead and tell the other story. The second story is called The Secret of Happiness. A bit of qualification. This is straight out of Paolo Coelho's masterpiece, The Alchemist. And for those of you who have the twenty fifth anniversary edition comes at page thirty three, where the King of Salem tells a story to the protagonist of the story. Ah the story I mean the alchemist.

And uh he tells the following story, The Secret of Happiness. And I'm just going to read it for you. A certain shopkeeper sent his son to learn about the secret of happiness from the wisest man in the world. The lad wandered through the desert for forty days and finally came upon a beautiful castle high atop a mountain. It was there that the wise man lived.

Rather than finding his saintly man, though, our hero, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity. Tradesmen came and went. People were conversing in the corner. A small orchestra was playing soft music, and there was a table covered with platters of the most delicious food in that part of the world. The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait for two hours before it was his turn to be given the man's attention.

The wise man listened attentively to the boy's explanation of why he had come. but told him that he didn't have time just then to explain the secret of happiness. He suggested that the boy look around the palace and return in two hours. Meanwhile, I want to ask you to do something, said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil.

As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill. The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the room. keeping his eyes fixed on the spoon. After two hours he returned to the room where the wise man was. Well Did you see the Persian tapestries that were hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that it took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?

the boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing. His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted Then go back and observe the marvels of my world, said the wise man. You cannot trust a man if you don't know his house. Relieved, the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the power. This time, observing all the works of art on the ceilings and the walls, he saw the garden.

The mountains all around him, the beauty of the flowers, and the taste with which everything had been. Upon returning to the wise man, he related in detail everything he had seen. But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you? asked the wise man. Looking down at the spoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone. Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you, said the wisest of wise men.

The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.

As you can see, the two stories have overlapping themes. But how do they teach us about the way we are and the way we could be? We live in a world of rapidly accelerating change and technological marvels that seemingly do a lot of our thinking. We depend on our computers, tablets, smartphones, email, social media, various websites to help us perform our duties at our jobs.

Connect with friends and family, make plans, research ideas and knowledge areas, get our news, learn about the world, buy and sell consumer goods, and so on. Originally the idea was, and ideas come from human beings, not machines. Anyway, the idea was that machines Technology, if you will, would free us to become what? More evolved humans. Of course, theoretically speaking, that makes a lot of sense.

And many people have been able to take advantage of technologies available to them and free themselves from unnecessary labor and and meaningless tasks to be able to contemplate Enjoy seeing the beautiful things in their lives, appreciating the moments in their lives, seeing the big picture, so to speak.

while keeping an eye on the oil on the spoon, as it were, which can be a job or a specific task and However, by and large, most people tend to be trapped by the specialization system they help create in the first place. Think about it. Are you one of those people who gets frustrated in traffic jams? Say you have a flat tire. Do you get out and kick the tire? Get mad at it and think, why did this happen? Do you become your job? Do you introduce yourself as a professional? For instance.

When you're at a party and in a person you meet for the first time asks you, So Jane, what do you do? Do you respond by saying, for instance, I am a web designer. Do you reduce yourself to being a person that does nothing but web design? And look at flowers?

Stare at the stars, lift weights, swim, travel, take salsa dance lessons, read poetry, travel to other countries, play sports, Play the guitar, maybe raise children, maybe cook exotic foods, parachute out of airplanes just for fun, while at the same time designing websites

And getting paid for it and enjoying it too. I'd like to go back to the black dot story. If you recall, the students chose to focus only on the black dot in ignoring the white space uh on the screen. Why did they do that? Are they the victims of reductionist thinking? Perhaps the victims of algorithmic living? Think about algorithms. Algorithms are a reality for us. In many instances, algorithms tend to shape and control our behavior. Let's look at some definitions.

Algorithm as a noun uh has the following definition on most dictionaries, you know, the reliable ones. The the British dictionary perhaps is the most reliable. They did invent the language after all. A set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, as for finding the greatest common device. But algorithm in different fields may have different applications or meanings and and so on. So let's let's look at some.

For example, in medicine, algorithm could uh infer a step-by-step protocol as for management of healthcare problems. And this is from the American Heritage uh Stadman's Medical Dictionary. Ah algorithm and science. A finite set of unambiguous instructions performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a goal, especially a mathematical rule or procedure used to compute.

A desired result. Algorithms algorithms are the basis for most computer programming. And then finally, we should look at algorithm and culture. A set of instructions for solving a problem, especially on a computer, an algorithm for finding your total grocery bill, for example, would direct you to add up the cost of individual items to find the total.

Of course I got this from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, the third edition, copyright 2005. Perhaps new definitions are coming along and we should think about that. So when you are, say, for example, on social media and you happen to like sports. You click on a piece of news that somebody has shared about your favorite team. And guess what happens? There is an algorithm.

To find the keywords in that piece of news and say you like it, right? The keywords are connected to the fact that you have clicked on the like button there. And there are others who have done the same thing. So everyone is reduced and sent to this channel of focus according to the algorithm. And this isn't a human being doing this, but it was a human being that created the algorithm.

Uh so Does your life get reduced to focus on that particular sport and all the other little black dots that are connected to that sport? The paraphernalia, the podcasts that come along with it, the radio programs, the television programs, the twenty four seven cable news about sports, and does your life become nothing but Is it the black dot on the white screen? Is does that become the focus? And you forget about everything else in life?

Or rather, everything else becomes fuzzy and the black dot comes in sharp focus and it becomes the central focus of your life. Does that make sense?

Should that be the totality of one's life? People who are in the interest of making money from other human beings and when I say making money, I'm talking about profit. I'm talking about a statistical distribution of uh the kind of interest that draws in large sums of money. Say for instance, if face algorithms that yield results that show to an advertiser that look there are millions and millions of people that like this kind of product that you make.

And we have an algorithm to always Bring you the exact data on this, so your advertising will be as targeted as humanly and technically and artificial intelligence possible. What does that mean? That translates into large sums of money in an electronic form that can buy people who own Facebook, the executives, the major shareholders and so on. Goods and services. They too are part of the machine. They too tend to focus on these algorithms that reduce their lives to the profit motive.

So the story of the black dot, the assignment has to do with the a signal. A signal that tells the student that look, You have been trained to think about the black dot. And that black dot in this case happens to be literally a black dot on the electronic screen that you are seeing. However, in life, there are other things. Yes, you might get sick one day and that becomes your area of focus, but do you forget about everything else in life?

Do you forget about the big picture? Do you forget about your family? The point is that we have to try. We have to work towards seeing the totality of life. And not focus on the black dot. Yes, not forget about the black dot. It's like the the spoon, right? It has oil in it. You have to focus on the oil. You don't want the oil to fall out of the spoon. But at the same time you're traveling around the palace

You need to see the beautiful tapestries, the marvels of the palace. And the palace, of course, is your life, is the universe in which you live. If we allow algorithms to do the thinking for us, we, the thinking animals on the planet Earth, will eventually become non-thinking animals. Eventually we can get to a point where algorithms AI, if you like, artificial intelligence.

will start creating its own algorithms. So one algorithm writing another algorithm and next thing you know we have become the parts of the machine. The machine that creates the black dots for us, and that's all we will see. If the machine decides this is the black dot you must focus on, then we will focus on that. But you know what? We have created machines. We have created the algorithms. So we have to fundamentally think about.

Other ways of seeing the world. We have to start looking at the white part of the screen as well as the black dots that may appear on We've got to start thinking and and seeing life in its total. Thank you for staying with me and giving me your listening ears. Be well and I look forward to talking with you at the next episode of Tech Humanity.