How Mark Cuban Helped Me Find God
March 31st, 2008
There’s a story that when President Eisenhower was shown the first supercomputer, a monstrosity that took up an entire room, he asked the question, “Is there a God?” After some time, the computer, with lights flashing and bells ringing, replied: “There is now.”
I love this story. It touches on exactly what is most enthralling and threatening about the introduction of technology into our lives specifically, where does it end?
It’s the story of Frankenstein and Skynet and Google (yeah, I said it) and a bunch of other Big Brother archetypes neatly synthesized into a two-sentence sound byte. It plays upon our fears of loss of control and the inevitable robot apocalypse when humans and bots will collide in epic battle on the backs of burnt-out car frames in empty shopping mall parking lots.
Yikes.
What does the world look like when the machines inevitably take over? Isn’t the digital grid ultimately going to spell doom and demise for us all? Shouldn’t we take a page from The Terminator and send our own human back in time to kill Al Gore’s mom before he’s born so he can’t invent the internet?
I’m here to say to we have nothing to fear. The battle between the machines and humans is being waged right now and the humans are wining.
But don’t take my word for it.
Mark Cuban recently wrote about how technology has allowed him to manage his data and separate information inputs into the “lean forward” and the “lean back.”
The former is info that he actively follows on news aggregators, RSS feeds, auto alerts, filters etc. This is the machine working for the human. Mark defines his interest and let’s the computer run its algorithms to pick the data to send that satisfies his requirements.
The latter, however, is passive and relies on social interaction. It consists of info that he labels “extraneous,” but if something’s important, the information will bubble up to him through social media. As he states, “If you put your virtual self in enough networks, facebook, myspace, twitter, wherever, someone is going to ping you with “the latest.”
So, if something is important, it will find you and the means by which it will find you is through an action by a human who recognizes that data is urgent, pertinent or otherwise valuable.
Cuban goes on to say that this is the “natural evolution and maturity of the internet. We have moved from discovery to activation to optimization to ubiquitous utility that allows the information you need to find you.”
This is why, despite a variety of other phobias, I’m not worried about the bots taking over. If we takes Mark’s word and agree that we’re evolving towards “ubiquitous utility” in a world in which I can count on humans to find ways to tell each other what’s important, then we’re solidifying the value in the networks that are based on social interaction. We’re strengthening the human value and allowing the machine to serve us. Bring more mead, machine!
What we’ve effectively done is redefined Eisenhower’s supercomputer from a threatening, monolithic overlord into a benevolent virtual deity that exists in all things, knows our logins and passwords, feeds us with relevant data, encourages data-portability and most importantly links us with other humans.
Deus ex machina.
Tags: blogmaverick, eisenhower, god, mark cuban, supercomputer, xb
Posted by: jake Posted in FunYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:51 am
Oh oh. I guess this deus is where we gotta go to find the church or synagogue without walls. Just hope the music’s good.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
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