How to Become Part of the Machine

Some of the mind-intensive activities or experiments outlined in this recent New York Times article have been selected below:

"Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined. . . .

Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel. . . .

How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections."

Click on the title of this post to read the entire article. (Free Registration may be required at New York Times site.)

The Multiple Lives You Are Living

If Quantum Mechanics really does suggest an infinite amount of parallel universes or realities existing simultaneously, then this changes what you perceive as everyday reality.

If we create our reality by our intentions and choices on a minute-by-minute basis, then even though it defies understanding, we are constantly stepping into and out of the ever-flowing river of time and reality.

Let me give an example. So much of what happens to us depends on what we envision as happening to us and as what we remember that happened to us in the past. I have been looking for a good friend from college for about 17 years with no success. Last week I recalled an incident that happened to him and his family and I commented on it on the following blog, Divergence. Hours later, I was exploring the Invisible web (the Deep Web) and accessed http://www.pipl.com/ and, to my utter surprise, I was able to find my friend's phone number in a database that had forever eluded me. I was able to talk with him and catch up with all that had transpired during those 17 years. One comment he made chilled me. He said he always felt that I'd contact him again when he turned 50 which happened last week.

I had always felt that I'd never find him again--that he was forever beyond my reach. I even thought he had died and that was the explanation as to why he was not in any of the databases that I had used to find countless friends from the past. It almost felt like I was never supposed to find him again in this life. My suspicion is that had we both not had that intention to find each other after two decades, we probably would not have done so.

Now this is the chilling part. Each of us is experiencing to some degree a different universe or reality than what we experienced even a day or an hour ago from the one we had been experiencing even a day or an ago earlier. The people we meet and the experiences we have are not the same ones we would have met or experienced had we continued existing in the previous universe or reality. Of course some things stay the same, you continue living in the same home from day to day. You continue in the same job from day to day. You stay married or related to the same spouse or love interest or friends from day to day, but there are slight changes that occur to you that are not integral to the life and world you were previously living in.

In other words, reality is always changing, perhaps subtly, but changing nevertheless. In other realities I could have lived in, I would still be looking for my elusive friend with no known address or phone number. In another universe he would still be looking for me, as well.

A good film to explore this concept of ever-changing reality is Dark City, a SciFi film that is like no other in that it explores a Matrix-like alternate reality, but one that continues changing from day to day.