

Awakened grains of sand - shawndumas
http://blog.jonudell.net/2011/05/17/awakened-grains-of-sand/

======
raffaelc
The whole article is based on three premises about human cognition. All three
are false. What is clear to me is that many people who engage in "web
thinking" as the author calls it have an absurdly caricaturish notion of human
thought and interaction before the advent of the internet.

Here are the three premises:

"As hominids we have a million years of experience with the properties and
behavior of physical things. And as individuals we have lifetimes of such
experience. Based on those experiences, here are some things we know:

1\. If I give you a thing then it’s yours until you give it back. We can’t
both use it.

2\. If I want to make a collection of things, I get a bucket and put things
into it. A thing is either in the bucket or it isn’t. The same thing can’t be
in two buckets at the same time.

3\. If I invite you to work on a project using my collection of things, you
have to visit my house."

And here's why they're false:

1\. Human beings have had shared spaces and things such as temples, communal
dwellings, canals, bridges, roads etc. that many individuals could and did
contribute to and improve, and in many cases the whole community could use
simultaneously. The internet is not a radical departure in this regard - it's
yet another example of the kind of social construct that's as old as our
species.

2\. So a cardinal can't simultaneously be a member of the category "things
that are red" and the category "bird" and the category "animal" - at least
that's what the article claims. Apparently this sort of flexible thinking had
to wait for the invention of the internet. I'm just awed that anyone is so
ignorant of human thought and history to think such a thing, much less commit
it to writing and publish it.

3\. So people throughout human history never collaborated by writing and
exchanging letters, or phone calls. According to the author this never
happened until the advent of the internet.

The whole article is wildly hyperbolic and yet another sign that we are caught
up in bubble 2.0.

------
camtarn
Disappointingly, this is not about micro/nano-robotics, but instead about
tagging and virtual collaboration.

I was hoping for more updates on systems like this (linked on HN a while
back):
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php?title=Robot_P...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php?title=Robot_Pebbles)

------
qjz
There's a reason why computer science uses abstractions like "data," "memory,"
and "storage." These terms aren't as ambiguous as the author suggests.

