For anyone interested in privacy, security and surveillance issues, Roger Clarke’s website is a must. Well-researched and insightful, it has become a regular read for me since he covers a lot of issues that have arisen from technology-saturated societies and the natural marriage between IT, governments and corporations in creating ubiquitous surveillance.

Today’s quote is from a paper Clarke wrote in 2006 entitled “What’s Privacy?“, in which he offers this wonderful definition of privacy:

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a ‘personal space’, free from interference by other people and organisations.

We would do well to keep this definition in mind before privacy simply comes to mean that corporations and governments can still conduct massive surveillance and collect information on you, but they’ll try make sure it’s secured from unauthorized access. Privacy is not, and should never be, the same as data security.

Today’s quote comes from German chemist Ernst Otto Fischer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1973:

 As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

I’m a great believer in this myself, and think a world of uniform efficiency and perfection is one of dull, straight, black and white lines.

Today’s quote comes from creative non-fiction author Lee Gutkind whose new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, explores “robotics subculture and the challenging quest for robot autonomy”. It was recently reviewed by M. G. Lord at the LA Times, and it contained this wonderful quote from the book about why scientists such as those Gutkin profiles chase their dream of creating autonomous robots:

“The fact that you, a human being, have achieved the magic milestone of re-creating, if only for an instant, a real living creature that thinks and acts on its own, something almost human, is really quite remarkable. And the frustration and failure that precedes it makes the magic of the moment of triumph all the more astonishing and satisfying and worthwhile.”

Today’s quote comes from physicist Fritjof Capra. I am just reading through his (so far) superb book, “The Hidden Connections“, which aims to describe “the unified systems that integrate the biological, cognitive and social dimensions of life”.

At any rate, the quote comes from page 9, where Capra is talking about the nature of life, in particular the process of “autopoiesis” (self-making or auto self-creation) where “living networks continually create, or recreate, themselves by transforming of replacing their components”. Here, he demonstrates that “viruses are not alive, because they lack their own metabolism”, but he then goes on to add:

Similarly, a robot that assembles other robots out of parts that are built by some other machines cannot be considered living. In recent years, it has often been suggested that computers and other automata may constitute future life forms. However, unless they were able to synthesize their components from “food molecules” in their environment, they could not be considered to be alive according to our definition of life.

I found this particularly interesting because he approaches the idea of a “living” robot from a biological point of view rather than simply using consciousness or self-awareness as the criterion for a future life form.

Capra has his own webpage, and there is a really fascinating interview with him at intuition.org. Some of his other books include: The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Turning Point, and Uncommon Wisdom.

Today’s quote comes from an old (1995) interview in Wired with AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter where he talks about the complexity of the human spirit:

“If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth [like Bach] could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about - what humans are about, what love is about, what caring about people is about, and what humor is.”

Since Adam Smith is set to be immortalized on Britain’s £20 bill, it’s worth turning to him for a quote of the day. Most people know of his praise for the division of labour, but he had some rather scathing criticisms, too:

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for human creature to become.”

And just for free, I’ll throw in my other favourite second quote: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Adam Smith would probably be a bit perplexed to see that things haven’t changed much today.

On Sunday, three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide by hanging themselves using make-shift nooses from clothing and bedsheets. What follows are a collection of quotes in response to the revelations.

“He also stressed that it was important to treat the bodies humanely and with cultural sensitivity.”
- White House Spokesman Tony Snow describing US President George Bush’s reaction

“He wants to make sure that this thing is done right from all points of view.”
White House Spokesman Tony Snow describing US President George Bush’s reaction

“It does sound like this is part of a strategy - in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic. Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move.”
- Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy

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One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groupsâ??and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. Andâ??cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another.

From Philip K. Dick’s work, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978