IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

172 Chapter 8
the central question of what Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of
California at Los Angeles, calls ‘‘telepistemology’’—the study of knowledge
acquired at a distance. Cyberspace presents us with a dilemma, he says; we
are physical beings who experience the world through our bodies. Are we
being deceived? What can we know? ‘‘These questions in the philosophy
are hardly new—they date back to Plato and Aristotle,’’ Goldberg notes.
‘‘Now, however, if we are to measure and interpret the state of invisible systems
around us, we have to make important judgments about the value of
knowledge that is technologically mediated.’’ 33
We cannot wait for philosophers to resolve two-thousand-year-old differences
about the status of different kinds of knowledge before looking
for new ways to perceive the consequences of our actions for the health
of the planet. Whether or not one set of data is or is not ‘‘true’’ is not the
main issue. The purpose of new perceptual aids is to stimulate us to reflect
more critically about the consequences of our actions for larger systems.
For Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, authors of a classic book called
Understanding Computers and Cognition, the issue is not one of theoretical
exactitude. Practical understanding, they argue, is more fundamental than
detached theoretical understanding. ‘‘We cannot,’’ they observe, ‘‘deal with
‘organism’ and ‘environment’ as two interacting, independent things.’’ 34
The consequence of that appears to be that augmenting reality and augmenting
our capacity to sense the invisible are interrelated tasks.
Teach the World to Speak
At Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem, in The Netherlands, a magnificent sound
synthesizer is on display that was once used for imitating vocal sounds.
Eight chunky resonators, a bit like miniature brass water boilers, are attached
to electronic tuning forks that are actuated by clunky copper coils.
A keyboard, containing eight white keys, is mounted on an aged wooden
plinth. The machine is dated 1859.
Nearly 150 years later, it’s still not much fun listening to machines.
Microsoft, IBM, and other companies have spent billions of dollars trying
to enable us to converse with computers the way people did with HAL in
the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But progress is painfully slow. Computer
scientist Ben Shneiderman believes the whole effort is misguided, if only
because—for computers and people alike—‘‘it’s hard to speak and think