Here are four new talks from TED, all interesting in their own way.
Purely at the fun level, this talk@ discusses the computer modeling that went into creating the face of the aged Brad Pitt for the Benjamin Button movie. I find many computer graphics to be boring and tedious — either they focus on low-level technical minutiae, or they are nothing but sequences of gee whiz, ain’t that cool. This talk, however, is genuinely interesting in showing all aspects of the process in a way that is easily appreciated.
Next we have Mike Rowe@. I should explain that I chose this for personal reasons, and so you might not be as interested in seeing it as I was.
One of my betes noires is people who manual labor, or, heck, pretty much any job that is not their job, people who make fun of auto mechanics or miners or chefs say. This attitude smacks to me of not just snobbery but stupidity and ignorance, coupled with the certainty that the speaker knows best — the exact same attitudes that made George W Bush the president he was. The world is so complex, in so many ways, that it seems ridiculous to simply assume that whatever an auto mechanic is doing, heck, I could do the same thing, and do it better, if you gave me a week of training.
Anyway this talk by Rowe discusses some of the subtle difficulties behind some jobs, and berates America, in words more eloquent than mine, for its attitude, across all society, to non-professional jobs.
In the “OMG!!!!” category, we have Pattie Maes@ from MIT demoing work by Pranav Mistry on what they call sixth sense and what others might term something like personal ubiquitous computing. What they have done is to hook up a camera (tracking the motions of the fingers), a cell phone (for data comm), and a small lightweight projection system (for projecting a display onto any available surface, including walls, tables, and even, if nothing better is available, one’s hand) to some software that, based on what one does with one’s fingers, reads or writes information to or from the internet. Sure it’s currently clunky, and I suspect that in real life it suffers from a variety of problems that we did not see in the demo (slow comm speeds, misrecognized gestures, short battery life etc), even so it is amazingly slick and cool, and very much gives one a “the future is already here, it’s just not yet evenly distributed” feeling. You look at this and you think the rest is probably already on between Win CE, Android, and iPhone as to which of them will be first with this in a commercial product.
Last, and in many ways most interesting, is this@ talk by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita talking about using game theory to predict the future of Iran.
So why is this so interesting? IMHO, it’s because it’s like being present at the birth of a disaster, seeing the first few errors that will lead, many many miles later, to the track going off the rails and killing everyone on board.
Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, we’ve had this strange metamorphosis of economics, from a set of ideas and heuristics regarding how people generally behave, to an unfalsifiable discipline claiming, ala Gary Becker to have the key to all human behavior. de Mesquita seems to have visions of sending political science does exactly this same insane path.
The economist supporters will no doubt protest at what I’ve said. They will argue that people like Becker do not represent the mainstream (so why did he win a freaking Nobel Prize?). They will argue that economics as an academic discipline is fine, the problem is when rich-and-powerful non-academics exploit whatever ideas in it they currently find helpful to an agenda they are trying to push. They will say that economics only provides rigorous mathematical probabilities; it is the fault of the real world that people for the most part don’t really understand what probabilities mean.
All these statements are true in a way, yet none of them change the essential facts of the last thirty years or so; and more to the point, none of them change how this will play out with respect to political science. If people like de Mesquita are willing to talk in terms of how science and computer models can “rigorously” predict the future, it won’t be long before every politician in America is claiming that “science” proves that the only solution to some problem is the solution proposed by that politician.