The Future of Computing
The future of computing is a multi-sensory multi-media experience: visual, audio, tactile. In the past, computing was seen as the processing of information stored as bits. Bits represented numbers and logic. But breakthroughs in neuroscience and computing philosophy have revealed that information underlies all of human consciousness.
The future of computing questions our very identity as biological information processors. Are we the computer, or is the computer us? Where does information stop and thought begin? Are they different, or will they be the same? Were they always the same, but we could not realise this truth until the evolution of technology had caught up with the evolution of brain/mind?
The past of computing was all about the delegation of information processing that human brains (computers?) did not want to do – the counting of votes, the calculation of logarithms. Computers did the drudge work and set the human mind free to soar the heights of creativity.
But in the future of computing, creativity will be a joint venture between man and technology. There will not be any line where you can say, here goes man and here goes only machine, or vice versa.
There will only be new paths trodden. Genre will become algorithm. Debates about the best programming technology will merge with debates about which is the correct school of artistic development, if indeed the word correct will continue to have any meaning in a world where a machine may have as much right to make aesthetic judgement as the person who builds that machine, plugs it in and switches it on.
If aesthetics is philosophically challenged by this new ambiguity between biology and technology, between psychology and information science, then even more so challenged will be morality. Once we have plugged the new machines in, will we even have the right to unplug them again?
What you can see, what you can hear, what you can feel, the thoughts, intentions and emoti