IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 8

LETTERs TO THE EDITOR

Questioning Ray Kurzweil
Dear Editor:
I refer to the T&S Interview "Augmentation and Transcendence" (Spring 2013, pp. 5-6).
I can't believe that there's only one ray Kurzweil.
The contributions attributed to the early one are huge.
But the loose thinking of the later one raises the suspicion that the magic mushrooms close to where he lives
must be really, really powerful.
He's losing his grip on the timeline when he says that "four years ago, most people didn't use social networks,
wikis (such as wikipedia), and blogs. Ten years ago most people didn't use search engines ...".
The general point that people adapt remarkably quickly to (some) innovations is fair enough. On the other
hand:
■ social networks exploded in 2004 (eight years before the interview, not four);
■ wikis were healthy in the mid-to-late 1990s (15 years, not four);
■ wikipedia was launched in 2001, and was very big by 2004 (eight years not four);
■ Blogs' growth phase was the end of the 1990s into the early 2000s (11 years not four);
■ Search engines were big in 1996 (Altavista), and huge by 2003 (Google) (13-15 years, not 10).
The contention that "our current biological immune system ... does not recognize cancer as a foe because it
thinks it is you" is a classic example of a reductionist finding fault with reality and trying to modify reality to
be more like their own models. Cancer is a challenging concept, as well as a challenging condition, precisely
because it *is* you.
And ray's stuck in 1950s AI thinking when he says that he doesn't like the term 'artificial intelligence'
because it "implies that the intelligence is not real." The problem is that, many decades on, the word 'intelligence' still hasn't been unpacked into its many different senses. Until we do that, we can't migrate the debate to
where it has long needed to be - about complementary intelligences.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2292807
Date of publication: 9 December 2013

Roger Clarke
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra
Visiting Professor in Computer Science, Australian National University
Visiting Professor in Cyberspace Law & Policy at the University of N.S.W.
Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au

Online Repositories and Publishing:
Implications for IEEE
Dear Editor:
re: IEEE Computer, Special Issue on Big Data, June 2013, Guest Editors: Katina Michael and Keith Miller.
The rapid growth of online publishing, especially of Open Source Journals, many using open source software
of some sophistication and simplicity of use for refereeing, editing, and submission, has been changing the territory for some of the legacy systems still in use by large organizations.
IEEE is using a system that requires all privacy settings to be "off," something that the older users and the
younger ones know better than to allow to occur. A direct consequence is that the poor HCI standards of IEEE
legacy document management systems not only cause headaches and substantial productivity costs to prospective and actual paper submitters, but also to editors and reviewers.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2292808
Date of publication: 9 December 2013

(continued on page 13)
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

wINTEr 2013

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