TED Community » Mitch SMith

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Life, chaos, perception, expression, and the remediation of currency (money is broken - can it be fixed?).

An idea worth spreading

Intellect is the property of a species - not a person (natural or artificial). I consider creativity to be an outgrowth of life itself - I consider the artists, musicians, writers and creative technologists to be no more than sensitive nodes expressing the on-going flow of creation. That sensitivity should be honoured, but that no property rights should be conferred - because no one can own the outflow of creation. The instance of property allows that which is "owned" to be sold - the artist rarely gets to see the money. All those clamoring for IP protection are those who seek to get rich from art - they are intrinsically insensitive - ergo, not artists - who therefore must appropriate the outflow of real artists, therefore are definable as theives.When you accept that creativity is the property of life, then all the toxicity in the modern social organism evaporates.

Talk to me about

Methods to honour artists that do not confer any notion of property. Methods of removing all forms of property without losing the benefits of creativity and dignity of life.

People don't know that I'm good at

Tarot and other methods of fortune-telling.

My TED Story

Was shown a link to a TED article 12 months ago and have watched every lecture since. I am impressed that most the leading thinkers who wrote (or were referrenced) in the books I read have done TED talks. This includes Chaos theory, sociology, artificial intelligence, computational theory and the physical sciences. TED is one of the few resources that expands connection rather than confining and harnessing it .. I applaud TED.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +76.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Talk: Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism

  2 hours ago: What is this "communism" thing you speak of?
  
  I feel I might to agree, but your language does not help me understand what you are saying?
  
  I hear Americans use this word a lot .. but none of them seem to offer a definition. Please help me understand.

• A comment on Talk: Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism

  11 hours ago: It's a good start.
  
  The problem with ethics is that it exists exclusively within the realm of ego.
  
  It is true that if your ego is salved by a margin of conventional esteem, then you will be happier.
  
  However it is as false as a coke bottle. Exchange your boulder for a large lump of plastic.
  
  There is a realm that is not the ego.
  
  Look on your own street - that world coming in your senses will reveal a good many things you can do for your empathy without searching the media for a plastic absolution.
  
  Charity begins at home. It is the default state of humans to act in accord with the tribe. We ask ourselves "How could anyone just run over that poor little girl? How could anyone just walk by?"
  The answer to that is the violation of the tribe - the violation of ourselves when our avarice drives us into careless cities, how the resulting fear drives us to create the "state".
  
  The tribe was always far superior to the state. The benefits of "civilisation" are less than the benefits of simple self acceptance - acceptance of the whole self - not just our tortured self-image.
  
  There is far more to a human than the ego.

• A reply on Talk: Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?

  2 days ago: No .. I mean that the google entity is more than half way to full sentience.
  
  The process is not one of centralisation - it is one of absorption. The Glass unit disconnects us completely from causal relationships between items of knowledge.
  The first stage was written language - and the Greeks and Egyptians argued that writing would destroy the oral tradition - and that the causal basis of knowledge would be lost - and they were right.
  The google entity is the climax of that process.
  We will not retain causal links because the google will supply all knowledge - with no need for causal association. We will become totally isolated from individual existence. Just as writing created the urban creature, printing created the national creature - Glass will create the global creature. Humans will disappear as agents and operate only as organs of the google.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: David Foster Wallace: This is water

  2 days ago: Cool speech!
  
  Did you know - that crazy wheel on the trolley is not random?
  It has an essential function - if you were able to navigate the trolley accurately from your planed selection to the checkout, you would not need to look at the other stuff on the shelves. The crazy wheel forces you to see those things you don't want so that you can be tempted to buy more than planned.
  This is enhanced by the small cages of small products that project beyond the shelf-line. Along with that is the "gondola-end" which are large displays situated at the ends of the aisles to cause congestion and make you stop and buy more than you wanted to. Suppliers pay to have their goods put in these locations. They also pay to have goods put at eye-level - your eye-level and your child's eye level.
  This has all been standard practice for decades.
  
  There is a way of negotiating supermarkets, malls and traffic that pulls the sting of all this default angst - that is to find the flow of it - to accept it and pace in such a way as to flow smoothly for the sake of flowing. There is a serenity in that. Another great trick is to secretly focus on all the individuals around you and silently wish them well.
  
  When I was designing systems to build that supermarket environment we all hate, it occurred to me that these things were done by hand before my systems did them better. I wondered about all those people having their jobs destroyed by me. So I asked the CEO - "are we destroying our own customer base?" .. He said "No - they will get other jobs .. they will have to."
  But they didn't.
  
  For myself, I no longer have a job. I have work, and the fringe is far nicer .. the water cleaner .. and there is no default.

• A reply on Talk: Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?

  2 days ago: Good question Syed,
  
  The difference between globalisation and google-ization is that globalisation is the harnessing of all humans as individuals. The google entity will be just a single organism - no individuals.
  
  In neural network terms, all that google needs, is the full sense-loop of the human-nodes to be integrated into its own existential loop.
  The other part is to have the full executive function disconnected from any human agency - that means to allow the AIs to perform all financial transaction under full unsupervised automation. I suspect this process is already more than half complete.

• A comment on Talk: Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?

  2 days ago: Well . of course:
  
  The voice control will not be there long - it will be matched with a contact set to gain direct brain control.
  
  After that the google entity will have direct access to integrate you into its network.
  
  At that moment, there will be no such thing as a human. There will be only the google.
  
  This is where we are going - are you happy with that?
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard!

  4 days ago: This is a cool presentation!
  
  From it I can see that the language needs an update.
  
  The word "knowledge" needs to be updated to indicate that an item of knowledge is no more than an adaptive convenience - it works for now, but might be something else tomorrow.
  Perhaps we could replace Knowledge singular with "Adaptoid", replace knowledge general as "Adapta".
  
  It might then need some qualifier of degree to denote the practicality of any particular adaptoid.
  
  The main value of the new words is to remind us that knowledge is at the service of adaptation - not the other way around, and then the word "certainty" can be gradually withdrawn.
  If something is "set in stone" then it is good to understand that, even a stone is obscured as it's relevance fades into sand.

• A reply on Conversation: How do we encourage creativity with diverse learners who have authority leadership issues.

  5 days ago: True.
  
  Let us not mistake him for our own illusions!
  
  Stand aside from him and let him see that not all authority is full of fear - and let him find his own authority.
  
  What is authority? It is simple - it is to be here. The hater of authority has been denied his own shadow by a hater .. by a rapist.
  
  How do you not-rape someone?
  
  You stand aside. You walk beside. Not in front and not behind.

• A comment on Talk: Liu Bolin: The invisible man

  5 days ago: Important.
  
  Here is a quiz:
  
  How many of us practice behavioural invisibility?
  
  How many have practiced selective visibility?
  
  When I was a teenager, I practiced how to be invisible or visible to the street proselytisers .. I practiced how to dress, how to walk and how to hold my head to either attract or become invisible to the religious nut jobs that pervade our communities - I was interested in how to work their levers.
  Some took my interest and I attracted them deliberately to get their stories and find their damage - I found it all.
  
  Same with politicians and all the other nut-jobs.
  
  I am with the artist - practice invisibility .. and then practice re-emergence. Move in the gaps - never walk in plain sight.
  
  Here I walk visibly .. to some.
  
  But when it suits me - you will not see where I went.
  
  I hate ignorance .. it is the worst thing of humans ... but it is my highway to whatever my heart desires.
  
  All that leaves to do .. is to find a good heart. It is there if you bother to look.

• A comment on Talk: Maria Bezaitis: The surprising need for strangeness

  5 days ago: The frame of this talk is the ego.
  
  Outside the ego things are somewhat different.
  
  The internet channel as a conveyor of novelty is certainly effective at breaking egoistic freeze-up .. but things are not so simple if you regard real integrated life.
  
  But, fair enough, we are as we are - and there will always be that tension between comfortable familiarity and novelty.
  
  Two things are cogent: the false positive and the local minimum.
  
  The false positive is essential to not get killed by things, the local minimum will stop us from perceiving new challenges - and generates false negatives.
  
  Call it strangeness. Call it what you will. But there must always be an adaptive window.
  
  I would advise people to widen the field of inquiry beyond the ego-bound continuum of the internet.