Erik Davis on Cybermystics

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In talking about Erik Davis, one can’t help but talk of hybrids, things crashing into each other and having mutant children, millennial mixes of the ancient and the modern, often quite fringe but distinctly new. Davis floats in a very twenty-first century subcultural style, a mèlange of futurism and primitivism, call it cybermysticism or as Davis does “techgnosis”.
Mission by Anais Lunet, Alexandre Bailly
Look at this mission also on Check-in Architecture websitehttp://www.checkinarchitecture.com/mission/59 or on Google Earthhttp://www.checkinarchitecture.com/index/earth/mission/59.kml

 

Spiritual Computing

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Google Tech Talks
September 28, 2006

Craig Warren Smith, a Seattle native, is a former Harvard (Kennedy School) professor, a founder of the global movement to close the Digital Divide, and for 30 years a Buddhist teacher. In the mid-1990s as a consultant to Bill Gates, he led a strategic planning process that helped Microsoft and its founder find the distinct role of philanthropy in its corporate culture.

ABSTRACT
Can the next generation of technologies advance the spiritual development of individuals and communities? The speaker, director of the Spiritual Computing Research Group (www.spiritualcomputing.com), will argue that several trends – Web 2.0 innovations, neuroscience’s interactions with the Dalai Lama, and West’s new embrace of premodern wisdom traditions – all combine to bring spiritual principles at the doorstep of the world’s technological laboratories. The upshot: today’s system architects may be able to measure fuzzy notions like user empowerment. “Tech researchers will get algorithms that show if they are empowering users, addicting them or just delivering ease of use,” he says.

Spiritual technologies, he says, could release enormous pent up demand for web services in advanced markets (where 83% of users are “spiritual”) and in emerging markets such as India where spirituality is fundamental for survival. Examples: versions of Wikipedia in which wisdom, not mere knowledge, rises to the surface; gaming as spiritual quest; online enhancement of Islamic rituals; locative technologies that use feng shui to create sacred spaces, biofeedback interfaces that bring mindfulness into cancerous organs; technological support for 12 step programs that transform addiction into empowerment.

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Speaker: Craig Warren Smith