Man, could I use an Augmented Fifth right about now …

Jon

when I first read this, just from the title, i thought it was meant to be something for people on the autistic spectrum. how the heck is that supposed to work? but it's something entirely different! so NM.

meaning of course, no disrespect.

Is it snowing where you are, too?

Jon

Good idea.

You're wasting our time.....

But it is an odd name. You have to know a little of the history for it to make sense. PARC has been involved in Augmented Cognition, that is to say the use of technology, mostly computers, in an effort to make people "think better" for 30 years. Many of the GUI innovations were made there. So Augmented Social Cognition would be the Web 2.0 roll out of this work. Think Hivemind, but with it making people smarter, not stupid.

I first learned the word "augmented" back in the late 1950s, when the scandal du jour was that some TV shows included canned laughter. For a while, CBS and other broadcasters added a disclaimer in the credits, stating, "This program was recorded in a live studio with audience reactions technically augmented."

I remember learning the term "Augmentative Communication" back in the days when I used to hang around John Eulenberg's Artificial Language Lab at Michigan State. Somewhat earlier than that, the terms "Intelligence Amplification" and "Intelligence Augmentation" (IA) were commonly used to emphasize certain approaches or alternatives to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Jon

And then in the early 1960s, they stopped pretending altogether, and ALL laugh tracks were artificial. Remember how "innovative" people thought All In The Family was, because it was taped in front of a live audience? Normal Lear wasn't a "visionary", he was simply taking television back to its primitive beginnings.


God, this does nothing but remind me of all the articles I've read about how human language developed. Full of terms like "Bow-Wow Theory" and "Pooh-Pooh Theory"........

Hasn't AI become a complete joke yet? It was suuuuch a big deal in the 1980s, and now you are hard-put to even hire a LISP expert.

Augmentation has a different connotation in psychiatry too

Reports of AI's demise, etc. I remember — but dimly — ∃where in time between 1980 and 1984, ∃ Systems Head at my old school read ∃ article by ∃ Nyetsche in ∃ popular rag as to how "AI Is Dead", and ¼with proceeded to dump our dear old UT Lisp off the mainframe. So I had to (1) translate what I cdr of my programs into Tubbo Pascal and (2) pack up my big box of 10×14 green-&-white-striped printouts of Lisp code and find another university where they didn't give a R's A what Nyetsche thus spake.

Maybe you have no idea how many of the bots who twiddle our bits today first e-scaped from the labs of Artifical Intelligence Research (AIR) — are they still pretty dumb? Yes, they are.

Jon