Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Related, Unrelated

Am I related to you?

As the leaves begin to turn here in New England, every day I see my trees shed their green, yellow, orange, and red parcels of wonder. They land on the ground in a sort of unceremonious manner as they atrophy into brown, black, and other nondescript organic matter. What determines, which leaves shall meet their death sooner than the rest?

This season of transition once inspired my expression of fall in a little applet.

Now, as so many calamities have hit our earth this year, I wonder about the difference between closeness and far. I am puzzled by the way the online world works in relationship to disasters. With the Asia tsunami and Louisiana hurricane incidents, within hours online services like Amazon.com and Google were quick to advertise ways in which fundraising methods were available. I expected the same thing to happen with the earthquake in Pakistan but that still is yet to happen. I used to marvel at the way that Google news delivers articles that freshly emerged "6 minutes ago" -- but that is the act of a machine doing the delivery, whereas Google's front page is governed more directly by humans. Can a machine (or "computer program") be more fair than a human? We know that programs are written by humans, so in the end it's really about human decisions.

As computer science enrollment goes down worldwide, I am hopeful that there will be an increasing number of students from the liberal arts and non-technology minded fields that take on software development efforts wholeheartedly. Creating software systems that can not only think, but also have a conscience, shall be a critical factor as we move forward in this odd century of extreme proximity and ever-present distance.

Posted by maeda at October 15, 2005 10:51 AM