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MIHAI
NADIN ON ANTICIPATORY SYSTEMS
What
is the difference between a falling stone and a falling cat?
Mihai
Nadin, who directs the newly established Institute for Research
in Anticipatory Systems at the University of Texas at Dallas,
holds a Ph.D. degree in aesthetics from the University of Bucharest
and a post-doctoral degree in philosophy, logic and theory of science
from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, West Germany. He earned
an M.S. degree in electronics and computer science from the Polytechnic
Institute of Bucharest and an M.A. degree in philosophy from the
University of Bucharest. He has authored 23 books, including "The
Civilization of Illiteracy," "Mind: Anticipation and Chaos,"
and "Anticipation: The End is Where We Start From."
UBIQUITY:
Your work is at the intersection of the arts, computer science,
and cognitive science, correct?
NADIN: Yes. But please add semiotics and design to the list. Especially
design, the most pervasive form of human activity: from product
and interior design to landscape and urban design, from visual communication
to visualization, from engineering to designing new materials. And
let's not forget computational design.
UBIQUITY: Is there any way that you could explain the essential
nature of the connection between those ways of thinking?
NADIN: There is really no way of defining it, if by "connection"
you mean a shared body of knowledge. What interests me in each of
these areas is the implicit theme of underlying creativity. How
in the world are people creative? And why? That's the connection
I look for.
UBIQUITY: How does your work in anticipatory systems relate to that
interest? Tell us about anticipatory systems.
NADIN: We learned from Descartes to look at the world only as the
physical reality that he described. That perspective is his contribution
to the world. Part of his method was to reduce everything that's
very complex to one or more simpler things that you can understand.
Just as he reduced geometry to numbers and he has gone down in history
for developing what we call the Cartesian coordinate system —
he operated in the same spirit, as he looked for regularities in
the physical world. Based on his reductionism, we learned how to
find answers to the questions from the perspective of the cause-and-effect
sequence. This model works beautifully when it comes to technology.
We apply it when we build and drive cars, or launch satellites,
or develop computers. However, the model implies that everything
can be reduced to the physical, and therefore be explained in the
language of physics. Moreover, it implies that the living is nothing
more than a machine that embodies determinism. Yet it's becoming
ever more clear, as science discovers new facts about how the living
functions, that the living cannot be reduced to the physical. My
main point is that what distinguishes the living from the physical
is the property, or characteristic, called anticipation.
UBIQUITY: Give us an example.
NADIN: If I drop a stone, I can calculate its position, velocity,
acceleration, and everything else involved in the stone falling
from position A down to position B. But if I drop a cat, I am no
longer able to provide such a description, although the cat is also
made of matter. In contrast to the stone — which will fall
the same way the cat will never fall the same way. But it will fall
the right way, that is, it will not get hurt. So the cat has a characteristic
in its dynamics that the stone doesn't have that is, anticipation.
UBIQUITY: Who's doing the anticipation there? The cat?
NADIN: Anticipation shouldn't be seen as a voluntary action, such
as "I'm going to laugh before you even touch me since you are
about to tickle me." Laughing before being tickled! To ask
the question "Who is doing the anticipation?" would imply
that there is an agent that does the anticipation, and that anticipation
related to a human being has something to do with the brain. Along
this line of reasoning, some look at neurons, and say that they
are doing the anticipation. So it all looks like computation. But
that approach is as deterministic as Descartes' explanation of the
physical world, and his reduction of the living to a machine. Anticipation
is the result of many processes. Some are inherent in the system,
and others are developed through learning, or through experience,
or through training.
So back to your question: "Who is doing the anticipation?"
In the cat, there are long-term mechanisms, which we associate with
evolution, that eventually became "hardwired" in whatever
the particular living being is —whether a cat, a human being,
or a monocell. But there are also processes that unfold in each
new context. Evolution accounts for the past, anticipation for the
present and future. This is why I call anticipation our sixth sense,
the sense of context.
UBIQUITY: So what do you anticipate finding as you study anticipatory
systems? Where is your research going, and how is it related to
software? You want to embed the notion of anticipation in software,
isn't that right?
NADIN: Yes, but first let us get our terminology straight. First
of all, on the theoretical level, anticipation is complementary
to reaction. Isaac Newton declared that "Actio es reactio,"
the reactive mode. I add, "Anticipo ergo sum," "I
anticipate therefore I exist." "Anticipare" comes
from "antecapere," "to understand before." That
is, we exist to the extent that we also anticipate, not only react.
We'll reap a very high reward in our general understanding of how
things work if we realize the practical consequences of this description
of the living. Now to your practical question: Where can our research
go? It will contribute to the elimination of that limiting and dangerous
understanding, almost universally accepted since Descartes, that
the human being can be understood as a machine. Four hundred years
of determinism left us with the inclination not to question it.
UBIQUITY: What was the impulse behind that conviction?
NADIN: It was a useful conviction, up to a point. Complexity was
too difficult to handle, so he believed it was possible to reduce
the whole to its constituent parts. And since we human beings embody
the physical, as well as anticipation, the understanding of the
physical entailed a certain efficiency. It points to a way we can
optimize our physical efforts, including the use of tools and machines...
The description of the being as a machine is one possible description,
and thus a source of knowledge. It is another thing to believe that
since this description is useful, we should apply it across the
board, and treat human beings as if they were machines. If it didn't
work to a certain extent, this perspective would not have shaped
Western civilization to the extent it has. For example, how to turn
human beings into a machine to fight battles, or to produce material
goods. Remember Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times." In
medicine, every individual is treated in the same way, as though
we were factory-made cars with a malfunction. Turning humans into
machines is tantamount to turning them into idiots, and I find the
implications of this attitude profoundly disturbing.
But now to your question of whether I intend to embed anticipation
into software: my answer is yes and no. In reality, every program
we write is also a machine —a digital machine. It operates
on a digital representation: high precision, low (almost zero) expressive
power. My focus is on a different computation: anticipatory computation.
Feynman had this revolutionary thought: In order to address complex
phenomena, we would need to compute in the medium that interests
us. Given his interest and competence in quantum mechanics, he suggested
quantum computation. Well, it's important to understand that alternative
forms of computation cannot be reduced to digital computation. So
if we're able to start thinking of software as a living entity,
then yes, I want to embed anticipatory characteristics in software.
I see this possible as a hybrid implementation: the living interacting
with the program. The resulting dynamics derives from learning.
UBIQUITY: What would be a good example of that?
NADIN:
My work on hybrid control mechanisms. I was the one who introduced
to industry the notion of what I called "the aging car"
—by which I meant not that your car would rust a little faster
or fall apart sooner, but that as you continued to drive, it would
"learn" your driving habits and also take the driver's
age into account. So the aging car is the car that "realizes"
that your reflexes are no longer the same as when you were 20 or
30 or 40. It will not prevent you driving wherever you want to,
but it will try to assist you: what is the best time of day for
you to drive, now that your vision and hearing are not what they
used to be. The car starts adapting to your characteristics. Adaptations
result from hybrid anticipatory control mechanisms at work. They
will eventually prove to be much more interesting than the deterministic
control mechanisms applied to date.
UBIQUITY: You've done some work along these lines with what Audi
and Daimler-Chrysler, is that right?
NADIN: Yes, that's correct, and it was a big challenge because car
manufacturers have one main thing in mind: how to sell more cars.
The "aging car" would remain with one owner longer than
the industry desires. But my feeling is that the automobile industry
would be better off if it saw itself less in the business of selling
cars and more in the business of mobility. If I need to get from
A to B, my car is not just a heavy steel object, it's an instrument
of my purpose. It should know who I am (my characteristics), where
I am, and where I want to go, and it should help me get there. This
is what motivated me in advancing a similar anticipatory idea: "How
much car does a person need?" If we conceive the engine and
transmission as "driving software," we could have a standard,
very efficient, low-power car for most of the time, and download
the "extra power" the software controlling the engine
and transmission, when we drive the car up a steep hill, or when
the load requires it. This can all be beautifully automated —
a car is a machine. And not unlike paying only for the software
we use - an idea grounded in anticipation, in which I invested lots
of time and energy - we would pay only for the "amount of car"
we really need. Think about the task, a real technical challenge,
and the benefits for the environment.
UBIQUITY:
As you've talked to different groups, what have you found to be
the hardest thing for people to understand about what you're saying?
NADIN:
What makes my life difficult is the appearance that I'm arguing
against things that seem to be working fine. The modus operandi
in the USA, but not only in the USA, is, "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it." Most of the time, the work people carry out
within the machine model is all right. What needs to be addressed
is the long-term perspective. Consider it this way. I was conditioned
just as you were, and as everyone was —by an education founded
on cause-and-effect. So the first reaction of most people to what
I try to tell them is always, "We don't need to learn about
anticipation in order to accomplish what we're already doing."
Let's face it, people who have invested their lives in a way of
looking at things that is not only the dominant way of looking at
things but in fact the exclusive perspective of the day, will find
it very hard to come to grips with any other kinds of thinking.
When it comes to things they cannot accomplish through the model
they are captive to, the answer is: Not yet. But physics has all
the answers.
UBIQUITY:
Does it help to give them examples from different domains?
NADIN:
Absolutely. Inventions take place in anticipation and not in reaction
to reality. Science is always anticipatory. And when we are not
anticipatory we end up facing difficulties. For example, the health
system. Health was the subject of the art of healing. Now, after
the industrial age, physicians are trained to look at human health
entirely from the perspective of determinism. They become engineers,
and fix the machine as it breaks down. In reality, health has much
more to do with anticipation than with cause-and-effect.
This inevitably makes the discussion tremendously difficult at the
beginning. But once they start comparing the deterministic and the
anticipatory perspectives, then people's positions soften. To make
progress along these lines, they simply have to come to understand
that you can get only so far by applying the deterministic method,
no matter how good that is, but that you can get much further if
you start adopting an anticipatory perspective. The same thing applies
to work and the future of work. Let's face it, at first, companies
work hard to turn workers into parts of the working machine. Once
the job is describable through regular patterns, the machine can
take over. The jobs that involve anticipation are the jobs that
machines cannot take over. And are difficult to outsource. Creativity
cannot be outsourced.
UBIQUITY:
Let's assume, then, that as they obtain insight at some point, do
they then still have trouble figuring out what to do with that insight
in the creation of practical systems?
NADIN:
Yes. There are many difficulties in this respect. We all expect,
we were all taught to expect, that if you solve a problem you thereby
solve a whole family of problems. In the world of physics, we are
dealing with homogeneous entities that are supposed to behave the
same way under the same circumstances. The living does not do that.
The living is infinitely diverse, and different, and by definition,
creative —in the sense that a living being is not a copy of
a past state. It's always in the new state. Accordingly, anticipation
addresses things not repetitive in nature.
UBIQUITY:
What does that mean, then, for the scientist?
NADIN:
It means that traditional validation techniques, as applied today,
don't apply. You won't be able to reproduce your results and test
them and repeat that process forever; so-called scientific proof
of valid scientific propositions does not apply to anticipation.
Anticipation deals with singularity. The fact that we've eliminated
singularity from our thinking over the last 400 years has a major
effect on us. Everyone now is specialized. We have more and more
experts who know everything about something limited, but repetitive.
Today, very few scientists are able to look at the relation among
these specializations and extract useful knowledge from these relations.
UBIQUITY: You don't consider the ability to look among specializations
as actually a kind of generalization?
NADIN: No, I really don't. Again, terminology is important. To generalize
is a defining characteristic of the human being. To generalize is
to leave out the richness of the concrete. Anticipations are always
in the act. There is no efficient distinction between the perceived
and what is acted upon. Vittorio Gallese and his colleagues made
this point quite well. Accordingly, to expect experts obsessed with
generality and abstraction to "see the world anew" is
almost like inviting them to give up their identity. The study of
anticipation is an investment of the only thing that a scientist,
like any other human being, will get only once —part of his
life. It costs part of somebody's life.
UBIQUITY: Do the difficulties leave you feeling a bit pessimistic?
NADIN: Not at all. I'm an optimist, because I don't think that life
deserves to be lived other than in a spirit of optimism. But in
respect to our topic, which is a tough issue, remember that Descartes
himself had a very, very hard time 400 years ago. I'm by no means
comparing myself to Decartes, but simply making the point that obstacles
are an inevitable component of all new scientific approaches. Descartes
had it very difficult with other scientists because in his time
the dominant viewpoint of the Church made it impossible for him
even to address the issues that he had identified. He knew the Catholic
Church would come after him if he said all he thought about humans
as machines. So he had a tough time in many ways.
UBIQUITY: And today?
NADIN:
We have a tough time today because the easy way is the one that
brings immediate results, even if some are mediocre. The holy church
of Saint Cause-and-Effect is as dogmatic as any church. The mechanisms
in place (grants, prizes, recognition) are part of this church,
of the machine designed to dispense public money for research. But
computation, broadly understood, offers a tremendous chance for
profound beneficial change. It brought about a new civilization,
and new expectations. Of course, there is also tremendous danger
associated with computation. Because of the digital computer, which
we understand quite well, we are very close to reducing human beings
to mere segments in the digital data processing. Look at the huge
amount of mediocrity that is generated with the help of these immensely
productive machines called digital computers. In our progress as
a species, we're going to find out very, very soon that we put ourselves
in a position that cannot be defended: we lose the perspective of
belonging to a greater image, to the whole, in which the human being
is only one part. Our interaction with the rest of life is probably
more interesting than interaction with digital computers. But very
little of this living interaction is effectively pursued.
UBIQUITY:
You used the word "mediocrity." When you look at what
is done in software and in design and architecture, music, and everything
else, music do you find mostly mediocrity? Or do you think things
are better than that?
NADIN: To address the first part of your question: Fundamentally,
the artifacts that result from the digital data processing model
as we apply it in art, architecture, even music, etc. etc., are
mediocre. Why? Because we take a machine (which can be driven by
a very sophisticated software program, but which in the end is a
machine) and we tell the machine, "Do it according to the rules
embodied in your functioning!" In other words: "Here are
my rules. Here is my understanding" —of what the building
is, or of what the piece of music is, or of what an image is.
And this will be reproduced by the machine. When a creative person
designs a building, or writes a piece of music, or paints an image,
basically he or she looks back at the rules that dictated how we
historically built homes, or how we made music, only as a stimulus
to creativity. But does not repeat it. The individual involved in
the act of creation is not an historian or an archaeologist recreating
the past, but someone who is questioning it. The individual is in
the process of discovering, whereas a digital computer program is
not in the business of discovery at all, but in confirming past
knowledge. It's in the business of performance. Unless and until
we are able to introduce into computing understood above and beyond
the digital —the notion of discovery in its deep meaning,
we will not have anything but mediocre products; nothing but canned
experiences.
Now
to the second part of your question: Do I find everything mediocre?
On the contrary. In many cases, very important architects —and
for personal reasons, I want to mention Gehry, but there are others
less famous who work in the same spirit —or musicians, or
artists have been able to use the digital computer almost in the
way they would use a pencil, or another form of technology. In other
words, they learned to control it, or have computer experts help
them, and take advantage of what it can perform. They themselves
remain dedicated to the actual creative work. The computer executes
tedious routine assignments and supports the generation of alternatives,
but the creative genius, the aesthetic choice, remains with the
human being. The notion, advanced by Minsky and others, that the
digital machine, well programmed, will evolve to the level of genius
and experience emotions is simply ridiculous.
The digital machine as we know it came to existence in order to
automate the mathematics of artillery essential to the persecution
of war. That was the first computer. The second computer automated
mathematics at a higher level, the third at an even higher level,
and so on. But this advance was always based on the previous understanding
of mathematics, not on the discovery of a whole new form of mathematics.
That is the machine's implicit limitation. The second, let me repeat,
results from the form of representation, and the associated logic,
chosen. Cooking might be describable in the language of zeros and
ones, but not creative cuisine; neither is writing poetry (with
or without rhyme and rhythm, even though computers generate all
kinds of poems), nor dancing, nor the selection of a typeface, nor
the design of an event.
UBIQUITY:
What would people who are in, let's say, the software business do
differently with this insight?
NADIN: They will eventually realize that you can not produce one
piece of software that will fit everyone! Even now, within the digital
computation model practiced, they should allow for as much individualization
of the program as possible. "Proprietary" is not conducive
to creative use. They should start writing programs that are basically
interactive environments, in which the user challenged to be creative
—is able to individualize the program as much possible. This
approach must be reflected not only in the user interface, where
many things can be done better than they are done today, but reflected
throughout the structure of the program. We are still writing programs
that are by definition deterministic machines. We need to get past
that and allow programs to open up to the larger world, to have
dynamic properties.
UBIQUITY:
Speaking of the larger world, you've suggested elsewhere that your
approach would have an important impact on other fields, such as
health systems, politics, and so forth. Is that right?
NADIN:
That is correct. But in order to avoid inflationary promises, we
must again adhere to strict terminology; otherwise we end up in
demagoguery. Let's take politics as an example. Today, states are
machines that create rules on whose basis people are supposed to
function in a given society. States evolved into this machine condition
as society entered the Industrial Age. Now, circumstances are fundamentally
different, and the machine-model state breaks down. Within the scale
of industrial society, states tried to function like deterministic
machines, and encoded industry's rules into their laws. At today's
new scale, the "machine" behaves erratically, fixing the
cascading number of problems more by luck than political skill and
responsibility. Its guardians (the lawyers) and its agents (the
police, the military, security forces) and its many components (social
services, education, commerce, etc.) face new issues, but are supposed
to work with the "mechanics" of the past. The rules pertain
to the past, to the "machine" that we call "property
rights," which commands that people are not allowed to exchange
musical files on the Web, just to give the most ridiculous example.
In general, these rules interfere with the creative impetus of the
new generation. Innovators make new things possible; lawyers rush
to regulate them. We have to free ourselves of their ruling. The
almost sanctified Constitution —a remarkable political document,
exceptionally adequate for the time in which it was formulated corresponds
to a State of limited dynamics. At the time of its writing, the
Constitution projected an image of the future, it expressed anticipation.
Today, by golly, this is not the case. We are forced to react to
the Constitution. And the unprecedented power of practicing lawyers,
who regulate even politics, places us all in the past, which for
all practical purposes, "We the people" have successfully
transcended through our own creativity.
In
recent months, many, many people —in the USA and abroad asked
me whom was I going to vote for: Bush or Kerry. I answered that
both are irrelevant, the Presidency is irrelevant. The dynamics
of the world today is such that no person, be it Bush, Kerry or
both together, would ever be able to steer such a system. It's as
though someone placed you on a rocket and said, "Would you
please, when you see my house, go a little slower so I can wave
at you and you take a picture of my swimming pool?" These are
systems that can no longer be driven the way we are used to driving
a car, or to running a piece of software. They reached a scale at
which the dynamics is such that only by taking an anticipatory perspective
can we start coping with whatever change such systems bring upon
us. The consequence is that we must start focusing on self-organizing
nuclei, allow for greater degrees of freedom, establish correlations,
form networks of reciprocal interest and responsibility. These are
more effective control mechanisms than regulation driven by interest
groups watching the road through the rear-view mirror.
UBIQUITY:
To take another example, what are the prospects of changing health
systems?
NADIN: In respect to medicine: we buy aspirin under the common,
but false, belief that aspirin is good for everyone, no matter what.
Medical advances based on the deterministic model of the machine
have brought us to a crisis. We look for a medicine similar to how
we practice engineering, a medicine of spare parts, artificial or
natural, to repair the body. Not for self-repair mechanisms, which
are anticipatory. Not for our own responsibility for our well-being.
Spectacular science has made possible surgery that only years ago
looked like science fiction. However, it is expensive and intrinsically
dangerous. The living is not a machine, and things go wrong. The
lawsuits that follow are just as spectacular. And they cannot be
regulated because life is the most precious thing each has. There
is something more to human health than the machine perspective allows.
And there are some people in the medical field, people who know
much more than I about it, who are looking at alternatives. A person's
protein profile is a very individual image of the body's dynamics.
It indicates a possible path of our health, and in this respect
it invites a very individualized consideration. Physicians who look
at the whole, not just the parts, don't immediately plug you into
the diagnostic machine and order a dozen of X rays and MRIs.
UBIQUITY:
What's wrong with that?
NADIN:
If you go to a doctor's office, they will immediately draw your
blood and perform the other tests — in order to find out whether
you function like the machine that they compare you to. And you're
supposed function like a machine. If you don't, they will give you
what it takes to make this happen. If the insurance you carry provides
for it.
UBIQUITY:
Then we'll never see a machine that can be used to anticipate a
patient's reaction to a drug received for the first time?
NADIN: I would not use the word "anticipation" in this
case. I would use the word prediction, or forecast, for there's
a distinction between prediction and anticipation. Prediction is
based on previous observations, probabilistic models, and statistics.
Anticipation integrates both possibilities-the possibility that
something might or might not affect you-and probabilities. In general,
we have a problem in dealing with possibilities. We are very good
in dealing with probability and statistics, but possibility is not
something to which we've paid enough attention. I've often said
that Zadeh's genius was not only in inventing fuzzy sets, but in
making the first attempt to give a rational foundation for a theory
of possibility. Not too much happened with his attempt. In the years
ahead, people will focus on possibility. There is a possibility
that a drug might affect the same person in different ways over
the course of his life, and might change fundamentally in a different
biological context. Doctors will always face the problem of looking
for a common denominator (some still believe that aspirin is good
for everyone's headache) versus treating the individual irreducible
to any other. Human beings change. But physicians don't realize
anymore that these changes are even more profound than suggested
by the old categories-infant, child, mature, aged-which are coarse
time distinctions that define medical fields (from pediatrics to
geriatric medicine). Health is dependent on much, much finer distinctions.
The grain of distinction counts here. After all, anticipation means
that we acknowledge time distinctions: the pre-, or ante- of a process.
UBIQUITY: Let's move from medicine to education. How do anticipatory
notions impact that area?
NADIN:
Education became the meat processing machine through which we send
our kids, like you send meat through a salami factory. At the end
of the process, you put the grades A, B, C (no factory would admit
it sends out D or E grades of meat) on the various types of salami
the factory produces. Graduates get these certifications, along
with the degree of incompetence —BA, MA, Ph.D., or post-doctoral.
Anticipation is actually a fundamental implicit characteristic of
every act of learning, yet we removed anticipation from our education
system. We are making education an institution that reacts to reality,
not one that prepares for future, changing, possible realities.
Not to be visionary, not to be in the forefront of creativity, not
to question, but to service, to satisfy requirements —we need
so many accountants, so many teachers, so many hotel managers, etc.
UBIQUITY:
How could we then restore anticipation to its rightful place in
education?
NADIN: In the first place, by giving up this very institutionalized
hierarchical centralized model reminiscent of the military, of hospitals,
and of prisons. We need open environments that allow for the individual's
unfolding not based on rules that tell him and her that they have
to be like everybody else. Engage the students through projects
and not through the obsession with grades and credits. This is what
"equality" turns out to be in education today. We should
look at our educational process as one that does no longer impose
homogeneity, but allows for diversity, in the true sense, one that
is driven by acknowledging and stimulating difference, innovation,
and creativity.
UBIQUITY:
You've had a great deal of experience, both as a student and as
a professor, in European and American institutions of higher education.
What comparisons could you make?
NADIN: The European system is still stuck in the Industrial Age
(in some cases, in the Middle Ages). Many students sit mute in classes,
if they show up at all. The professors are "lords" in
their respective fiefdoms. Only the demands of rigor have been weakened,
as in the USA. In West Europe, Germany, which once produced a highly
educated populace, scores at the bottom third on European educational
tests. There is an apathy to students more interested in receiving
certificates than a challenging education. Some educators are looking
at the models of the most successful American universities, including
their obsession with finding rich people to fund programs, mainly
because the state coffers are no longer full enough to support the
many so-called social programs in place.
It was not always so. For instance, some of the most intriguing
things happened in the post-World War II university generation in
Eastern Europe. Out of desperation, I and others still knew enough
about independence to pursue an education based on finding our way
around the books we were forced to read the communist bibles by
Stalin, Marx, and others and discovering those areas where we could
express our highest creativity. That's why the East Europeans, and
Russians, Uzbeks, Estonians, etc. of my generation became fabulous
mathematicians, much better at that time than the mathematicians
in Western Europe or the United States. Rigor was still demanded.
But this has changed. The brain drain there and the brain hunger
here helped us refresh the perspective. East European universities
are becoming more market oriented. But in doing so, they will give
up some part of their soul. The USA and Western Europe has profited
from the situation. The list of Nobel laureates already has a new
sound to it.
UBIQUITY: Is there anything in particular that you like about the
American system?
NADIN:
It is dynamic, even where it is mediocre. But I like two fundamental
characteristics in particular. One, it is a place where you can
definitely fight for your ideas, and have a very good opportunity
to bring your ideas into the public domain. Two, the American university
is still a competitive institution, whereas the European university
is not. The European university —which at this time is in
the process of opposing the American university model, especially
when it comes to tuition —is the best place for people afraid
to grow, for people who graduate but don't find employment and so
stay on at the university and study for 10, 12, 15 years, at taxpayer
expense, even after new measures taken to discourage "the eternal
student" as he is known in Germany. You ask them what their
profession is, and they answer, "I am a student." It's
a sad situation. That's why not too many ideas have come out of
those European universities, despite their strong tradition and
generous public funding, in the last 15 to 20. A number of better
ideas came out of the American universities. It is our chance that
we can maintain the university as a creative context.
UBIQUITY:
And you don't find that kind of fear among American students?
NADIN:
No. And I refer to higher education in the Northeast, as well as
to my new experience in Texas. My best experience was at Stanford.
I had the chance to see a student in a seminar congratulated for
developing a successful search engine and at the end of the semester
congratulated again, at a brunch at Terry Winograd's home, when
that student —a co-founder of Google —became a multi-millionaire.
It was beautiful because I could witness the unfolding of a young
person who dared to do something, and did it in a context in which
to have an idea is not a sin against society, or cause professors
to suspect you of breaking eternal rules. In the USA, to be different
is not seen as a handicap. That's a good aspect of the American
university and American society. But if we are not vigilant, we
might lose some, or a lot of this.
UBIQUITY: How would begin to think about the design of a perfect
program for undergraduates?
NADIN:
I tend to like a renaissance program in which the liberal component
and the science component are completely integrated. I'm still dreaming
and hoping that I will find a university some place, even if it's
on the moon, where people will notice that although we all have
eyes, not everyone sees, and therefore it is time to provide for
"visual education." Everyone in such a university who
wants to become a doctor, or engineer, or even an accountant, would
learn what it means to really see and what it means to express oneself
visually. This will add a fundamental dimension to language and
music education. The visual has been woefully neglected in our approach
to education. That needs to be corrected, especially in the new
age of visual acquisition of knowledge aided by computation. Some
of our more interesting anticipations are definitely related to
the visual.
Prof.
Dr. Mihai Nadin
Ashbel Smith University Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas
Source: Ubiquity, Volume 5, Issue 42, Jan. 1 - 8, 2004
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v5i42_nadin.html
About IIAE
UTD’s Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering was established
to provide students with an opportunity to learn about interactive
advancements in the fields of communication, entertainment, digital
arts, education and training, as well as in scientific and medical
applications. As part of their studies, students, along with faculty,
are charged with inventing new pathways for the converging disciplines
and fields. The institute is a collaborative, interdisciplinary
effort by two of UTD’s seven schools — the School of
Arts and Humanities and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and
Computer Science.
About UTD
The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of
Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major
multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor®,
enrolls more than 14,000 students. The school’s freshman class
traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities
in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment
of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs.
For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s
web site at www.utdallas.edu.
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