MIT researcher Deb Roy shares with us a project he undertook to record, on video and audio, his son's first 90,000 hours of life. In the video you can hear his son learn to enunciate "water" from a first baby utterance of "gaga" over a period of six months. Roy also shows us an astoundingly powerful media dataset based on the same technology he used to record and analyze his son.
I wish that Douglas Adams could have been alive to see this. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he posited the planet Earth as a giant computer, designed by a race of hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings to calculate the great question to the great answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. The answer, of course, is 42. But the question...?
Roy appears to have developed the technology needed for us to witness the workings of our own species, and to intuitively grasp individually what we are thinking and experiencing as a compound entity. It's as if we've figured out how to hook up a monitor to Adams' "computer Earth," and have installed a little monitoring program so we can achieve greater group self-awareness. I'm thrilled and fascinated.
Read the whole story here: Deb Roy: The birth of a word - via TED talks
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