Week 1: Two Culures

WEEK 1: TWO CULTURES
Fangmo Ba

The materials on two cultures have introduced an interesting perspective on the division of humanities and science and helped me rethink the disciplines that I have learned to abide through out my academic career. While John Brockman draws a fine line between each category,  C.P. Snow aims to bridge the gap between the two fields. 

Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple


While UCLA is geographically and structurally divided into North and South campuses, as an economic major, I have grown accustomed to the integration of the two cultures, and learned to touch upon both sides of the "coin". Employed by the biggest blockchain investment company in Shanghai, I gained a chance to study the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. While many might attribute financial-technology and its likes to be strictly digital innovation, the Bitcoin whitepaper, written by Satoshi Nakamoto after the 2008 financial crisis, is a protocol that calls for a social network that reconciles with the most fundamental human element of trust. To categorize bitcoin as merely a digital currency is to negate the essence of its consensus layer, which largely rests on the individual selfishness and aims to create a trustless system that aligns the incentives of different players with a set of hard-coded rules. 

The Bitcoin aims to discrupt the fraudulant and centralized
banking system, which indirectly contributed to the financial
crysis. Thus a snapshot from the Big Short
 Thus, the blockchain stands in the middle ground of the two cultures as it provides a digital solution to address a human emotion. Just like most other creations such as A.I. and big data, the technology is only an expression of the humanitarian needs, and the codes are simply tools that bridge the gaps between human emotions and machines. As far as I am concerned, the cultures are located on different ends of a spectrum. Just like how Bitcoin transcends the simple definition of digital money, cultures should be viewed through a lens that incorporate different scales of artistic expression and scientific methods. I believe that scientific advancement will eventually blur the line between arts and science. With cutting edge projects training computers to study human emotions the existing arts and scientific knowledge will be culminated into a singularity that expands the power of the human kind and builds upon the essence of both cultures.

                         
References
Arar, Raphael, director. How We Teach Computer to Make Sense of Human Emotion. TED, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeliMlEjQCE&t=95s.
“Disrupting the Trust Business.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 15 July 2017, www.economist.com/news/world-if/21724906-trust-business-little-noticed-huge-startups-deploying-blockchain-technology-threaten.
Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 1 Dec. 2009.
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution. 1959.
Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125.

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 10, 2018 at 7:34 PM

    I would have never thought about something such as bitcoin as encompassing both the worlds of science and art. This is a really interesting concept! Also very impressive employment history.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yuhan WangApril 11, 2018 at 12:23 AM

    I deeply agree with your points about humanities in the cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, I think blockchain is also something that could support the art collecting industry in the future, since current trading and collecting procedures contain a lot of frauds. By applying blockchain on artwork trading, we can easily exclude the possibilities of frauds by having a decentralized trading system. That is definitely another mixture of art and technology.

    ReplyDelete

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