Future Salon

Open Standards for Virtual World Exchanges

Last Thursday I attended the Technoraty Party in their swank new location close to the ballpark. Swank only in comparison to their old funky office that was warm in the summer cold in the night and loud during the day because of the construction going on at third street. I met Tantek Celik their and told him about the Accelerating Change 2004 and that Will Wright will talk about how he approached the design of landscapes in The Sims 2.

By the way Will is nominated for the Visionary of the Year prize by the Billboard Magazine for his work on the game. Rightly so, they have chartered new ground in integrating Artificial Intelligence in the design of the game. The Not so simple Life article in the Mercury News the other day wrote:

What's remarkable about this computer game, being released worldwide Tuesday , is that the domestic drama is not scripted. The characters act the way they do because that is what naturally unfolds. It's a quality dubbed ``emergence,'' based on the history of the characters' relationships and their own artificial, or preprogrammed, intelligence.

Electronic Arts, which is publishing the sequel to the bestselling ``The Sims,'' believes this leap forward in artificial intelligence is what will keep gamers by the millions entranced with their virtual Sims. ...

``It brings the game into a more dramatic space,'' says Will Wright

Tantek remarked something interesting. At the moment all this MMOG are living on their own little islands. Tools are needed to build your own Online World. API and standards should be defined for interoperability, so I can visit yours and you mine.. The one who figures that out will eat the other's lunches and Technorati tools would help with the finding and connecting of these do it yourself online worlds. If you look at evolution regarding finding and creating connections we are only at the stage of may be amoebas soon there will be multi-cell organisms and off we go. For sure these standards and interoperability are no trivial problems and currently not in the interest of the game designers.

I am curious what the experts will say to that suggestion at AC2004. For example Cory Ondrejka VP of product development from Linden Labs the creators of Second Life. The great thing with that game is that it gives the player the tools to create their own world. Don't know how sophisticated these tools are, but in principle the limit of Second Life's growth is only the imagination of their players and the size of their servers.

Congratulations Dan Gillmor

Congratulations to Dan Gillmor another speaker at Accelerting Change 2004 for winning the

2004 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism prize. I am reading and have quoted his Weblog for a long while. I also own his book and will give it to my boss as soon as I have finished it.

He spoke briefly when introducing Larry Lessig at the SD Forum: As expected the book didn't get any mentioning in the main street press, but a lot of buzz in the web world. Can't wait to get an update to it at the conference.

[via Doc]

We will rock you!

I was part of both SAP TechEd teams this year in San Diego as well as Munich. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

At both events Shai Agassi was one of the keynote presenters. He was great, but don't take my word for it. Dagfinn Parnas also mentions in his SAP TechEd summary : Interesting key notes from technically adapt SAP leaders (especially Shai Agassi's keynote was excellent)

With 5000 other SAP TechEd participants in attendance standing in the back it had a bit the feeling of a Rolling Stones or Queens stadium concert. I took the picture to the left in Munich.

At the Accelerating Change Conference happening next weekend at Stanford there will be around 300 people which means you will be a lot closer to the action.

Shai's keynote will be about Achieving Enterprise Agility:
Abstract: SAP customers process roughly 50% of the world's GDP through its systems annually. Flexibility, interconnectivity, analytics and usability are key capabilities that companies need to succeed in today's competitive marketplace. Mr. Agassi will illustrate SAP's strategy for enabling the "in-time enterprise" which can rapidly adapt to market demands and increase the velocity of events throughout business networks.

It boggles my mind that 50% of the world's GDP is running through SAP systems. I had no idea. Makes sense to check out what is in store for the next years in this area.

Clash of the Interface Titans! Will Wright Vs. Jaron Lanier at AC2004

Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier will debate Sims creator Will Wright at Accelerating Change 2004 (November 5-7 at Stanford). Their debate is entitled "Finding Humanity in the Interface: Capacity Atrophy or Augmentation?" and Future Salon's own Mark Finnern will do the moderating. (Mark is, of course, Superman in the picture to the left :)

In the latest edition of Tech Tidbits, ISAC President John Smart provides the following context for the debate:

"As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them from dehumanizing us? Can we avoid the world of MT Anderson's masterful dystopia, Feed (2002), where the internet-jacked, childlike teens of 2030 speak pidgin English and live primarily as vehicles for highly sophisticated and automated corporate marketing and political programming?

"Should we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and analytical reading skills? Do we need 1960's math skills in a world with ubiquitous calculators, or reading skills in a world with digital cable? Or thinking skills in a world with intelligent text analytics?

"Encouragingly, the Millennial generation reaches maturity earlier, communicates in new nonlinear ways, and has a strong facility to adapt to new technology. But are we in danger of losing our perspective, independence, and global vision? What are our most important priorities as we enter a world of increasingly sophisticated interfaces and simulations?"

It will be very interesting to see where these two interface and simulation legends differ in their views and assumptions about our collective human future. See the latest Tech Tidbits for more information, including Will and Jaron's bios.

Will Wright will also deliver a keynote presentation at AC2004 called "Sculpting Possibility Space", the abstract of which can be found here.

Start the Art at the Future Salon

Special Future Salon next Tuesday 19th of October: The very charismatic Guy Kawasaki will introduce his new book: The Art of the Start at our old stomping ground the Barnes and Noble at the Hillsdale Shopping Center.

It is a bit unfortunate that I can't be there, but to spend a couple of days with my folks back home in the Black Forest is more important right now. But the Future Salon is not a one man show: This time Wayne Radinsky together with Kevin Keck will be hosting the event.

Location: Barnes and Nobles bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across the San Mateo Caltrain Station. Map (The star is a bit misleading. The Shop is right at the El Camino across from the Caltrain station.) 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 Tel: 650-341-5560

When: 7:30 to 9:30pm, 19th of October 2004. First 30 minutes introduction and exchange of Future relevant stories, news clippings, ... 8pm Guy Kawasaki reading.

Please join us also for dinner afterwords next door at Romano's Macaroni Grill.

Well, you will not see me there, but promise me to have a good time and take some pictures, may be someone could take a video camera to tape it too for our Internet Archive collection.

Wired Doug Engelbart Article

Via AlwaysOn's Pip Coburn I stumbled over a link to an excellent article about Doug Engelbart one of the Keynote speakers of AC2004.

The key quote is this one:

I came to realize that we needed new levels of group understanding and abilities to work collectively to solve complex problems.

When I talked to Doug about speaking at AC2004 he told me, that he is still driven by this goal. There is great untapped potential and the need for new levels of understanding is even more urgent now.

We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge. Automation means if you're milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.

Not long before the San Francisco demo, Arthur C. Clarke came by our lab. We showed him what you could do with the NLS. As he was leaving he said, "I write all kinds of things about the science fiction future, but I never thought of anything like this!"

Now you understand why I am so excited to get an update of his vision, that may be even Science Fiction authors haven't thought of yet.

New Tech Tidbits Highlights "Real Money in Virtual Economies" Debate and Welcomes Nanotech Pioneer Christine Peterson to AC2004

This week's Tech Tidbits highlights the upcoming AC2004 debate between Steve Salyer, President of IGE, and Jack Emmert, lead designer of the massively multi-player game City of Heroes, on "Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content".

Forbes.com has a new article (Ordinary Hero) discussing the success of City of Heroes (released at the end of April by the small, first-time developer Cryptic Studios, it has already clocked 200,000 paying subscribers). Meanwhile, just a few days ago at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, Bill Gurley gave a great talk (mp3 file) about the emerging massively multi-player market.

The massively multi-player gears are turning on both the business and play ends, something's in the air, and AC2004 will provide a great stage for thinking about the next act in addition to all the other great dialogues on technology, business and social systems.

This week's Tech Tidbits also announces the addition of Christine Peterson to the AC2004 speaker line-up. Christine is Vice President and Founder of Foresight Institute, and co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (full text online). She'll give a talk entitled "Championing Nanotech Innovation: Lessons Learned".

Jeff Thompson reviews Ghost in the Shell 2

ISAC board member Jeff Thompson wrote the following movie review of Ghost in the Shell 2 in contrast to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The review will appear in this week's Tech Tidbits, and is interesting enough to post here by itself. Jeff highlights the different motivations behind the scenarios (social commentary, future prediction), and reminds us that our baseline visions of the future can be woefully far from the direction in store for us--no matter how futuristically on the ball we try to be ;-).

Jeff's review:

Last week's Tech Tidbits linked an article by James Pinkerton comparing two current movies, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, set in the 1930's, and Ghost in the Shell 2, set in the 2030's. Sky Captain is not really an attempt to visualize the future, but rather to nostalgically present how people viewed the future in the 1930's. There are airplanes that turn into submarines, wrist radios and giant mechanical robots. The movie does reveal one fascinating thing: for all their imagination, no one in the 1930's imagined the most important development which the future would bring only a decade later: the electronic computer. At the core of robots in the movie are gears, not digital processors. Power is about having bigger metal feet that can crush cars, not about being able to manipulate information faster. (It wasn't until 1937 that Alan Turing showed that a general purpose computer, like the one you're reading this article on, was mathematically possible.)

Contrast this with Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, which gets it. There are many reviews, like this one which will confirm that the mix of hand-drawn animation and 3D computer graphics is gorgeous. At the end of the first Ghost in the Shell movie, the main character's police partner is basically uploaded, becoming pure information on the world's data networks. In the second movie, he wanders through the sensory overloaded urban landscape, vaguely missing his partner and trying to solve a case. He mostly does this by interviewing one person after another who questions what it means to feel like an individual when the world has so clearly been shown to be a just sea of information created by ubiquitous computing and instant communications which link everything. Among the philosophizing and eye-popping scenery, there is indeed a plot involving the case (remember the movie title) which is a literary device to ask the question: In a world where information devices can turn the whims of anyone, even a little girl, into a reality that reaches out across the world, who can truly be innocent? Both the main character and his uploaded partner (and hopefully the audience if they were paying attention) are left wondering how to proceed when physical space has been turned into mind space, and like it or not your fate can be determined by the naive - but not innocent - impulses of a random child. Maybe even the ever-resourceful Sky Captain would realize that the threat in the future is not an army of giant robots, but the precipice of confusion and cognitive dissonance.

end review

Jeff's website (thefirst.org) has a new paper outlining his perception of how minds percieve perception. It's titled, fittingly, The Orders of Perception and I'm sure feedback would be appreciated from those so inclined.

"Injecting Life With Computers"

Tomorrow (Oct 7) the Stanford CS department will be holding a special seminar by Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute on biomolecular computation and (essentially) nanomedicine. While there's no way to be sure what the turnout will be, I'd suggest getting there early if you want a seat.

Thursday, October 7, 3:00PM
Gates 104, Stanford University

70 Miles Per Gallon Anyone?

I thought it was a declared goal of Ford to achieve a 50 miles per gallon fleet fuel efficiency average by 2010. Turns out it is a request from the Jumpstart Ford Coalition.

Well soon you may be able to get 70 MPG using the Smart Car co-developed by Mercedes and Nicolas Hayek the driving force behind the Swatch success in the 80s. They run very successful already on European roads.

It's a two seater, so small, that you can park three of them sideways next to each other in a regular city parking spot. Just for the fearful beneath us, it is using a particular space frame technology, that makes it safer than a Ford Escort.

A deal has been signed for ZAP to bring it to the American market. The diesel version is clocking in at 70 mpg and in San Francisco or New York or for that manner all cities with parking shortage it would be heaven sent. I would drive it.

For a long while I wanted to point out to this development and an article in the latest Wired magazine (online release 7th of October) has triggered it finally.

Blogger Discount Competition

You too can offer a $50 discount to Accelerating Change 2004 on your Weblog. Not only do you point your readers to a very interesting event, but you also enable them to come for less money.

If your Blog post leads to the most registrants you get a free ticket to the conference to use for yourself or to enable a student to take part in the AC2004 excitement.

For this to work you need your own discount code. Please contact Iveta Brigis and she will give you one right away.

If you don't care about your own code use: AC2004-FS. This one is not taking part in the competition.

AC2004 Early Bird Extended Until Next Sunday

Good news, we extended the early bird special for AC2004 until next Sunday the 10th of October.

Until then you can register for $350 after that it will be $450.
If you use the Future Salon discount code: AC2004-FS you can bring down the prize by another $50. Go for it.

A weekend of expanding your mind and perspective beneath 300 of the smartest most active positive thinkers is a weekend well spent.

Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

Accelerating Change 2004 Abstracts are being posted as they come in.

This one I didn't know and it blows my mind: " SAP customers process roughly 50% of the world's GDP through its systems annually ..." Talking about influence.

I am really looking forward to the big picture outlook for example Doug Engelbart's:

Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

Yes, the pace of change is accelerating: the number of aspects of our life that are changing is itself accelerating; the rates of their respecive changing are accelerating; the secondary adjustments of each change vector to accommodate the other change-vector changes are accelerating -- an expanded "acceleration" perspective seems necessary for appropriately dealing with this situation.

Picture all of the world's humans trundling along in one common "human-society vehicle," carrying us in semi-separate, national/cultural "compartments" that are each evolving through its accelerating social, technological, economic, political, religious, etc. changes.

This vehicle is moving us faster and faster through an ever-more complex, multi-dimensioned space -- and increasing places in that "space" are dangerous for our society to stumble into. Are "we humans" in control? Sorry, but today we couldn't steer it even if the path were laid out for us.

Do "we" anyway have vision that is clear- and farsighted-enough to guide it if we did have "steerage control" of the vehicle?

My personal orientation has focussed on the need for what is essentially an "Augmented Collective IQ" capability which can provide both (1) the improved collective vision as to where we are headed and where we best should be headed, and (2) the improved collective control for steering our civilization/vehicle toward that envisioned future.

I will lay out a proposed strategic framework for facilitating the evolution of our collective IQ on a world scale.

Neural Biotechnologies Future Salon Video Online

Finally the video from the August Future Salon The Present and Future of Neural Biotechnologies is available on the Internet Archive.

It automatically creates a screenshot of every minute for the first half hour of the video. Unfortunately that is usually our introduction round, so you mainly see faces from the audience and this time not even the speakers.

To be able to publish his research results in scientific papers Eric asked us not to share his presentation on the net. We totally understand and respect that request. One more reason to come to the Future Salon in person :-)

More information to this session can be found:
http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/07/computers_and_d.html

Access to the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab at AC2004

Jeremy Bailenson, head of the amazing Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, will be speaking on his research and presenting new VR technologies at Accelerating Change 2004. There will be two tours of his lab where visitors are encouraged to demo lab projects such as this and these. The first round will happen on Thursday, November 4th from 6-8 PM, and the second will act as the final conference event on Sunday the 7th, again from 6-8. Jeremy is an amazing mind in the field of virtual reality and mediated social interaction, and this is a rare opportunity to experience the state-of-the-art in those technologies, and to converse directly with one of the big thinkers behind them. Look for more news soon on the AC2004 website.