Jerry Michalski is one of my favorite forward thinkers and experimenter. We are planning to do a Future Salon about Abundance in the fall with him and others.
At this Fireside Meeting, Jerry will blend a performance piece that involves the audience and a piece of concept-mapping software called TheBrain with a thesis he’s developing that will either have you grinning enthusiastically or throwing spoiled vegetables. It’s an experiment, and whoever shows up will help shape it.
At AlwaysOn a week ago I talked to Doc Searls and he told me that the original idea for the Cluetrain Manifesto was born 10 years ago at one of Jerry's retreats. There are many events in the Bay Area, but this one you shouldn't miss.
Details: Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street at Arch, with light refreshments at 6:30 pm, and the talk to start at 7:30 pm on Monday, August 1 and see what this is all about. Spoiled veggies optional. See you there.
P.S. Mark your calendar for Friday 19th of August Future Salon with Professor Walter J. Freeman from the Laboratory for Nonlinear Neurodynamics. More info soon.
AC2005: Last Four Days for Early Bird Registration On Monday, August 1st, our conference registration price goes up $50. Sign up now if you can!AC2005 will feature 45+ world-class speakers and 350+ distinguished attendees discussing the increasing intelligence of machines (artificial intelligence or AI), the evolving effectiveness of technology-aided humans (intelligence amplification or IA), and how these twin accelerating trends are shaping our future. Come meet Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, George Gilder, Daniel Amen, Esther Dyson, Steve Jurvetson, Peter Thiel, Harold Morowitz, Marcos Guillen, Beth Noveck, Janna Anderson, Philip Rosedale, Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann, Blake Ross, David Fogel, Robert Hecht-Nielsen, Ron Kaplan, Patrick Lincoln, Ruzena Bajcsy, T. Colin Campbell, Scott Rafer,Cecily Sommers, and special host Moira Gunn.See all speakers confirmed to date. Sign up now using your Accelerating Times discount code (AC2005-ATIMES, entered in all capital letters) and get $50 off! This special $400 conference rate is available to ATimes readers until August 1st. Will you be coming? If so, tell your friends! Post a "Meet me at AC2005" button at your site.
200 Free Advance Copies of Singularity is Near Keynote speaker and internationally-renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil will present free signed advance copies of his upcoming book, The Singularity is Near, which will be released nationally four days after the conference, to the first 200 registrants at Accelerating Change 2005. Additional copies will also be available for sale to conference participants. One of 2005's most anticipated new books, The Singularity is Near extensively makes the provocative case for accelerating and increasingly human-surpassing technological and computer advances in coming decades, and proposes a global "phase transition" circa 2040 where many forms of higher human thinking may be exceeded by global computing systems.
Kurzweil argues these systems will be seen not as separate from us, but as our increasingly personalized electronic extensions. If true, how can we ensure this will be an economically productive, socially stabilizing, and individually empowering transition? What are the major risks to be avoided? How do we protect the freedoms of those not interested in participating in this "digital future?" What might prevent or delay this scenario?
Attendees will have ample opportunity to explore these issues in an extended Q&A with Ray at AC2005, moderated by science radio personality Moira Gunn, host of NPR’s Tech Nation. Mr. Kurzweil is an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a winner of the Lemelson-MIT prize and the National Medal of Technology, and the founder of nine very successful technology companies. His internationally best-selling 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence has been published in nine languages.
What's Next in Commercial or Consumer Robotics? Win A Roomba at AC2005 Robotics pioneer iRobot has donated five Roombas to Accelerating Change 2005. We will raffle all five for the best 100-word (or less) answers to the question "What's Next in Commercial or Consumer Robotics?" by AC2005 attendees by 2pm on Sunday, Sept 18th. These brief, paragraph-length ideas can propose new commercial or consumer robots, new features for future Roombas, new and untapped market segments for existing or future robots, new technologies, or any other innovation you think needs to be or will soon be addressed. The time horizon can be as short as next year, and should be limited to ten years. You can discuss research, development, production, marketing, or any other aspect of the business model. All ideas are released to the public domain.
The five winners will be picked anonymously (but subjectively) by our panel of judges Sunday afternoon, and all ideas will be forwarded to Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner, and the other smart folks at iRobot after the event, along with the email addresses of the submitters. Are you an AC2005 registrant? Want to share your thoughts on what could or should happen next in this important space? Send your 100 word entries to mail(at)accelerating(dot)org, or give them to us when you arrive at the conference. No more than five entries per AC2005 registrant, please. Can you make a clean sweep? Seattle Future Salon Looking for New Members Two forward-thinking Seattleites, Marc Goodner and Brad Mewhort have signed on to start a Seattle Future Salon and are looking for folks to attend the free discussion and presentation groups. If you live in or near Seattle and are interested, you can sign up for their Yahoo group here to join online discussions and to receive emails about coming events. To learn more about ASF's Future Salon Network, check out our Future Salons start page.
Masters of Strategic Foresight at Regent University [JS] A new online MA with a strategic leadership and futures studies emphasis is being developed by Regent University, a private Christian university, starting Fall 2006 (press release). This will complement the university's MA in Organizational Leadership, which currently has 150 students. It will operate in the School of Leadership Studies, which is focused on Christian Leadership, but the MA curriculum will be ecumenical and open students of all faiths. About 15% of students are expected to be from religious professions. It is being developed by Christian futurist Jay Gary with the assistance of Peter Bishop (Director, U. Houston MS Program in Studies of the Future)and Wendy Schultz. ASF is heartened to see Regent continue move in a more ecumenical and universalist direction with their programs. As a unitarian universalist (or "deist") myself, I believe improving global appreciation of all the world's faiths and wisdom traditions, without imposing any one of them as a uniquely privileged value set, is the future of spiritual leadership in an age of accelerating scientific learning and technical advancement.
Quotography "There is no technological terrorism scenario [nuclear, biological, chemical, etc.] I can envision today that would be likely to match the damage potential we had in the 1980's from one Soviet nuclear submarine." — David Brin, 2005
"The most violent element in society is ignorance." — Emma Goldman
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." —Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1626
Alzheimer's and other age-associated dementias are a prime concern for all of us as medical science keeps us alive longer than ever before. Something like 80% of us over the age of 80 will have some degree of the neural plaques and tangles that constitute Alzheimer's. Many of us will have advanced cases. In some cultures, primarily due to poor diets rich in saturated fats, these plaques and tangles will be as widespread as atherosclerosis and cancer, two other progressive diseases of aging. In other communities we see much less of them. We are just now learning how to optimize our diet to prevent major dementia and mild memory loss as we age.
[Commentary by Iveta Brigis] When rocks decay radioactively, subatomic particles called geoneutrinos are released carrying a signature of its chemical origin. Neutrinos have no electric charge and negligible mass (though not non-zero), and can pass through matter unseen. Enabled by KamLAND, a Japanese tool that measures neutrino oscillation, scientists are now beginning to use these geoneutrinos to look far below the Earth's crust. Prior to this development, published in the July 28 edition of the journal Nature, researchers relied solely on seismology to further their understanding of the composition and activity of the Earth. Despite the tremendous advances in recent years in what we know about cosmology and the workings of outer space, scientists remain relatively in the dark about what is going on beneath our feet. While scientists are optimistic about the contribution the study of geoneutrinos will have to our understanding of the Earth, the current detector spots an average of one geoneutrino per month. Researchers hope to build bigger and more detectors that could increase this to one a day in coming decades.
Human Space bodies (biology, health, neuroscience), behavior (business, education, foresight, governance, innovation, pre-digital technology, society), minds (psychology, spirituality), human systems theory (ecological psychology, memetics)
The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon, ITConversations, Jamais Cascio, May 2005 (text) (audio) [Jerry Paffendorf]WorldChanging co-founder Jamais Cascio gave a keynote presentation at this year’s MeshForum on rapidly increasing transparency entitled, “The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon”. The talk, which makes clear that transparency is happening from the bottom-up (“souseveillance”) as much as from the top-down (surveillance), is now up for audio download at ITConversations with a text transcript available at WorldChanging.
From the abstract: “Soon - probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two - we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day-to-day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing. And we will be doing it to ourselves.” Jamais will further explore these issues in an interactive Explorations session at Accelerating Change 2005.
[John Smart]Here it comes! Flash Gigamemory for your laptop and cellphone that is truly "instant on", is far more shock resistant, and with a battery life to die for. With flash memory you can run a tablet PC or a wrist computer that is fast and reliable enough to replace paper, but with all of e-Paper's digital storage, modification, and sharing advantages. Samsung's first large (16 Gigabyte) flash hard drives roll out this year for military and industrial markets. Expect lower cost commercial units by next year, and 100GB flash drives in 2007.
Flash memory prices have dropped 40% in the last year, and with a Sony Micro Vault 5GB flashdrive now available for $180 street price, it's now possible for bleeding edge tinkerers to consider replacing their hard drives. Give it just a bit more time and you won't need a specialist to do so. Samsung is by far the #1 leader in flash memory supply (twice #2 Intel's revenue here), while it is #5 in hard drives, so it has major incentive to make this happen soon. This will be a tremendously empowering advance. Let's hope Intel and the other leading chipmakers get into the flash hard drive game soon as well. Thanks to Jeff Thompson.
Cyber Space computer "behavior" (co-evolution, automation, symbiosis), computer "minds" (computer software, simulation), cyber systems theory (holism, information, intelligence, interdependence, immunity) "When Cell Phones Become Oracles" Wired News, Ryan Singel, July 25, 2005
[Jerry Paffendorf] Wired News has a great article on tracking and predicting human behavior with information collected via cell phones. The article centers around research performed by MIT Media Lab researcher Nathan Eagle, organized under the Reality Mining Project. Eagle gave out 100 customized phones to MIT students and researchers that he usedto log 350,000 hours of data over nine months including location, proximity, activity and communication of the volunteers.
According to the article, “Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people, especially professors and Media Lab employees, would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.” The volunteers could also use the data to create diaries of their lives. Eagle notes, “"I can go ask it, 'How much sleep did I get in October?' 'When was the last time I had lunch with Adam?' 'Where did I go after that?'" On the topic of data-mining our lives, the article also mentions a book by Chris Stakutis called Inescapable Data. Stakutis says, “We want to have our life choreographed, cataloged, witnessed and archived. Now we are heading to a world where this is possible without effort … We are going to be a planet of 5 billion data magicians."
The virtualized models of our planet that Google and Microsoft are competing to build with Google Earth and Virtual Earth will progressively be used as fields to display this inescapable data. Jon Udell will give a presentation on the topic at Accelerating Change 2005 entitled Annotating the planet: Freedom and control in the new era of interactive mapping. Abstract: “The explosive innovation triggered by Google Maps produced a shock of recognition. We always knew that our meatspace coordinates would merge with our cyberspace addresses. Now that it's really happening, familiar topics—identity and privacy, grassroots collaboration and centralized control, ownership and use of data—will be newly refracted through the geospatial lens.”
[Jerry Paffendorf]Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment. The majority of Machinima uses video games as the platform for their development. To see some funny samples, check out these Independent Film Channel’s shorts made using The Sims 2. The reality comes in with the first homemade Machinima using Google Earth, a virtual recreation of our planet. It’s only a short zoom in from outer space to just above street level, but you get the picture. It was made using FRAPS, a program that saves video from programs using DirectX directly to the hard drive. FRAPS is a common tool for capturing footage that will be edited into Machinima. You can learn more about Machinima at http://machinima.org or check out the book, 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima by Paul Marino, 2004.
[Jerry Paffendorf]In a piece of breakthrough philanthropy, the American Cancer Society will hold an online Relay For Life fundraiser and community awareness event this August 27-28th in the user-created virtual world of Second Life. The event will be a cyberspace extension of the society's decades-old real world Relay For Life walkathons, and donations will be made in the form of virtual dollars converted to US dollars through Gaming Open Market.
The mixed-reality event (see picture right, by Sven Johnson) is being spearheaded by Randal Moss of the ACS's Futuring and Innovation Center, prominent Second Life resident Jade Lily, and ASF's very own Jerry Paffendorf. Congratulations to Randal, who took home the National Human Service Assembly Award for Excellence in Technology Innovation for his role in pioneering this digital philanthropy project. Randal and a number of his Futuring and Innovation Center (FIC) colleagues will be colocating an ACS FIC meeting at Accelerating Change 2005. We look forward to seeing you there!
new paradigms, phase transitions, hyperphysics (black
holes, multiverse, string theory, supersymmetry), hyper systems
theory (computational limits, emergence, phase transitions, technological
singularity hypothesis, developmental singularity hypothesis)
Book Phase
Change: The Computer Revolution in Science and Mathematics,
Douglas Robertson, 2003 [John Smart]
Doug Robertson is a U. of Colorado Geologist and
Environmentalist who enjoys taking a big picture look at information
technology. His earlier work, The
New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization,
1998, discussed the transformational impact of information processing
on human culture from the pre-linguistic to the modern age. Unfortunately
the last chapter of this book, "On Growth", has some shortcomings
with regard to its exploration of exponential growth. For one, Robertson
overemphasizes the human population growth problem, which most demographers
now say is on track to disappear entirely by mid century due largely
to the pervasive impact of global development on birth rates. More
seriously, Robertson appears to misunderstand the exponential nature
of information processing growth, which is the only known aspect
of universal change which has never run into resource limits to
growth, as it continually jumps to new more efficient computing
"substrates" over time. Yet even with these shortcomings,
The New Renaissance is a valuable broad look at the developmentalist
nature of our increasingly technological culture.
Phase
Change deepens Robertson's exploration by examining the role
of computer as a tool changing the nature of sciences and mathematics.
He demonstrates that paradigm shifts, broad "phase changes"
in our understanding of science, have often been triggered by the
availability of new visualization tools (the telescope, the microscope),
and new computational tools (the digital computer, the supercomputer,
the internet) and shows how such tools allow investigators to ask
questions previously unamenable to scientific exploration. A modern
particle accerator, for example, is a very computationally intensive
tool for peering into subatomic structure. How intensive? A particle
accelerator generates more data (albeit significantly lower level
data) in five minutes of exploration than was accumulated in the
entire Library of Alexandria between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.
Robertson notes a profusion of new computationally-aided tools our
physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, geologists, astronomers,
and other scientists are gaining access to. He shows how many of
these open up permanent phase transitions in the nature of the scientific
environment, creating dynamics that were unpredictable prior to
the computational advance, yet are predictable today within the
new scientific language that has emerged. On the mathematics side,
computers are becoming so powerful that specialized, computation-intensive
domains of mathematics, such as cellular automata, covered most
elegantly in Stephen Wolfram'sA
New Kind of Science, 2002, are now opening up their modeling
insights for us to discover. If you are looking for a book to update
your understanding of the way computers are permanently changing
the nature of scientific exploration, this is good choice.
Jerry Michalski is one of my favorite forward thinkers and experimenter. We are planning to do a Future Salon about Abundance in the fall with him and others. 
Recently added speakers include Janna Anderson, 
Keynote speaker and internationally-renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil will present free signed advance copies of his upcoming book, 
Robotics pioneer 
Alzheimer's and other age-associated dementias are a prime concern for all of us as medical science keeps us alive longer than ever before. Something like 80% of us over the age of 80 will have some degree of the neural plaques and tangles that constitute Alzheimer's. Many of us will have advanced cases. In some cultures, primarily due to poor diets rich in saturated fats, these plaques and tangles will be as widespread as atherosclerosis and cancer, two other progressive diseases of aging. In other communities we see much less of them. We are just now learning how to optimize our diet to prevent major dementia and mild memory loss as we age.
"
[John Smart]
Doug Robertson is a U. of Colorado Geologist and
Environmentalist who enjoys taking a big picture look at information
technology. His earlier work, 
Phase
Change deepens Robertson's exploration by examining the role
of computer as a tool changing the nature of sciences and mathematics.
He demonstrates that paradigm shifts, broad "phase changes"
in our understanding of science, have often been triggered by the
availability of new visualization tools (the telescope, the microscope),
and new computational tools (the digital computer, the supercomputer,
the internet) and shows how such tools allow investigators to ask
questions previously unamenable to scientific exploration. A modern
particle accerator, for example, is a very computationally intensive
tool for peering into subatomic structure. How intensive? A particle
accelerator generates more data (albeit significantly lower level
data) in five minutes of exploration than was accumulated in the
entire Library of Alexandria between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.
Robertson notes a profusion of new computationally-aided tools our
physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, geologists, astronomers,
and other scientists are gaining access to. He shows how many of
these open up permanent phase transitions in the nature of the scientific
environment, creating dynamics that were unpredictable prior to
the computational advance, yet are predictable today within the
new scientific language that has emerged. On the mathematics side,
computers are becoming so powerful that specialized, computation-intensive
domains of mathematics, such as cellular automata, covered most
elegantly in Stephen Wolfram's 
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